WINCHESTER FROM ST. GILES’S HILL
From St. Giles’s Hill, where in mediaeval days the world-famous Fair of St. Egidius or St. Giles was held, an unequalled view of Winchester city can be obtained. The Cathedral, Wolvesey, the College, the Guildhall, the High Street, the Alfred Statue, the Old Guildhall, the Westgate, can all be seen. The dark clump of trees on the sky-line is the so-called Oliver’s Battery.
Wells arose too out of his sturdy refusal to countenance the Merry Monarch’s irregular life, for he refused to let Mistress Eleanor Gwynne have the use of his house to lodge in, a refusal which angered the king at the time, but conciliated his respect, for on the bishopric falling vacant he declared that none should have it but the “good little man who refused his lodging to poor Nelly.” Izaak Walton, Ken’s relative, made Winchester his residence during the closing years of his long life—a man of culture and some literary pretension, apart altogether from his immortal Compleat Angler, for his lives of Donne and Herbert attained to some celebrity; tradition connects a certain summer-house by the stream in the Deanery garden with him and his fishing, and in several places in his Compleat Angler he makes allusion to our Winchester streams, showing that he had ofttimes baited his angle by one or other of its waters. Peace to his soul—he rests in the Cathedral, in Silkstede’s Chapel, and the verses over his tomb, though devoid of all literary merit, are said to have been written by Ken his kinsman.
Our next possession is a greater name—and that, moreover, a Hampshire, though not in any real sense a Winchester one—the Hampshire novelist, the most charming and natural of women writers, Jane Austen. Here in the early days of 1817, when a deadly and insidious malady had attacked her, she came with her sister Cassandra to lodge in a house in College Street, occupied then by a Mrs. David, in the vain hope that Winchester medical skill might restore her strength.
The following letter from her pen,[3] written at this period, reveals the characteristic espièglerie of the writer, which not even advancing weakness could disarm or subdue.
Mrs. David’s, College Street, Winton,
Tuesday, May 27th.
There is no better way, my dearest E., of thanking you for your affectionate concern for me during my illness than by telling you myself, as soon as possible, that I continue to get better. I will not boast of my handwriting—neither that nor my face have yet recovered their proper beauty; but in other respects I gain strength very fast; am now out of bed from 9 in the morning to 10 at night; upon the sofa, it is true, but I eat my meals with Aunt Cassandra in a rational way, and can employ myself, and walk from one room to another. Mr. Lyford says he will cure me, and if he fails I shall draw up a memorial and lay it before the Dean and Chapter, and have no doubt of redress from that pious, learned, and disinterested body. Our lodgings are very comfortable. We have a neat little drawing-room with a bow window, overlooking Dr. Gabell’s garden.... On Thursday, which is a confirmation and a holiday, we are to get Charles [a relative—then a boy at the College] out to breakfast. We have had but one visit from him, poor fellow, as he is in sick-room, but he hopes to be out to-night.... God bless you, my dear E. If ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed as I have been. May the same blessed alleviations of anxious, sympathising friends be yours; and may you possess, as I dare say you will, the greatest blessing of all, in the consciousness of not being unworthy of their love. I could not feel this.—Your very affectionate aunt,
J. A.