to the great Abbey of Hyde, then on to Headbourne Worthy church, to visit the Saxon rood at its western end, then on by Alton and Farnham, probably to rest for the night in the great Cistercian Abbey of Waverley hard by, and so on by Guildford and St. Martha’s to Canterbury—a well-defined route clearly marked even now for much of its length, and still known as the Pilgrim’s way. So great a vogue did the pilgrimage craving become that at length it had to be controlled and forbidden by law. Yet the pilgrimage had its uses—the open-air journey, severe though its hardships were to the ill-found and poorly shod, served, doubtless, as a magnificent tonic, both mental as well as bodily, and must have done much to correct the terrible insularity of ideas which a population otherwise chained to the soil must otherwise have engendered. Nor, in all probability, was the belief in the efficacy of pilgrimages in the cure of diseases, particularly mental ones, without at least some substantial basis of truth.
As in the case of Henry of Hoheneck, so also, mutatis mutandis, might many a pilgrim to Winchester have had it said of him:
And he was healed in his despair
By the touch of St. Swithun’s bones,
Though I think the long ride in the open air,
That pilgrimage over stocks and stones,
In the miracle must come in for its share.
A miracle none the less pronounced because the air of Hampshire Downs had been a potent but unrealized contributory factor in the result.
CHAPTER XV
THE MONASTIC LIFE
Grosse Städte, reiche Klöster
Schaffen, dass mein Land den euren
Wohl nicht steht an Schätzen nach.
Kerner, Der reichste Fürst.
But active as were the currents that circulated in and round the gilds, the wool markets, the annual fair, and the pilgrimage resorts, the dominating stream was that which flowed through the monastic channel, and over mediaeval Winchester the influence of the monastery in one form or other, whether of priory, abbey, or nunnery, or whether of the mendicant orders, or nursing sisterhoods, now for a considerable time firmly established in the city, was supreme.
The Priory was a secluded area, the privacy of which was jealously guarded. The Cathedral itself, from the eastern angle of the north transept to the southern corner of the west front, formed the effective boundary on the city side, with the great churchyard lying between it and the city proper. The remainder was supplied by the high close-wall running all round it, much as the greater part of it does now, flanked to the east by the boundary of the Bishop’s residence at Wolvesey, and forming, with the latter, part of the external defences of the city, so that between them the monks and the Bishop relieved the citizens of something like a quarter of the burden—a heavy one at that time—of keeping the walls in repair and defending them if attacked.
The main entrance was then, as now, the great close-gate, opening into Swithun’s Street near Kingsgate,—the point of attack in the troubles of 1264—and besides this a small postern or opening gave access from ‘Paradise’—as the area east of the northern transept was and still is called—to Colebrook Street and Paternoster Row. From the churchyard to the domestic quarter no direct means of access existed; the ‘Slype’ or passage through the great south-western buttress was not yet made, and to pass from the west part into the cloister it was necessary to pass through the Cathedral itself.