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cake episode. It is to be hoped she shared her husband's elevation-for the Church had not departed in those early days from the Pauline precept, that "a bishop be the husband of one wife."

Alfred was a puissant soldier as well as a scribe, and a good sailor to boot, as it behoved one who should hold Wessex against the amphibious Dane. His crowning victory over Guthorm or Godrun at Chippenham in 878 resulted in the treaty of Waedmor, which established him as King of Wessex, and of as much of Mercia as lay to the west of the Danelaw

uscript, now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, was chained to a desk in Wolvesey Castle: tradition affirms that the great king himself used to write in it down to the year 891; and the book ever lay open, so that all men who could read might trace therein the annual register as it grew. This warrior king had a great reverence for letters, and the fame of Winchester as a seat of learning was heard afar. The Christian communities of Ireland had got a long start in literature over those in Britain; they were not slow to take notice of the favour shown to scholars by Alfred. The voyage across St-namely, Norfolk, Suffolk, CamGeorge's Channel was hazardous, by reason of the northern pirates who swarmed there; nevertheless, in 891 came three Scots i.e., Irish-in a boat "made of two skins and a half," with provisions for a week, who, landing in Cornwall, made their way to Alfred's Court at Winchester. Their names— good Gaelic ones, to wit-stand in the chronicle to this day- Dubslane, Maccbetha, and Maelinnum.

Doubts have been thrown on the story of King Alfred and the burnt cakes, but it is as well authenticated as anything in his reign, and Asser, the king's intimate friend, is the chief authority for it. He adds (and both Florence of Worcester and William of Malmesbury confirm the strange story) that the swineherd Denulf, in whose house the incident happened, was remembered by the king after his restoration. Alfred having been struck by the fellow's intelligence, directed that he should be educated for the priesthood, and in the end appointed him Bishop of Winchester. none of the deponents mention how it fared with Denulf's wife, the chief personage in the burnt

But

bridgeshire, Essex, Herts, and parts of the shires of Bedford and Huntingdon. And thus was the kingdom of England founded, with Winchester as the capital. In that city the Witenagemot continued to assemble; thence Alfred issued the Domboc, or code of Wessex law; and thither, in 897, were brought to him the prisoners captured from the fleet of the Danish usurper Hasting, to be hanged on the walls of Wolvesey Castle. In this union of Wessex and Mercia, London, the chief town of the latter realm, was too busy a seaport to be overlooked; but the day of London did not dawn till long afterwards.

The bones of the founder of the English monarchy have been lost. They laid Alfred the Great in the Old Minster of St Swithun, where the cathedral now stands; but the monks vowed that his ghost walked and gave them no rest, so the remains were moved to the half-finished New Minster, which had been founded just behind the old one. As time went on, the proximity of these two minsters was found to be too great a strain on the Christian love of the

brethren; so the monks of the newer foundation migrated in 1110 to a spot outside the city walls, where they built Hyde Abbey and Monastery. Alfred's bones they carried with them, and laid in a new tomb; but it is our mournful part to record, with what patience God may grant us, that towards the close of last century the corporation of Winchester-Alfred's own city-being fired with the modern craze for improvement, caused the ruins of Hyde Abbey to be swept away, and used the material thereof for building a new jail. Worst of all, they suffered a wayfaring antiquary to carry off a certain stone of memory to Corby Castle in Cumberland, where it may still be seen, and the inscription thereon read

ALFRED REX: DCCCCLXXXI.

Thus the ashes of the great king were scattered, as well as those of his doughty son Edward. But he still lives in his writings, and space may be found to quote one of the numerous interpolations he made in his translation of Boethius; for albeit it contains no more than a well-worn reflection on a trite subject, such as thoughtful men have ejaculated through all the ages, it throws some light on the intellectual degree of the first King of England:

"True friends! I say that this is the most precious of all the riches of the world. They are not even to be reckoned among the goods of the world, but as divine ones; because false fortune can neither bring them nor take them away. Nature attracts and limes men together with inseparable love. But with the riches of this

world, and by our present prosperity, men more often make an enemy than a friend."

