In marked contrast with his behaviour elsewhere, Bishop Henry had acted oppressively against them, and when their abbey was destroyed he had even forced from them the ashes to which it had been reduced. No slight treasure the latter, for did they not contain the molten remains of cross and shrine and chalice, the cross of Cnut and Emma, their great prize and possession, and many another treasure, which though now but molten metal, still reckoned a value in thousands of pounds? Fortune was against the bishop, and he found it convenient to retire abroad, to Cluny and elsewhere, for a time, while the new king established his authority, made order in the distracted kingdom, and razed the offending fortresses to the ground. Thus while the bishop’s palace at Wolvesey still remained, the Norman keep was dismantled and rendered harmless, and some of these ruins we can see there to-day.
The succeeding years were to present Bishop Henry in a less ambitious and altogether more attractive light. He had played for his great stake—played and lost: his legatine commission had expired, his archiepiscopal dream had rudely disappeared. His political power shattered, and his personal influence largely compromised, he was glad to make peace with the king and full restitution to the monks of Hyde, and he returned to his see to spend the last portion of his life—some fifteen or sixteen years—in acts of quiet episcopal rule and active beneficence. During his stay on the Continent he had amassed many treasures of art, and these he brought back with him—very probably the wonderful and curious black stone font, one of a rare series of seven English fonts, four of which are in our own county and diocese, was placed by him in the Cathedral at this time. But a far nobler and more noticeable monument he was already rearing for himself in the outskirts of the city. Some mile down the valley, in the little village then known as Sperkforde, he had, in the early days of Stephen’s reign, commenced to build a hospital or almshouse—the Hospital of St. Cross—and to this he now devoted himself.
Filled as the land then was with misery and ruin, relief of the hungry and distressed was a peculiarly pressing need, and the bishop’s aim was to relieve distress. Following the hospitable example of the great Clugniac house in which he had been reared, the gates of St. Cross were to be ever open, ready to give kindly welcome to all who should enter there in want. Thirteen aged brethren were to be maintained in ease and comfort. One hundred of the poor of Winchester were to be regularly fed there in the “Hundred Mennes Hall,” and seven poor Grammar School boys of Winchester—for Winchester had its Grammar School then, earlier even than the College of Wykeham—were likewise to be fed and provided for daily. In 1157 Bishop Henry committed the guardianship of his hospital to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, the Knights Hospitallers as they were called, whose special care was to aid wandering men, particularly the poor pilgrims visiting the Holy Sepulchre. And so the brethren of St. Cross wear the black gown and the eight-pointed silver cross of the Knights of St. John to this day.
St. Cross is Bishop Henry’s great memorial. He lived to see it firmly established, but otherwise in his later years he took but little part in public affairs. One of his last acts was to receive his cousin, the repentant King Henry, after the murder of à Becket, when he bade him welcome him with affectionate admonition and gave him his blessing. He died in 1171 and was buried in the Cathedral; the tomb popularly designated William Rufus’s Tomb has been thought to be his. Great and high-minded as a churchman, he had lived through the period of personal striving—“the fever, and the watching, and the pain” of self-advancement and of worldly ambition. His selfish schemes had died and nobler ones had succeeded, which revealed the man at his greatest and his best. Truly it might be said of him—
That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
And St. Cross, at whose gates the needy wayfarer still receives hospitable welcome as he did in Bishop Henry’s day, flourishes still, exercising a far wider measure of beneficence and power for good than its founder, in all probability, anticipated or even dreamed.
CHAPTER XIII
ANGEVIN AND PLANTAGENET
Ay, that approves thee, tyrant, what thou art,
No father, king, or shepherd of thy realm;
But one that tears her entrails with thy hands,
And like a thirsty tiger suck’st her blood.
Edward III.
We need not stay to discuss in much detail the course of events during the reigns which followed. It was but a blackened and ruined Winchester which emerged from the disasters of the civil war. With two monasteries, some twenty churches, and most of the domestic dwellings consumed, it took her all her energies to reconstruct the desolate fabric; nor did she ever completely recover the blow. Hyde Abbey was at once recommenced, and gradually, but only very gradually, resumed its former importance. St. Mary’s Abbey, too, was rebuilt, and Winchester, as the natural centre of the wool trade, was able steadily to recover her commercial activity, and managed to retain her importance as a centre of traffic and intercourse some two hundred years or more longer, but politically her supremacy had departed for ever, and London henceforth was more and more to hold unchallenged sway.
Henry II.’s visits in Winchester were not frequent, and in addition were but casual. It was here, while recovering from illness, that he matured his great scheme for the administration of justice, the division of the country into circuits with itinerating judges of assize, to hold assizes or sittings for the due dispensation of the king’s justice, from which circumstance Hampshire has always occupied a foremost position in the assize list, but Winchester was in no sense his capital.