Ben Jonson.
It is pleasant to turn away from the direct stream of the national flood, and to explore some of the by-streams, the more local whirls and eddies in the life of our city, and this theme is naturally suggested by the thought of Winchester in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when imperial politics had largely ceased to affect her, and the wider growth of interests and domestic features had given her life within a greater diversity, and rendered possible a minuter degree of specialization.
Interest in the main centres round her civic rule, the pilgrim stream, the great annual Fair of St. Giles, and the domestic architecture, while supreme over all these was the dominating interest and control exercised by the ecclesiastical powers within her—the sway of the crozier and the tonsure, the cloister and the cowl. We shall deal in this chapter with the city at large, leaving to the chapter following the more purely monastic aspects.
The city as a city had been growing—as always was the case with mediaeval towns closely walled in—continually more and more congested. The southeastern quarter occupied by the Convent of St. Swithun’s, with its Cathedral and great churchyard, the adjoining Abbey of St. Mary, and the bishop’s residence at Wolvesey, was a lung open indeed and well ventilated, but elsewhere the hemmed in area was a maze of narrow and crowded thoroughfares, with houses, whose curiously timbered, but inconveniently picturesque fronts, almost jostled one another across the narrow passage-ways between,—houses, of the type still to be seen in the so-called ‘Old Rectory’ in Cheesehill Street, in the pseudo-antique houses in ‘the Brooks,’ in Mr. Mayne’s Tudor House near the Butter Cross, and the present Godbegot House almost opposite, of later date though most of these be—as if the chief office of neighbourly regard of a mediaeval dwelling to those round her was not merely to
Not beteem the winds of Heaven,
Visit their face too roughly,
but also to religiously exclude that indiscreet and unwelcome intruder, the all-prying and inquisitive sun, while through many of the low-lying streets ran broad and open ditches, not always, alas! the dulcia et piscosae flumina aquae, the sweet refreshing streams which Precentor Wulfstan had once commemorated,—streams whose channels flow now in well-regulated courses, some open, some underground, but which then made their way, often through filth and accumulated garbage, in far less well-ordered circulation through the city.
Though the city, judged by contemporary standards, might be a ‘joly cité,’ of which
The aere was god both inne and oute,
it must have fallen far short of almost every modern standard of health and convenience, and its narrow, confined, and ill-cleansed courts were the lurking-places of contagion and of never wholly absent plague.
The civic management was a strange, incongruous muddle of overlapping and conflicting authorities, each jealous of its own influence and envious of its neighbour’s. The authority of the gilds had now become crystallized into a corporation of more or less definite form, the Mayor and Bailiffs, who exercised the controlling influence over the major part of the city. When exactly a ‘Mayor’ first came into existence is unknown. The civic records go back, indeed, to a certain Florence de Lunn in 1184, though he can hardly be accepted as a ‘mayor’ in the technical sense, but the Mayor only exercised authority over the population within the walls, and ‘the Liberties,’ as they were called, were excluded from his jurisdiction. Of these there were two, the Liberty of the Soke, the region, that is, beyond the walls to the east and north, over which the Bishop had supreme jurisdiction, and which he entrusted to the care of a special officer, the Bailiff of the Soke, and the Liberty of Godbiete, the little manor within the city granted by Queen Emma to the Convent of St. Swithun, from the church tower of which curfew rang, and within whose ‘liberties,’ as already stated, no officer bearing warrant, whether of king, mayor, or bishop, might enter. This tripartite division of authority, in which the civic, episcopal, and monastic powers were mutually confronted, formed a cunningly devised preserve, in which the dexterous fisher in the troubled waters of the day might ply his angle with rarely successful result.