The canons of the Old Minster, however, flatly refused to adopt the monastic life and discipline, and finally Æthelwold brought monks from Abingdon to replace them. Wulfstan relates their coming thus:—
It happened on a Sabbath in the beginning of Lent, as the monks from Abingdon were standing at the entrance to the church, that the canons were finishing mass, chanting together, “Serve the Lord with fear and rejoice unto Him with reverence. Take up the discipline, lest ye perish from the right way,” as if they should say, “We will not serve the Lord, nor keep His discipline; do you do it in your turn, lest, like us, ye perish from the way which opens the heavenly realms to those who follow righteousness.” Accepting this as an omen, one of them exclaimed, “Why do we stand still outside the church? Let us do as these canons exhort us; let us enter and follow the paths of righteousness.”
The canons, however, struggled hard for reinstatement. They appealed to the king, who inclined to temporize with them, and a great meeting of the Witan was convened at Winchester, where Dunstan and Æthelwold urged strongly the monastic view. The king, however, was still undecided when a voice was heard from the crucifix built against the walls bidding him not to waver longer. Thus, so the Liber de Hyda informs us, the monks were confirmed in occupation.
Next year it was the turn of the canons of the New Minster to follow suit, for, in the words of Wulfstan, “thereupon the eagle of Christ, Bishop Æthelwold, spread out his golden wings, and, with King Edgar’s approval, drove out the canons from the New Minster, and introduced therein monks who followed the cœnobitic rules of life.” The Nunnery, St. Mary’s Abbey, was at the same time placed under the strict Benedictine rule.
And now events moved fast, and with monks established in the monastery strange rumours and portents began to prevail. It was noised abroad that the saintly Swithun, buried humbly in the common graveyard on the north side of the church, had begun to manifest his virtues by acts of healing at his tomb. The churchyard became the resort of crowds of pilgrims, until
... the holy father, Æthelwold, warned by a divine revelation, translated the holy Swythun, the special saint of this church at Wynchester, from his unworthy sepulchre, and piously placed his holy relics with due honour in a shrine of gold and silver given by the king, and worked with the utmost richness and craftsman’s skill.
The same account tells us that the bones of St. Birinus were similarly deposited in another shrine, but St. Swithun was the popular saint, and the miracles wrought at his shrine soon made the Old Minster renowned throughout the whole land.
Indeed, as Rudborne, the monk, quaintly and naïvely tells us, “as long as canons held the Church at Winchester there were no miracles performed, but no sooner were they ejected and replaced by monks than miracles were wrought abundantly.” Doubtless Rudborne was right. At all events crowds of pilgrims thronged to Winchester, and the name of Swithun, the Saxon saint, became a power in the land.
But all this time Æthelwold was at work rebuilding the Cathedral, and the church he reared was the finest in the land—one of the wonders of the age.
Wulfstan in his long-winded way describes the building, its aisles, its towers, its crypt, both mystifying the reader and losing himself over and over again in the description, as he relates how the newcomer passes bewildered from one wonder to another, till he knows neither how to advance nor to get back again.