Richard I. paid the city the compliment of coming here after his release from captivity to be crowned in the Cathedral, and though at the royal banquet following thereon the citizens of Winchester strove with those of London for the honour of serving the king with wine—a privilege involving the reversion of the golden goblet in which the wine was to be served—their claims were overruled and London bore off the prize.
More important were the building projects of the Bishop of Winchester, Bishop Godfrey de Lucy, who had succeeded to the see the year before Richard came to the throne. The pilgrim stream which flowed through Winchester had swollen to such proportions as to embarrass the monks of St. Swithun’s. Bishop Godfrey formed a confraternity to raise funds and carry out an extension eastward of the fabric, to make it possible for the pilgrims to visit the shrine of the saint without invading the body of the church, an extension which, owing to the limited area of firm ground on which the Cathedral stood, had to be made on an artificial foundation, in peaty and waterlogged soil, and to this fact must be in part attributed the insecurity of the fabric, which has necessitated the enormous and heroic labour of repair now actively in progress. Of this, however, more anon.
But Bishop Godfrey de Lucy had wider aims also. As bishop and receiver of the dues from St. Giles’s Fair, the commercial prosperity of the city was of great moment to him, and he improved and developed the Itchen navigation by means of a canal—or “barge river,” as it is termed—and constructed a huge reservoir at Alresford, much of which remains still as Alresford Pond, to retain the water necessary to keep the channel full. The trade of Winchester was evidently still a highly valuable asset.
Of King John’s reign we have memories in keeping with the general course of his doings. He was frequently here, hunting regularly in the forests all round the city, and here his son and successor, Henry of Winchester, afterwards Henry III., was born. It was at Winchester that John received Simon Langton and the other bishops exiled during the interdict, and in the chapter-house of the Cathedral that he received the papal absolution for his offences against Holy Church. But the peace thus dishonourably ushered in was of short duration, and a year or so later Winchester was in foreign hands, being held by Louis, Dauphin of France, whom the barons had invited over to expel John from the throne.
But when John died, as he did shortly afterwards, the barons withdrew their support from the Dauphin, and John’s son Henry, then a lad of nine years old only, ascended the throne—Henry III., Henry of Winchester.
We cannot give in full the story of Henry, interesting and important as it is, and intimately associated as much of it was with our city; for Henry was here continually, he made it his chief residence, and in the years that followed Winchester had often reason to pay dear for his attachment to his parent city. Wild disorder, riot and revel, profuse expenditure and pinch of consequent poverty, anarchy and siege and civil warfare in her streets, all followed in turn, till order was at last evolved, and dignified and noble parliaments assembled in her Castle Hall, the symbol of the reign of law that was to follow, and the earnest of that rule by representative assembly which has made our nation—and almost Winchester herself—the mother of parliaments, honoured through the length and breadth of the world.
Chequered as the reign was to be, the early years were quiet and prosperous, till Henry’s evil genius, Peter de Rupibus, Bishop of Winchester, gained ascendancy over the king. The king’s marriage to a French princess, Eleanor of Provence, followed, and the king, under the influence of a foreign wife, and a prelate and justiciar of alien sympathies, entered on a
CHEYNEY COURT AND CLOSE GATE, WINCHESTER
The outermost ‘court,’ if such a term may be used, of the Cathedral Close, from which the great Close Gate gives access to Swithun’s Street and King’s Gate. The Close Gate is guarded by a porter, as in mediaeval days, who locks and unlocks it regularly by night and day. Near Cheyney Court stands part of the old ‘Guesten Hall,’ where poor pilgrims to the Shrine of St. Swithun used to be lodged. Weird tales of ghostly visitors haunting the Close are told by persons still living. The name Cheyney appears to be derived from the French chêne, an oak.