THE LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS OF

HAMPSHIRE

THE County of Hants is justly regarded as one of the most favoured in England. The varied character of its scenery, with its noble chalk downs, its extensive sea-board, its verdant and peaceful valleys, its vast stretches of moor and forest-land, cannot fail to charm the lover of Nature; while for 'swift, shallow, clear, pleasant brooks, and store of trouts' we have it on the authority of Izaak Walton that' Hampshire exceeds all England.' Its historical associations too are of special interest. Many are the camps and barrows, crowning the high downs of the Island and the mainland, or scattered throughout the New Forest, which point back to pre-Saxon times. In Silchester the county possesses the greatest of the buried Romano-British cities, and in Winchester the early capital of the kingdom. The picturesque ruins of Quarr Abbey, of Beaulieu, of Netley, of Wolvesey, of Portchester Castle, are eloquent of the past; while the historical interest of Winchester Cathedral can hardly be exaggerated. Many again are the distinguished names, especially in early and medieval times, associated with the county. Before the Norman Conquest the most famous makers of English history were connected with Hampshire. The long line of Statesmen-Bishops included many occupants of the See of Winchester; while in more modern times great names are not wanting which have added lustre to the long and splendid roll of England's greatness. Less striking perhaps at first sight are the literary associations of the county. Still, a large number of men of letters have been connected with it, and when it is remembered that 'Alfred created English literature' and created it at Winchester, and when the names of Gilbert White, Jane Austen, Charles Kingsley, and Lord Tennyson are called to mind, it will be allowed that a consideration of the subject should not be without interest.

With the exception of certain charters or grants of land made by the Kings of Wessex to the monastic houses of the county, our earliest historical document is the famous Donation' of King Ethelwulf, made in 854 or 855, in which, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle phrases it, 'he booked the tenth part of his lands to God's praise and his own

eternal welfare.' This deed was written at Winchester, and laid with much solemnity on the high altar of the Cathedral Church in the presence of Bishop Swithun and the assembled Witan. The gift was not, as has often been supposed, one of tithe; but a gift of a tenth part of the crown land of Wessex to the Church. The original document, written over a thousand years ago, is preserved in the British Museum; and one of the special grants made to the convent of St. Swithun may still be seen in the Cathedral Library at Winchester. It begins by saying that Ethelwulf had granted twenty manses of land at the time when I had decided to grant the tenth of my lands throughout my realm to the sacred churches.'

A few years later, under the fostering care of Alfred, Winchester became the home of all the learning and culture of the day. He established a school for the young nobles of the Court, and it was the need of books for these scholars in their own tongue that led the King to those remarkable literary efforts which mark the first beginning of English prose. He took the popular manuals of the age-the Consolation of Boethius, the Pastoral of Pope Gregory, the compilation of Orosius, and the history of his own people by the Venerable Bedeand translated them into the English language. Before then,' writes Mr. Green, England possessed in her own tongue one great poem and a train of ballads and battle-songs. Prose she had none. The mighty roll of the prose books that fill her libraries begins with the translations of Alfred, and above all with the Chronicle of his reign.' It is, as Dean Kitchin well says, 'a source of legitimate pride for Winchester, that within her walls Alfred made that first and greatest history book of the English people.' At Wolvesey Castle, with the help of the brethren of St. Swithun's, the earlier part of the record was completed and copied out; while for twenty years the King wrote with his own hand the contemporary chronicle of his reign. Several copies of this great work were afterwards made, and sent to different places; one to Peterborough and another to Canterbury; while the 'mother-manuscript was kept at Wolvesey, chained to a desk, where all who could might read it. Until quite recently it was believed that this very manuscript, written by Alfred's own hand, was preserved in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It seems, however, to be now generally admitted that the Corpus document is not the original Chronicle of Alfred, but an early copy made at Winchester not long after the King's death. The importance of this great work can hardly be over-estimated. In reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle we are reading 'the first vernacular history of any Teutonic people, and, save for the Gothic translations of Ulfilas, the earliest and most venerable monument of Teutonic prose.'

