England of My Heart : Spring

by Edward Hutton

To begin with the exit from Winchester: there in Jewry Street a Roman road overlies the older British way, not indeed exactly, but roughly, certainly as far as King's Worthy, whence it still shoots forth straight as an arrow's flight over hill over dale to Silchester. The very street by which he leaves the city, as it were, by the now destroyed North Gate, is Roman, one of the four roads which met in the Forum of Venta Belgarum and divided Roman Winchester into four quarters, though, perhaps because of the marshes of the Itchen, not into four equal parts as in Chichester. The present name of this road, Jewry Street, indicates its character all through the Middle Ages, when here by the North Gate, upon the road to London, the Jews had their booths, and the quarter of Winchester which this road served was doubtless their ghetto, the richest quarter of the city.

It was not, however, of the Middle Age, but of the Dark Age I thought as I issued out of Winchester where, not much more than a hundred years ago, the old North Gate still held the way. In the year 1001, after the battle of Alton, in which the men of Hampshire were utterly broken by Sweyn and his Danes, this road was filled with the routed Saxons in flight pouring into the city of Winchester. The record of that appalling business is very brief in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," a few lines under the date 1001. "A. 1001. In this year was much fighting in the land of the English, and well nigh everywhere they (the Danes) ravaged and burned so that they advanced on one course until they came to the town of Alton; and then there came against them the men of Hampshire and fought against them. And there was Ethelward the King's high-steward slain, and Leofric at Whitchurch and Leofwin the King's high-steward and Wulfhere the bishop's thane, and Godwin at Worthy, Bishop Elfry's son, and of all men one hundred and eighty; and there were of the Danish men many more slain, though they had possession of the place of slaughter." A mere plundering expedition, we may think, but it foretold with certainty the rule of the Danes in England, which as we know came to pass, and was not the catastrophe it might have been, because of the victory of Alfred at Ethandune, a century and a half before, when he had made Guthrum and his host Christians. Till the year 1788 Alfred's bones lay beside this very gate through which the beaten Saxons poured into his city in 1001. For though Hyde Abbey was destroyed at the Reformation his bones seem to have been forgotten, to be discovered in the end of the eighteenth century in their great leaden coffin and sold, I know not to whom, for the sum of two pounds.

I considered these unfortunate and shameful things as I went on along this British, Roman, Saxon and English way, the way of armies and of pilgrims into Headbourne Worthy, whose church stands by the roadside on the north.

This little church dedicated in honour of St Swithin is all of a piece with the road, and illustrates it very well. Its beauty alone would recommend it to the wayfarer, but it also possesses an antiquity so great that nothing left to us in Winchester itself can match it. For in plan, and largely in masonry too, it is a Saxon sanctuary, though a late one, dating as it would seem from the early part of the eleventh century. What we see is a beautiful little building consisting of nave with curious western chamber, chancel, south-western tower and modern south porch. The original church probably did not differ very much in plan from that we have, but only the north and west walls of the nave of the original building remain to us; the latter having the original doorway of Binstead stone. The south wall of the nave and the tower were rebuilt in the thirteenth century, as was the chancel, which is now a modern building so far as its north and eastern walls are concerned. In the late fifteenth century the western chamber was added to the nave as in our own day the south porch. The best treasure of the church is, however, the great spoilt Rood, with figures of our Lady and St John, upon the outside of the west wall of the Saxon nave, to preserve which, in the fifteenth century, the western chamber was built. The western chamber was originally in two stages, the lower acting as a porch to the church, the upper as a chapel with an altar under the Saxon rood. It is needless to say that the Reformers, Bishop Horne of Winchester it is said, the accursed miscreant who ordered the destruction of all crucifixes in his diocese, defaced this glorious work of art and religion, cutting the relief away to the face of the wall so that only the outline remains. Nevertheless it is still one of the most imposing and notable things left to us in southern England.

Headbourne Worthy, granted to Mortimer after the Conquest, was the most important of the three little places grouped here in a bunch which bear that name. King's Worthy, where the road first turns eastward and where the church, curiously enough, stands to the south of the way, [Footnote: According to Mr Belloc (The Old Road) this modern road does not exactly represent the route of the Pilgrim's Way which ran to the south of King's Worthy church] was but a hamlet and of Martyr Worthy, Domesday knows nothing. Little that is notable remains to us in either place, only the charming fifteenth century tower of King's Worthy church and a fourteenth century font therein.

