Hic rex Egbertus pausat
(Here rests King Egbert).
Surely Winchester, which preserves the bones of him who first strove for and successfully realized the conception of national unity, should be the Mecca for all true devotees of Great or Greater Britain.
Like master, like man, and great kings have always had great subjects. Such a one was Swithun, Bishop of Winchester, whose influence was all powerful during the next half century, and was reflected in Egbert’s still greater grandson, Alfred. Swithun belongs essentially to Winchester; he laboured incessantly for the kingdom, the diocese, and the city, and his shrine became for centuries afterwards the glory of its Cathedral, and the place of pilgrimage for thousands of pious feet. He built churches; he protected the Cathedral and Monastery by building a wall round it; he built a bridge across the river, outside the East Gate of the city, where the present graceful Georgian structure stands. As some old verses tell us:
Seynt Swithun his bishopricke to al goodnesse drough,
The towne also of Winchester he amended enough,
For he lette the strong bruge without the towne arere,
And fond thereto lym and ston and the workmen that were there.
Fate deals unkindly with some, even at times with those who deserve most at her hands; Swithun is one of these. A man of saintly life and far-reaching influence, his humility and aversion to display were among his most striking personal characteristics. With an instinctive and indeed prophetic dread of superstitious veneration being paid to his remains after death, he gave orders that his body should be buried, not within the Cathedral, where kings and saints reposed, but in the open graveyard outside, among the poor and the unnoticed. But in vain: with the monastic revival in King Edgar’s reign, one hundred years later, came the erection of a new and more splendid cathedral. Tales of miraculous occurrence began to be told of Swithun’s tomb, and nothing would serve but the translation and enshrinement within the new Cathedral of the saint, so pre-eminently national, whose bones had such potent virtue. Accordingly, in solemn state, in the presence of King Edgar, Archbishop Dunstan, and Bishop Æthelwold, the pious translation was performed. Thus Swithun, never formally canonized, became by universal consent dignified by the appellation Saint, and his mortal remains were for centuries the object of that superstitious worship which he himself had so earnestly dreaded. Later years obscured his reputation even more: a tradition grew up that the saint had signified his displeasure at the translation of his body by sending a violent deluge of rain, which for forty days rendered his exhumation impossible. No foundation for this impossible story can be found in any contemporary account, and several contemporary accounts both minute and circumstantial still exist; but the tradition has passed into a proverb, and so the name of Swithun—his virtues, his piety, and his personality all forgotten—serves often merely to suggest the school-boy jingle:
St. Swithun’s day, if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain;
St. Swithun’s day, if thou be’est fair,
For forty days ’twill rain nae mair.
For the general public he has ceased to be a historic personality at all, entitled to veneration and esteem, and has come to be regarded as a mythical being, malignant and capricious, the patron saint of discomfort and of stormy skies.
The century which followed Egbert’s death was one of unremitting struggle against the Danes—a struggle during which the newly formed kingdom seemed more than once in imminent danger of being submerged. Æthelwulf and his sons faced the danger manfully, through which, at length, Alfred emerged victorious. The history of Winchester is in large measure merely the history of these movements.
Æthelwulf, the priest-monarch, the son of Egbert, who succeeded him in 839, will be best remembered in Winchester as the father of Alfred, and by the charters, particularly two of extreme interest, which he executed here. The more important of these is still extant, and the original is preserved in the British Museum. This is often spoken of as the origin of tithes, but erroneously, as Æthelwulf’s gift was a gift to the Church not of produce, but of one-tenth of his landed possessions.
The charter conferring this grant, having been duly executed, was solemnly laid on the high altar of the Cathedral in the presence of Swithun and the assembled Witan. The actual original of the second charter no longer exists, but an ancient copy is preserved among the treasures of the Cathedral Library. Even as a copy it possesses extreme interest: it bears the names of King Adulfus (Æthelwulf), Swithun, and the King’s four sons, Æthelbald, Æthelbert, Æthelred, and Alfred—the two elder sons being described as ‘Dux’ (Earldorman), and each of the two younger, mere boys at the time, as ‘Filius Regis,’ son of the King. Each name is attested, according to Saxon custom, not by a seal, but by a cross. The date is 854, when Alfred was five years old, and the document is the earliest tangible link still existing between the city and the great King.