A most interesting manuscript belonging to the latter part of the tenth century, and connected with the monastic revival under Archbishop Dunstan, is still preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

It is known as the Tropary of Ethelred, and is a musical MS. compiled for the use of the organ in Winchester Cathedral during the reign of Ethelwold. This document, of the highest interest to ecclesiologists and musicians, gives us, in the notation of the period, the actual tones and cadences used at that time in the cathedral services.

After the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the most celebrated document in early times is William's Domesday Record; and no county in England is so closely connected with it as Hampshire. Commissioners were sent throughout the kingdom, inquiring

what hides of land there were in each shire, what lands and cattle the king himself owned therein, what was due yearly to him for it. And he had it written down, how much land his archbishops held, his bishops, his abbots, and his earls, what each 'land-sitting' man held of lands or stock and its value. So narrowly was it spied out-'tis shame to tell, but he thought it no shame to do-that never a hide or rood of land escaped, nor ox, nor cow, nor swine, but it was set down in his writing and brought to him.

These returns, compiled in the year 1086, were all sent to Winchester, where the original rolls were copied out into one great Domesday Book. It is worth noting that the only name which the book gives of itself is that of 'The Book of Winchester.' At Winchester, too, the book was kept, so long as the city remained the capital of the kingdom; it was afterwards transferred, with the other exchequer records, to Westminster. So far as Hampshire is concerned, the account in the Domesday Survey is fairly complete; there is, however, one notable omission. The city of Winchester is not mentioned, probably because, being the seat of government, it demanded a separate treatment. Accordingly in the days of Henry the First the special Liber Wintonia, the Winton Domesday, was made. This medieval document is a valuable record of the inhabitants of Winchester in the early part of the twelfth century, and contains much interesting matter with regard to the life and manner of the people and of the condition of the city.

This

During the long period of the Middle Ages the lamp of literature was kept burning in most of our Hampshire monasteries, and many interesting documents connected with the Abbots of Titchfield and Beaulieu, and the Priories of St. Denys and Christchurch, and above all with the Convent of St. Swithun's, are still in existence. latter house, especially in its earlier days, had a good reputation for learning, and numbered certain authors among its brethren; and as the Scriptorium, says Dean Kitchin, in his interesting Introduction to the Obedientiary Rolls of St. Swithun's, was probably never altogether idle, by degrees there came to be a large collection of valuable manuscripts. It is much to be regretted that at the time of the Commonwealth these priceless treasures were scattered to the winds. Waller's troopers, as the Dean says, were not of a literary turn, and when in 1642 they took possession of the Cathedral they twice ransacked the Library. The vellums and parchment MSS. and printed books were

dispersed abroad; some were sold to wealthy persons; some found a resting-place in other libraries; others were irretrievably lost. The good chapter clerk, John Chase, did all that lay in his power to protect the treasures under his care, and we learn that by persuasion or pur chase he recovered many valuable MSS., ' some from the hands of the tradespeople of the city, some even from the filth and damp of the gutter.' A few of the ancient Codices may still be seen in the Cathedral Library; among them a very fine MS. of the Concordantia Moralis of Conrad de Allemannia, and an early copy of Bede's Historia written in the tenth century. But by far the most interesting and valuable is the splendid Vulgate Bible of the twelfth century, written throughout in a fine very clear hand, and all of it, Dean Kitchin tells us, the work of the same scribe. This Codex is beautifully illuminated, and the colours and burnished gold are as fresh and bright to-day as when they were first laid on by the unknown artist in the Scriptorium of St. Swithun's.

