A small but extremely interesting parish church in ‘The Square,’ of which practically all the exterior, save the Western Doorway and the Tower, is hidden from sight by the houses and shops hemming it in on all sides. Every Bishop of Winchester on being installed proceeds in solemn procession from the Cathedral to St. Lawrence Church to ring the bell—a picturesque survival of feudal days. ‘The Square’ marks the site of a palace built for his own occupation by William the Conqueror.
his dwelling at Wolvesey with an ‘adulterine’ castle—for he built here without royal warrant, as he built his castles elsewhere at Bishop’s Waltham and at Hursley,—and he sided alternately with Stephen and Empress Matilda in the civil war, as circumstances dictated. And so it befell that Winchester itself became divided into rival camps; Matilda’s forces held the Royal Castle and the Bishop held Wolvesey, and, here within his defences, now in ruins, the Bishop stood the siege valiantly. Ultimately peace was made, and Winchester saw Prince Henry make joyful entry into her ruined streets and ratify the compact. His later years were passed in works of peace and beneficence, and for these he will always be most gratefully remembered.
He built the Hospital of St. Cross, a permanent refuge for thirteen poor brethren, and a house of daily entertainment for the poor and needy outside its walls. He placed his foundation of St. Cross under the protection of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, an Order specially devoted to guarding the welfare of pilgrims and wayfarers. And so the Brethren of St. Cross still wear to-day the eight-pointed cross of the Order and the black gown which distinguished the Knights Hospitallers, and the wayfarer’s dole of bread and beer may still be asked for and obtained at its hospitable gates. Advancement, personal power, and political ascendancy, all these Bishop Henry desired for himself, strove for, won and lost in turn. St. Cross retains its vitality still,—such is the perennial virtue of unselfish kindliness and beneficence.
Though its fortifications were dismantled, Wolvesey remained the residence of the Bishops of Winchester for many centuries after Henry de Blois. Here, on March 28, 1394, in the presence chamber of Wolvesey, William of Wykeham received the warden, John Morys, and the seventy scholars of his Newe College of St. Marie, and gave them his blessing as they set out in solemn procession to enter into occupation of their newly erected premises. In the Civil War, after Cromwell’s capture of the city, the old Bishop’s Castle was finally dismantled.
Present-day Wolvesey Palace stands on your left as you enter from College Street with the Norman ruins and the old Tilt yard in front of it and on your right. Bishop Morley, the friend of Ken and Izaak Walton, erected it. But Wolvesey and Farnham together proved too heavy an episcopal burden, and later bishops have preferred to reside at Farnham. So Wolvesey ceased to be the Bishop of Winchester’s official residence, and the greater part of Morley’s building was pulled down by Bishop North at the end of the eighteenth century. The growing need for the division of the diocese makes it quite possible, however, that the Bishops of Winchester may again be residing in Wolvesey Palace, as their predecessors did for so many hundreds of years.
Wykeham’s College, ‘the Newe Saint Marie College of Wynchester,’ is but a stone’s-throw from Wolvesey. The story of the College has been fully dealt with in a former chapter, and so, now, as we pass along College
Street from Wolvesey, our thoughts may well turn to a house on the left adjoining College, with memories of a different kind, those of Jane Austen. A tablet over the door recalls the fact of Jane Austen’s death within its walls in 1817. She had removed here from her home at Chawton, near Alton, in hope of recovery under the medical treatment which Winchester could afford her. But the hope was vain. She lies buried in the north aisle of the Cathedral nave. We know her now as among the rarest and most charming of women novelists. Of her we shall speak again in the chapter on ‘Winchester in Literature.’
Some half mile or so south of College, beyond New Meads and the meadows by the river—those meadows from which the tower and pinnacles of College Chapel form so poetic a picture as they mingle with the trees around, and the Cathedral behind—lies St. Cross, a foundation which has undergone many vicissitudes and been at various times “much abused” (see pp. 188, 189), but which has happily now for many years past been rescued from the spoiler and restored to the full exercise of generous beneficence. Of its foundation by Henry of Blois we have already spoken, but in its associations another historic name figures, of equal prominence with Bishop Henry’s—that of Beaufort, Bishop and Cardinal in Henry VI.’s reign. Beaufort was a second founder, and the domestic buildings and the fine gateway are his work. Along with the Brethren with black gown and silver cross will be seen some wearing a mulberry gown, with the Beaufort Rose as emblem; these are Brethren of the order Beaufort founded—the Order of Noble Poverty. St. Cross is not a place to describe at all in words; its traditions, its characteristic customs, its general atmosphere belong to it and to it alone; to appreciate it it must be felt. Peaceful and dignified, with the clear transparent waters of Itchen flowing quietly by at its feet, there is no place in Winchester, or indeed anywhere else, where the sense of hallowed charm, of serenity, of contentment, and of rest seems quite so natural and so pervading as here.
Wherever else we turn in Winchester we find some treasure or other over which to linger. On the high ground forming the south-west angle of the city there is the County Hall, last surviving relic of the great royal castle, which William of Normandy first erected and which his successors added to. For some six hundred years that great keep, with its heavy battlements and frowning bastions, scowled down upon the city and overawed its burghers. Yet, grim and all but impregnable as those ‘rude ribs’ might seem to be, more than one assailant found means to penetrate within. Here, in 1140, Matilda the Empress, besieged by Stephen’s Queen, was forced by hunger to abandon resistance, and to seek safety by stealth and stratagem in a hasty and disastrous flight—her power of effective resistance broken finally and for ever. Here, in 1645, flushed with victory from Naseby field, came Cromwell, and, after nine days of hot cannonade, compelled the surrender of the citadel—a surrender which he followed up by ordering the castle to be ‘slighted,’ i.e. razed to the ground.