endured for a century and a half, and owed its destruction to one of the first acts in the long struggle for civil supremacy between Church and State. Winchester was then, as it remained for centuries afterwards, the richest see in England; so that in later years, when William of Edington was made to exchange it for the metropolitan dignity of Canterbury, he murmured with a sigh, "Though Canterbury is the higher rack, Winchester is the richer manger." Yet Dunstan, the leader of the monastic reformation of the tenth century, proudly refused to become Bishop of Winchester, having a far loftier ambition to serve when King Edred died. Edwy, his successor, was but a lad of sixteen when he ascended the throne, and Dunstan did not lose a day in asserting his authority over the new king. Edwy had made a love match with his beautiful cousin Elgiva; but the churchmen would not recognise their marriage, which was within the forbidden degrees. No terms are too harsh for the monkish chronicler Osberne to pour on the girl— mulieris animum instigat Diabolus. On the day of his coronation at Winchester, the poor young king, wearied with the long ceremony, refused to sit and drink all night with the nobles and clergy, and, thinking it high time to "join the ladies," withdrew to his wife's apartments in Wolvesey Castle. Now a king that would not get royally drunk at his own coronation was no king for the Saxons; the guests were furious at this affront to their læta convivia. Odo, Archbishop of Canterbury, was present, and ordered Dunstan and Bishop Cynesius to bring their monarch back to the board. These, hurrying off, burst into the room

The kingdom founded by Alfred where Edwy was sitting with his

VOL. CLXI.NO. DCCCCLXXVIII.

2 M

queen and mother-in-law, his golden crown lying on the ground at Elgiva's feet. Dunstan delivered his summons, with which the king flatly refused to comply; whereupon Dunstan, who probably had drunk already quite as much as he could conveniently carry, made a most offensive harangue to the ladies, seized hold on the king, rammed the crown on his head, and, assisted by Cynesius, forcibly carried him back into the banquet ing - hall.

Edwy had plenty of spirit; he chastised Dunstan for this outrage by stripping him of his abbotcy, and sent him into banishment. But he was not strong enough to fight the Church: all his kingdom north of the Thames slipped from his grasp, and the virulent Odo pronounced a divorce between him and his queen.

Unhappy Elgiva! not content with thus ruining her fame, Odo caused her to be seized in her palace of Wolvesey, branded in her beautiful face, and banished to Ireland. Worse was in store for her. "After a while," as Osberne, with redundance of vituperation, ungallantly describes, "her wounds being healed, but with the deformity of her shameless mind still gaping, she left Ireland and came to Gloucester, steeped in the obstinacy of a black heart." Homo homini lupus: the vengeance of the Church which she had incurred was wreaked with devilish atrocity. Elgiva was seized ab hominibus servis Dei-by men in the service of God-acting, that is, under orders from Odo and Dunstanand the sinews of her legs were severed, so that she might wander no more. Incredible as it might seem, were it not testified by the writings of Osberne, who was briefed by the clerical party, the

young queen was actually hamstrung by these fiends. Of course, to palliate such severity, Elgiva is made to appear a dissolute, unworthy female; but the testimony of men who could carry out such abominations as their own annalist describes is not worth much against the character of their victim. She died under her torments; and Edwy himself - pro suis criminibus eliminato et misera morte damnato

perished in a mysterious way, doubtless by assassination, near Gloucester, where he had gone to meet his beloved wife. It is a singular illustration of the prejudice which besets ecclesiastical historians in dealing with affairs involving the reputation of churchmen, that Dr Milner, Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, an able, and, in lay matters, an impartial chronicler, writing in 1798, described Elgiva as "a wicked woman, of great beauty and high birth"; repeated (though he did not dare to translate) the abominable gossip about the scene in Elgiva's room, and vehemently vindicated the actions of Odo and St Dunstan. The whole passage is one of lamentable insincerity, suppressing Osberne's statement that the final punishment of the Queen was inflicted by "men in the service of God," and throwing the blame on the thanes, "then in arms against Edwy."

Dunstan, after holding the sees of Worcester and London simultaneously, became Archbishop of Canterbury in 960, and died in 988, having seen five kings on the throne of England, and assisted at least one of them to leave it. One of the most formidable and unscrupulous characters connected with the history of Winchester, he was, with all his dark faults,

1 History of Winchester, pp. 115, 116, and notes.

a courageous and powerful statesman-powerful because courageous. Had he lived a few years longer, he might have averted or deferred the ruin of the AngloSaxon monarchy; for it is certain he never would have allowed Ethelred the Unready to enter in 991 on the fatal policy of buying off Danish invasions, which ended in the surrender of sixteen counties in 1010.

The last vivid picture which we may present of Anglo-Saxon Winchester shows the straits to which statecraft may be reduced under feeble rulers. Good Bishop Ælfeah, scandalised by the nightly orgies of his liege lord, and trembling for the disasters which such debauchery was bringing on his country, used to steal out of the palace of Wolvesey on winter nights, creep past the sentries, and, plunging into the icy Itchen, stand up to his middle singing penitential psalms till sunrise.