Throughout the whole of this period, and indeed for many long years after the invention of printing, but few Hampshire names connected with literature have come down to us. We hear, indeed, of John de Basingstoke in the thirteenth century, one of our earliest Greek scholars, who studied for a time at Athens and returned home laden with precious manuscripts. To him belongs the honour of reviving the study of Greek in England. In the following century William de Alton, a Dominican of some distinction, wrote a work on original sin. Later on, it is interesting to remember that William Lilly, the Grammarian, the intimate friend of Colet and Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, was born and educated in the ancient markettown of Odiham. More, in one of his letters, speaks of him as 'my most dear companion,' and when in 1518 Dean Colet founded St. Paul's School, he appointed 'Master Lilly' to be the first head of it.

With the dawn of the seventeenth century the names of men of letters connected with the county begin to grow more numerous. Michael Drayton, in what he calls his 'strange herculean task,' the Polyolbion, which appeared in 1612, devotes the second book almost entirely to the rivers, forests, and scenery of Hampshire. In the chancel of the church of Bishop's Waltham lie the remains of Dr. Robert Ward, one of the translators of the Authorised Version of the Bible. In early life Ward had been the tutor of Lancelot Andrewes, and it was mainly owing to his influence that Andrewes entered the ministry, and that the Church of England was able to boast of one who was 'Doctor Andrewes in the schools, Bishop Andrewes in the diocese, and Saint Andrewes in the closet.' In after years, when Andrewes became Bishop of Winchester, he collated his old tutor to the rectory of Bishop's Waltham, where the stately remains of the episcopal palace, often occupied by Andrewes, may be seen on the banks of the Hamble stream. In 1613 George Wither, who had been born in the

little village of Bentworth some twenty-five years before, published his satirical poem entitled Abuses Stript and Whipt, in which he has several allusions to the beechy shadows' of our Bentworth.' On the outbreak of the Civil War, Wither, who was a keen politician, is said to have sold part of his ancestral property at Bentworth in order to raise a troop of horse for the Parliament. At that time the rector of New Alresford (afterwards the birthplace of Miss Mitford, the wellknown authoress of Our Village) was the learned Dr. Peter Heylin, the friend and biographer of Archbishop Laud, and the writer of a work on the English Reformation. His views were naturally distasteful to the Presbyterian party, and it was known that he possessed a fine library, valued, it was said, at a thousand pounds. Hence Waller's troopers, fresh from their work at Winchester, or it may have been immediately after the fight at Cheriton, a few miles only distant from Alresford, visited Heylin's rectory, and seized his entire library, while the living was sequestered by Parliament. Another victim of the Great Rebellion was Thomas Johnson, the learned editor of the great edition of Gerard's Herball which appeared in 1633. In this undertaking he received considerable assistance from Mr. John Goodyer, of Maple Durham, near Petersfield, one of the most famous of our early botanists. To these observers we owe many of the first records of Hampshire plants, a fact which renders this edition of Gerard of peculiar interest to Hampshire botanists. Thomas Johnson, who practised as a physician in London, and kept a herbalist's shop on Snow Hill, was led by his zeal for the Royal cause to enter the King's army, where he greatly distinguished himself. He became LieutenantColonel, and played an important part in the siege of Basing House, where unfortunately he was mortally wounded. At which time,' says an old writer, his worth did justly challenge funeral tears; being then no less eminent in the garrison for his valour and conduct as a soldier, than famous through the kingdom for his excellency as an herbalist and physician.'

Among the most popular hymns in the English language are, beyond question, Ken's Morning and Evening Hymns. Before he became Bishop of Bath and Wells, Ken was connected with the Diocese of Winchester, being successively rector of Brighstone in the Isle of Wight, where a yew hedge at the bottom of the rectory garden is traditionally known as Ken's Walk, rector of East Woodhay, where in the churchyard there is a yew tree planted by him, and Prebendary or Canon of Winchester. The question as to where Ken wrote the hymns is much disputed, and many places claim the honour of having witnessed their birth. Dean Plumptre, in his beautiful biography of Thomas Ken, has exhaustively treated the subject, and inclines to the conclusion that they belong to the earlier Winchester period of Ken's life, about seven years after his election as a Fellow of the College. Winchester,' he adds, ' may cherish the thought that