Winchester | Page 2

Porchester, and Salisbury. With the taking of the town by the Saxons in
495 it became known as Wintanceastre, and here, after the final
subjection of the Britons, the capital of Wessex was established. If the
claim of Canterbury to be the "Mother City" of the Anglo-Saxon race
be granted, few will deny to Winchester the honour of being her eldest
and her fairest daughter. A royal city was this when Birinus, the apostle

of Wessex, came hither in 634, on his way to the Oxfordshire
Dorchester, to baptize the King of the West Saxons; and in 679 the
episcopal see was established, a cathedral built, and a monastic house
attached to it. It was from Wintanceastre that Egbert sent forth the
decree which gave the name of Anglia to his kingdom; and here, by the
tranquil waters of the Itchen, Alfred (with his friend, adviser, and tutor,
St. Swithun), Athelstan, and Canute held their Courts, and directed
their policies.
It was during the reign of Athelstan that the redoubtable Guy, Earl of
Warwick, returning to England in the garb of a palmer from a
pilgrimage to the Holy Land, found the Danes besieging Winchester in
great force, and King Athelstan unable to find a champion willing to
meet the Danish giant, Colbrand, in order to decide the issue by single
combat. The Earl, retaining his disguise as a palmer, begged the king to
let him appear as the English champion.
[Illustration: THE CITY BRIDGE]
This singular combat, which was to decide the fate of the city,
commenced by Guy breaking his spear on the giant's shield, and the
Dane cutting the head off the Earl's horse. Guy then fought on foot, and,
beating the club out of his opponent's hand, cut off his arm. So the duel
waged until night, when the Dane, faint from loss of blood, fell to the
ground, and his head was cut off by the English champion. Having
settled the affair to the honour of his country and his own satisfaction,
the Earl made himself known to the King, under an oath of secrecy, and
returned thanks in the cathedral for his victory. He then retired to a
hermitage beside the Avon, and passed the remainder of his life in the
cave which still bears his name, and probably contains his bones.
Several modern antiquaries are very sceptical about the whole story,
and labour hard to prove that Guy was a mythical figure, and his deeds
nothing but legendary lore. There is always some truth in these old
legends, in spite of the frills and embellishments added by the later
chroniclers, and the history of our land would be poor reading indeed if
we banished the romantic legends merely because they are not
confirmed by such dry-as-dust evidence as alone will satisfy a certain
section of scientific compilers, whose minds can perceive neither truth
nor beauty underlying ancient legends and traditions. The fact that they
cannot be proved to have happened is more than half their charm, and

our garden of romance, with its beautiful flowers of chivalry, is
infinitely better to live with than the dry and parched fields given over
to the cultivation of nothing but facts.
The defeat of the Danish giant is said to have been achieved in a
meadow to the north of the city, named from that occurrence
"Danemark Mead"; and we are told also that the Dane's sword was to
be seen in the Cathedral treasury down to the reign of James I. Be this
as it may, we do know that in the eighth year of Edward I a writ of right
was brought by the King against the Abbot of Hyde, to recover land
usurped in the north suburb of the city, called "Denemarche", and
judgment was given for the crown.
The appearance of the city in Saxon days has been described thus by
Dean Kitchin: "The three Minsters, which filled up the south-eastern
corner of the city, were for long the finest group of churches and
dwellings in all England. Wolvesey Palace, at once the school, the
court of justice, and the royal dwelling place, formed the bulwark
against the dreaded invasions of the Dane; inwards from Wolvesey
precincts came the strong enclosure of St. Swithun's Convent, a second
fortress, which protected the church, and behind both, sheltered by their
strong walls and by the river and the marshlands to the north, were the
growing buildings of the Nuns' Minster, and the new Minster. And up
the rising towards the west, on either side of the ancient Roman road
from the eastward gate of the city, the houses of the citizens began to
cluster into a street, with here and there a stone-built dwelling, and the
rest made of that 'wattle and dab' construction, of which