His will is a curious and characteristic document. It occupied an enormous number of folios. Blue Coat schoolboys, practically until the removal of the school to Horsham, showed respect to his memory by some sixty of their number attending a special Good Friday Service at the church of All Hallows, Lombard Street, at which sixpences and raisins were distributed, in accordance with his will; and his Winchester scholars and Brethren keep his memory by an annual procession to service at the Cathedral on St. Peter’s Day, with a special sermon and quaint ceremonial observance.
Such are some of the matters of interest, small and great, which meet you wherever you turn in Winchester—everywhere there is some genius loci, some cricket installed, and chirping on the hearth. Here it is a quaint tavern-sign such as you can read on the outskirts. As you leave the city you read the legend “Last Out,” as you approach from without you read “First In.” Or it is a name of some street—Jewry Street, for instance, recalling the times when, as already narrated, the Jews formed a powerful element in the commercial prosperity of the city, and had a Ghetto here—or Staple Garden, reminiscent of the great Wool Hall, where the ‘Tron’ or weighing-machine of the Wool Staple was kept, when Winchester was the mart where the wool trade of the south of England centred. And here and there are darker and more sombre recollections, such as the tablet outside the City Museum serves to remind us of the moving tragedy of the execution of Dame Alicia Lisle in September 1685, on a spot in the open roadway, in front of what then was the Market House. Then, too, there are glorious old houses, Tudor and mediaeval, like God Begot House and the so-called Cheesehill Old Rectory, and the delightful houses erected by Sir Christopher Wren himself—those inhabited now by Dr. England and Captain Crawford in Southgate Street for instance, and the house in St. Peter’s Street erected for the Duchess of Portsmouth, of unpleasant memory. These are merely random examples of the kind of interest which Winchester presents to those who wander through her streets with eyes to see and ears to hear. For the casual visitor Winchester has much to offer; for the student of history she has more; but her wealth of treasure can only be apprehended adequately by those who are privileged to dwell within her charmed circle, for her harvest of attraction is too wide to be garnered save by those who bring extended opportunity as well as love and reverence to the task.
CHAPTER XIX
WINCHESTER IN LITERATURE
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s eye
Clothes them with shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
It is always a pleasing occupation to follow out the associations of human fancy which often invest persons and places with an interest, and indeed a romantic charm, to which the cold-eyed historian or dryasdust critic is entirely unresponsive, and if Winchester as it first appeared to us, as we looked down from the brow of St. Giles’s Hill, seemed to throb with the life and interest of a departed age, and of historical personages long since passed away, so too we shall find that it possesses associations of the purely literary type, not indeed fit to challenge comparison with the glorious pageantry of its historic past which we have attempted, all too inadequately, to present upon our stage, but not unworthy to be chronicled and to be included in her volume of romance and recollection. Her points of contact with literature have been many, and yet it would be wrong to describe her as a literary city. No poet of note, no great writer, has, in recent days at all events, claimed her as parent; her acquaintance has been rather with literary persons than with literature itself, for though she has attracted many to make her in some form or other their theme, but little of real weight in any but ancient literature has first seen the light beneath her auspices. For all this she has, in literature as in life, her story to tell, and that an ancient one.
The first literary associations of Winchester are, as is but natural, historical ones, and the first mention of her in literature is found in Bede, who records for us, among other scanty details, her name, ‘Venta, quae a gente Saxonum Ventanceastir appellatur’; she next appears in a full flood of glory, the seat of the learned and literary court of Alfred, from which he gave the world the treasures of his literary efforts—the Consolations of Boëthius, Gregory’s Pastoral Care, Orosius, and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, all rendered into the vernacular, and more important far than all of these, the great thesaurus of early national history, the English Chronicle, the history of which we have already related, and from which we have quoted so constantly in our earlier chapters, to be followed by the equally momentous Domesday Book—curious as it may seem to include this among literary productions. Following from this we have a wide and almost bewildering series of chroniclers, historians, and annalists, some of whom, like William of Malmesbury, Henry Knighton, and Matthew Paris, record details of her career incidentally as general items in the history of the land, while others, like Precentor Wulfstan and the annalists of Ealden Mynstre and Newan Mynstre, laboured at Winchester in their respective scriptoria, producing not merely wonderful works like the Benedictional of St. Æthelwold and the Golden Book of Edgar, but local histories in goodly store, the Hyde Liber Vitae and Liber de Hyda, and the later monkish annals of Plantagenet days—Rudborne’s Major Historia Wintoniae, the anonymously written Annales de Wintonia, and others. Prominent among these various chroniclers was Geoffrey of Monmouth, who, romancist and fabricator as he was, has yet rendered valuable service by preserving the British legends as they survived among the Brythonic folk, and has given us—and let us be duly grateful—the Arthurian legend in all its suggestive elusiveness and mystery, centring round Winchester and Silchester, with Arthur the Christian King, Merlin the Mage, Dubric the High Saint, and many another—a legend which passed through many languages and many lands, gathering store of added marvels on the way, the customary guerdon of such literary wanderings, to reappear in strange unwonted guises, as in Layamond’s Brut and the Morte d’Arthur of Malorie. And the legendary lore of Winchester is far from being her least attractive literary asset: we have dealt with this subject fairly fully already—some may perhaps deem too fully,—yet is not legend but the alter ego of history, and are not myth and legend, sober fact and imaginative creation, after all merely the multicoloured strata in the complete rainbow of presentment of vital truth, passing and repassing each into other by nice gradation and imperceptible advance? But all these are but prehistoric as it were, when English as a language was not, and monastic Latin and Anglo-Saxon the muddy media of literary communication.
The Winchester stream in English literature begins to flow at first with feeble current—a distich or so of uncouth verse, or a casual reference, as in Piers Plowman, Leland, Camden, or elsewhere. Drayton, in his Polyolbion, has some twenty lines or so on the Itchen, referring to the Round Table of Arthur at Winchester, and the towns on her course, speaking of
... that wondrous Pond whence she derives her head,
And places by the way, by which shee’s honoured,
(Old Winchester, that stands neere in her middle way,
And Hampton, at her fall, into the Solent Sea),
and Ken and Walton, in later Stuart days, come upon the scene. Ken is a real Winchester possession—educated at Winchester College, and later on, Prebendary of the Cathedral, he wrote his well-known and still widely-used Manual of Prayer for the use of the scholars of Winchester College, and his Morning and Evening Hymns breathe the same spirit of the inner religious life afterwards so beautifully reflected in Keble’s Christian Year. His preferment to the see of Bath and