It availed not. The kingdom passed to lords of a sterner race, and Canute, or, as we are taught to write his name now, Cnut, ruled the whole Danish dominions from the ancient Saxon capital. It is said that he returned thither after the famous wave-compelling experiment on the sea-shore, and, vowing never again to wear an earthly crown, hung it on the cross above the high altar in the cathedral, where it remained till the great cross itself, a marvel of silver work, disappeared in the convulsions of the Reformation. Cnut was a good friend to Winchester, "having decorated," says Roger of Wendover, "the Old Minster with such munificence that the minds of strangers were confounded at the sight of the gold and silver and the splendour of the jewels."

The coming of the Norman Con

queror found Winchester divided against itself, and the two minsters took opposite sides, with very important results on their subsequent fortunes. Queen Emma, having vindicated her character against the charges of immorality in general and complicity in the murder of her son Alfred in particular, by walking unscathed over nine red-hot ploughshares laid in a row on the pavement of the Cathedral, died in 1052 in her own house at the top of the High Street. She was the widow of two kings, Ethelred and Cnut, and the mother of two more, Harthacnut and Edward the Confessor. The benefactions of that clever woman to the Old Minster of St Swithun had secured the goodwill of many of the clergy to her Norman kinsfolk; though Bishop Stigand, the friend of Earl Godwin, remained stoutly English. King Edward, too, though he hated his mother, and avoided Winchester as much as possible during her lifetime, had encouraged the Norman idea consistently, and had hospitably received Duke William, entertaining him in his chief castles. There was, besides, a strong feeling among the clerics of Winchester in favour of the race whose culture, as shown by their literature and architecture, was far ahead of anything hitherto attained in Anglo-Saxon England.

But the New Minster espoused the national cause against the foreigner. Under their stout abbot Elfwig, uncle of the new King Harold, twelve monks and twenty men - at - arms, well armed, well drilled, and with suitable attendants, marched across the downs to join their king at Hastings. After the decisive battle there, when the victors came to strip the slain, they recognised the monks of the

New Minster by their Benedictine dress under the mail-a circumstance by no means overlooked by William of Normandy when, amid the plaudits of the brethren of St Swithun, he set up his Court at "Guincestre." Not only did he cause his new palace to be built within the precincts of the New Minster, but he deprived the monastery of 20,000 acres of good land.

The next act of the Conqueror, however, put a severe strain on the loyalty of his adherents in the capital. This was the order for a severe inquisition into the extent and value of all lands within the kingdom, to be engrossed in the Rotulus Wintonia' the Winchester Roll. "So narrowly was it spied out," whines the chronicler Ingulph, "as it is shameful to say, though the king thought it no shame to do that never a hide nor a rood of land escaped mention, nor ox, nor cow, nor swine; all was set down in writing and laid before him." So odious and inconvenient was this proceeding to the commonalty, by reason of the facility it afforded for purposes of taxation, that the register was never referred to under its official title, but men nicknamed it the "Domesday Book.'

Brave Stigand was deprived of his bishopric in 1072, and imprisoned in Winchester Castle, where he died. Walkelin, a relative of King William, was appointed in his place, and, seven years later, began to build a new cathedral for the Normans despised the homely Romanesque of the Saxon architects. In 1086, the great structure being ready for the roof, the bishop besought his royal kinsman to supply him with timber from the forest of Hempage, which then flourished about three

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Alresford road. him leave to take as many oaks as his carpenters could cut in four days; whereupon the wily bishop enlisted a whole army of carpenters, who, working day and night, hewed down every oak in the forest. Now King William set great store by his woods, and, riding that way not long after, exclaimed, "Am I bewitched? am I out of my senses? had I not once a most delectable wood here?" When he heard of the trick played on him by the bishop, straightway he fell into a great rage, such as it took all Walkelin's tact and

courage to assuage. The original timbers of the oaks so craftily obtained without payment still remain above the stone groining added to the roof at a later day.

In 1093 the new cathedral was finished, being the longest in England except St Albans, and the relics of St Swithun and a host of other saints were stored within it. William of Malmesbury describes how, in the year 1100, some countrymen were seen coming from the west, driving a frail cart towards the new church; and ever as they went blood dripped from it by the way, for it held the body of the slaughtered King of England. Him the monks huddled into the earth below Walkelin's great tower, with much shame and little sorrow, for William Rufus had died unshriven of his violence, profanity, and sensuality. The horror of him was so great that nobody greatly marvelled when, seven years later, the tower fell in with a crash upon the tyrant's tomb. The beautiful grey tower - the same that gives Winchester at this day its crown of glory-was built immediately, with greatly strengthened piers, of which the foundations are no longer endangered by the ashes of the Red

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