Hursley, five miles from Winchester, is the centre of ‘Kebleland.’ Here John Keble was parish priest for thirty-one years. Hursley Church was practically rebuilt from the profits of the Christian Year, and Keble and his wife lie buried in Hursley churchyard close to the porch on the southern side.
The village has memories of Richard Cromwell, and there is a fine historical monument to the Cromwell family in the tower of Hursley Church.
could not be restrained, and the City Cross was left undisturbed. Nor did the West Gate escape except by accident. The great room over the gateway was at that time held as an annexe to a public-house adjoining, and so the West Gate was spared merely in order that Winchester citizens might the better enjoy their ‘cakes and ale.’ History teaches us to be grateful at times to strange benefactors. To many, with the present trend of social and political thought, the sentiment Das Gasthaus als Freund will come almost as a shock, yet here in Winchester we are confronted by the curious paradox, that while water has sapped the stability of the Cathedral, that of the West Gate has been secured by beer.
Municipal life in Winchester forms another chapter full of interest. Of her early ‘gilds,’ dating back perhaps to days before Alfred, of the Chepemanesela, the Chenicteshalla, the Hantachenesla, and other vaguely indicated centres of civic organisation, where, in Henry I.’s time, the citizens in their various grades assembled to ‘drink their gild,’ we have already spoken. Her roll of mayors claims to begin with Florence de Lunn in 1184. Whatever antiquity the Mayoralty can justly claim—for Florence de Lunn can hardly be treated quite seriously—her corporate history is full and varied.
The new Guildhall in the Broadway, some thirty years old only, which has replaced the old Guildhall in the High Street, possesses an interesting collection of civic portraits, along with corporation plate, municipal archives, and much wealth of historic raw material.
The finest of these pictures, King Charles II.’s portrait, painted by Lely, and presented by the Merry Monarch himself to the city, represents, perhaps, the only return with which the loyalty of the citizens towards the house of Stuart was rewarded. They lent King Charles I. £1000, they melted their private plate, valued at £300, and their city plate, valued at £58 more, to help to fill his empty coffers when the Civil War was raging. Old Bishop Morley, whose memories centre closest round present-day Wolvesey and Farnham, and Bishop Hoadly of the Queen Anne period, are among the more interesting of the personalities whose effigies are here displayed.
Many, indeed, are the interesting memories which Winchester preserves of the Merry Monarch and his Court; of Nell Gwynn and of the valiant stand made against her by Prebendary Ken; of Sir Christopher Wren and the palace he commenced to build for his royal master on the site of the castle razed by Cromwell—a great and ambitious project never completed, but which, under the name of the King’s House, served for many years as the military headquarters of the city till a great fire swept it away in 1894, to make room for the present barracks, erected, soon afterwards, on very nearly the same site.
Another interesting Guildhall portrait is that of Edward Cole, Mayor in 1597, a patriotic citizen who himself subscribed £50—a large sum for one man in those days—towards the Queen’s war fund in days of the Armada, and a ‘gubernator’ some years later of Christes Hospitall, Winchester, founded, by Peter
Symonds, in 1607 alike for the maintenance of the aged and the education of the young—a foundation possessing a delightful old Jacobean building, just beyond the Close wall, out of which has grown, almost within the last decade, on a wide and open site on the outskirts of the city, a rapidly developing school of modern type, where the ‘children’ of Peter Symonds, in largely increased numbers, receive a far wider education than was possible when he first called them into existence.