Much the same must be said of Itchen Abbas, Itchen A Bas, where the road falls to the river, the small Norman church there having been both rebuilt and enlarged in or about 1863, while an even worse fate has befallen the church of Itchen Stoke, two miles further on, for it has disappeared altogether. Nor I fear can much be said for the church of New Alresford or the town either, for apparently, owing to a series of fires, it has nothing to show us but a seventeenth century tower, a poor example of the building of that time, the base of which may be Saxon, while the windows seem to be of the thirteenth century.

New Alresford would seem only to have come into existence as a town in the end of the twelfth century, when it was re-established by Bishop Godfrey de Lucy (1189-1204). The old road did not pass through it as the modern road does; for as Mr Belloc seems to have proved the Pilgrim's Way, which descended to the river at Itchen A Bas as we have seen, crossed the ford at Itchen Stoke, Itchen Stakes that is, and proceeded east by south where the workhouse now stands, coming into the modern road again at Bishop Sutton. But though the Pilgrim's Way knew it not, New Alresford is of high antiquity. Local tradition has it that it owes its existence, as distinct from Old Alresford, "to a defeat inflicted by the Saxons on a party of Danes near the village of West Tisted about five miles (south) east of Alresford. The Saxons granted quarter to the defeated enemy on condition that they went to the ford over the River Alre [Footnote: It is curious that Guthrum was baptised at Aller and then his Danes in the Alre] to be baptised. In commemoration of the victory a statue of the Virgin was then erected in the churchyard of Old Alresford." [Footnote: V.C.H., Hampshire, vol. 3, p. 350.] Local tradition cannot, at any time, be put lightly aside, and when as here it preserves for us one of the great truths of the early history of modern Europe we should rejoice indeed. For here we have the obvious reality of the eighth century when Europe, slowly recovering itself and beginning to realise itself as Christendom, was everywhere attacked by hordes of pagans. The work of Charlemagne, of Offa and of Alfred was not merely the conquest of the barbarians, but really since they could not be wholly destroyed, their conversion, and thus alone could Christendom be certainly preserved. So after Ethandune Guthrum must be christened at Aller, and after the fight here on the Alre the defeated heathen must be christened at the ford. Since New Alresford has preserved for us a memory of this fundamental act we can easily forgive her lack of material antiquity.

The little village thus founded, certainly still existed in the time of the Conquest, and such it would always have remained but for Godfrey de Lucy, Bishop of Winchester, who, among his many achievements, numbers this chiefly that he made the Itchen navigable not only from Southampton to Winchester but here also in its headwaters, and this by means of the great reservoir, known as Alresford Pond, into which he gathered the waters of many streams to supply his navigation. In return, King John not only gave him the royalty of the river, but a weekly market here for which he rebuilt the place and called it New Market a name which was soon lost, the people preferring their old name New Alresford. So the market town of New Alresford came into existence, and, but for the unfortunate fires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, would bear upon its face the marks it now lacks of antiquity.

Bishop Godfrey de Lucy was constantly in residence at Bishop Sutton in the palace there. The road passes through this delightful village a mile or more to the east of New Alresford and something remains, the ruins of the kennels it is said, of the palace. This was doubtless "the manour-house ... a verie olde house somtyme walled round aboutte with stone now decaied well waterid with an olde ponde or moote adjoyning to it," of which we hear in the time of Edward VI. It seems to have been destroyed in the Civil war, but even in 1839 much remained of it. "Within the memory of many persons now living," writes Mr Duthy in 1839, "considerable vestiges of a strong and extensive building stood in the meadows to the north of the church, which were the dilapidated remains of an ancient palace of the Bishops of Winchester. The walls were of great thickness and composed of flints and mortar, but it was impossible to trace the disposition of the apartments or the form of the edifice." Bishop Sutton had belonged to the church of Winchester since King Ine's day, but in the early part of the eleventh century it was held by Harold, and after the Conquest by Eustace of Boulogne. Bishop Henry de Blois regained it for the church by exchange, in whose possession it has remained but for a few brief intervals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in one of which John Evelyn bought it, until to-day.

It is probably to this fact we owe the beauty and preservation of the church here, with its fine twelfth century nave, not fundamentally altered, and its chancel still largely of the thirteenth century. Especially notable are the two Norman doorways in the nave and curious supports of the belfry there, four naked and massive posts.