Stigand’s deposition made room for two notable appointments. Lanfranc, perhaps the keenest intellect of the day, certainly the foremost among ecclesiastical statesmen, was made archbishop. William Walkelyn, a relative, there is some reason to believe, of the Conqueror, became the first Norman bishop of Winchester.
Walkelyn enjoyed a high reputation alike for learning and for personal piety. The monkish author of the Annales de Wintonia describes him as a man “of perfect piety and sanctity of life, endowed with wondrous sagacity and withal of such abstinence that he eschewed both meat and fish and rarely tasted wine or mead, and then only with extreme moderation.”
To such a man, imbued with the culture as well as the genius of Norman civilization, the Saxon Cathedral of Æthelwold—albeit barely one hundred years before it had seemed so sublime to the restricted and untutored imagination of precentor Wulfstan—appeared meagre and quite insufficient. He set to work to rebuild the Cathedral, and this fact alone must serve to make his name ever memorable among the ’ makers of Winchester.’
Walkelyn’s building far exceeded in proportions the Saxon one it replaced. It is a moot point how far the sites of the two buildings were identical, and a passage in the Annales de Wintonia seems to show they certainly were not entirely so, though in any case they could not have differed much; but in historic continuity, in the dust of the early kings it preserved, in the shrines of the saints which it displayed to the devout, it was still the historic cathedral of the Saxon capital, transformed and glorified indeed on a scale of noble vastness and dignity hitherto unattempted in England.
Foremost among cathedral traditions is the story of the building of the roof, recorded in the same Annales de Wintonia to which reference has been several times already made, and in them alone. Walkelyn had strained his resources to the full, and still needed timber for the roof. He applied accordingly to the Conqueror for a grant of timber, and received permission to take from one of his woods—Hempage Wood, near Avington, five miles from Winchester—as much timber as he could fell and cart away within three days. “Make hay while the king smiles,” was the bishop’s maxim. He collected a whole army of wood-cutters, carters, teams of horses, and in three days removed every timber tree in the wood, leaving one oak only, the so-called Gospel Oak under which tradition reported Augustine to have preached. Unwarranted as the tradition appears to have been, it served to protect the tree, which still stands, though to all appearance dead, an interesting reminder of Walkelyn and his cathedral. When William discovered what a sweep the bishop had made of his “most delectable wood,” he was furious, and was only with difficulty appeased. “Certainly as I was too liberal in my grant, so you were too exacting in the advantage you took of it,” he said, when at length he readmitted the bishop to his presence and his favour.
The story acquires additional interest from the subsequent history of these huge and venerable timbers. For some 800 years they have continued to support the mighty roof, though quite recently some of them have had to be replaced, owing to the destructiveness of a grub—the grub of the Sirex gigas—which had in places eaten them through and through. A portion of one of these beams with a specimen of the destructive sirex can be seen in the city museum, and curios made of this so-called ‘cathedral oak’—though much of it by the way is chestnut—are being sold now for the benefit of the Cathedral Preservation Fund: thus is exemplified Earl Godwine’s remark, “Brother brings aid to brother.”
Two other items relative to Walkelyn are of interest. Curiously enough—and it speaks eloquently for his detachment of mind and freedom from professional narrowness—he wanted at first to revoke Æthelwold’s policy and put back secular canons for monks. The monks were aghast, and, more important still, Lanfranc was hostile, and accordingly after a struggle the bishop gave way and abandoned the project. The other item is the connection between Walkelyn and the great Fair of St. Giles, to which reference has been already made. Walkelyn persuaded William’s son, William Rufus, to grant him the right to a three days’
Fair, on the hill eastward of the city, and to apply the tolls so obtained to the erection of the Cathedral. To the development and further history of the Fair we shall return in a later chapter.
The residence or ‘Palace’ of the Conqueror stood in the very centre of the city, near where the Butter Cross stands now, and abutting upon the Newan Mynstre. Indeed, to obtain room for it the monks were despoiled of part of their site. Interesting remains of it exist in the thick walls and the cavernous cellars of the ancient houses which now occupy the spot—the latter vividly suggestive of dungeons and of the Isaac of York episode in Scott’s Ivanhoe. Close at hand were the Royal Treasury and the Mint, and almost within hail were the quarters of the king’s executioners, whom he kept always ready ‘laid on,’ as it were—a gruesome reminder of the darker tones in which life in Norman times was painted.
The rule of the Norman Conqueror was one which profoundly impressed the imagination both of his contemporary subjects and of succeeding generations. No historical events have been more picturesquely told or more repeatedly dwelt upon than the stories of Curfew Bell, of Domesday Book, of the Feudal System, and of the New Forest—all these centre in some form or other either round Winchester or the immediate locality. The history of William’s reign, as presented in our history books to children at least, might indeed be almost entirely constructed out of Winchester and its memorials. The curfew ordinance,