Winchester’s Great Hall survived the centuries, but the story of how it got here is stranger than anything in the history books. It was in September 1645 that Oliver Cromwell’s guns pounded the castle walls for a week. When the smoke cleared, only the Great Hall remained standing. Even then, I can still trace my own ancestry back more than a thousand years to Alfred the Great, a king who turned this town into the most important city in England for four centuries.
It wasn’t supposed to happen. When Alfred became King of Wessex in 871, England was being torn apart by Danish invaders. One kingdom after another fell — Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia — until Wessex was all that remained. Then the Danes attacked again, and Alfred was forced to retreat to the safety of the Somerset marshes.
From that hidden refuge, he plotted his revenge. It took fourteen years, but Alfred was ready. His defenses were organized, his forces disciplined, and within four years, the Danes finally withdrew. In the peaceful years that followed, Winchester prospered.
Alfred established more than just a government here. He built a place of worship and learning that would shape the kingdom for centuries. Coins were minted here, records kept, and kings held court. My own family could trace its line back to those very days, to the age of Alfred and beyond.
The Great Hall itself was originally started by the Normans and massively expanded by Henry III. For a long time, it was the seat of government and the official royal residence. The Domesday Book was kept here. Parliament met within its walls in the 1300s.
But it was the cathedral that became the heart of Winchester. Since the 7th century, there has been a church on this site, and by Alfred’s time, the Old Minster had already been the religious heart of the kingdom for more than two hundred years. The coronation service used for Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was much the same as the one created by Archbishop Dunstan when he crowned King Edgar some eighty years before Edward the Confessor. Dunstan designed the service carefully.
He wanted five things to happen. First came the shout of recognition — the Archbishop would say, “Here is this man. Do you accept him? ” and the people would cheer.
Then came the oath, which controlled the king before he was given power. Then the king prostrated himself as if dead, rose up dressed as a simple Byzantine peasant, and was anointed with holy oil. The church gave him everything it could at that point. Then came the investiture — crown, rod, and sword — followed by the anthem “Zadok the Priest.
” Dunstan chose that moment deliberately: he wanted everyone to remember it was a priest who made the king. Edgar united the whole of England, fulfilling Alfred’s dream. He changed the meaning of loyalty to the crown, turning pagan tribal instinct into Christian obligation. He introduced the idea of national patriotism for the first time.
During Edgar’s reign, the Old Minster became St. Swithun’s Priory. Swithun had been bishop in the time of Alfred’s father and grandfather. He rebuilt the bridge over the Itchen and once performed a miracle — a woman dropped a basket of eggs, and when he picked it up and returned it to her, not a single egg was broken.
But the saint is best known for the weather. He asked to be buried in a humble tomb outside the Minster. In July 971, church authorities exhumed his body and brought it inside. A dreadful storm erupted.
Ever since, legend says that if it rains on St. Swithun’s Day, it will rain for the next forty days. The cathedral survived the worst of Henry VIII’s Reformation because it was a royal burial site. But it did not escape entirely.
One morning in September 1538, at three o’clock, Thomas Wriothesley led a small band that smashed St. Swithun’s shrine and removed his bones. They feared his relics might become a source of veneration. His bones have never been seen again.
There was another act of destruction connected to the cathedral. Before the present cathedral could be built, Bishop Walkelin argued with William the Conqueror over how much timber he needed. The bishop persuaded the king to let him take as much wood from the royal forest as he could cut in four days. Walkelin then gathered an army of carpenters and stripped the forest bare, leaving only one tree — the Gospel Oak, where the Gospel was first read in Wessex.
King William was furious. It is said Walkelin was forced to do penance in sackcloth before he was forgiven. And it’s no coincidence that just a few miles away, William created a New Forest — perhaps to ensure no one could strip it so thoroughly again. It was in that New Forest that William’s unpopular son, William Rufus, was shot while hunting.
The rest of the hunting party fled and left his body lying in the middle of the forest. His younger brother, Prince Henry, fled straight to Winchester, seized the treasury, and was crowned king within three days. Under cover of darkness, Rufus’s body was carried into the cathedral while revelry celebrated Henry I’s succession outside. Locals believed it was bad luck to bury such an unpleasant man in so sacred a place.
When the central tower collapsed in 1107, seven years after Rufus’s death, many blamed him. The essentially Norman construction is still standing today, which surprises some people, because it’s built over a former marsh. Even now in winter, the water table rises high enough to flood the crypt. At the beginning of the twentieth century, parts of the cathedral seemed ready to collapse.
A deep-sea diver named William Walker was called in, and by hand, he replaced a raft of beech logs with bags of cement concrete. It took him six years to complete the work. King George V and Queen Mary attended the service of Thanksgiving for the workers — and especially for the diver who saved the cathedral. Alfred’s third gift to Winchester was learning.
His patronage of literature and his personal involvement in translating Latin books into English were remarkable achievements. Some of the best examples are Bibles — the Winchester Bible, a twelfth-century specimen, is a perfect example of local illumination. These works showed a partnership between the crown and the people under God. The crown’s patronage allowed the church to portray the word of God more gloriously, while the crown’s political power increased through its spiritual depiction in the illustrations.
The idea of learning was developed further in the late fourteenth century when Bishop William Wykeham founded Winchester College. After the Black Death decimated the population, Wykeham was dismayed at the standard of new recruits entering the church’s ministry. He established two places of learning for young priests — one at Oxford, and one at Winchester. Winchester College was unique because it was the first time scholarships were offered.
There are still places for seventy scholars. Before 1857, a scholar merely had to prove he had a wealthy patron — remarkably simple when you consider that a scholarship ensured automatic admission to New College, Oxford, and security for life. The school was established by royal charter in October 1382 by Richard II, and it still uses many of its original buildings, which are at least six hundred years old. It has the longest continuous history of any school in England.
Of all Alfred’s accomplishments, his greatest surviving legacy is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle — a remarkable collection of books providing a year-by-year account of his and his successors’ reigns right up until the Norman invasion. Then came the most consequential event Winchester ever faced. Edward the Confessor’s long, uneventful reign was later remembered with nostalgia. His only real achievement was the construction of Westminster Abbey, where he was buried.
He left the succession undecided — he was married with no children. When he died in January 1066, it set in motion a struggle for the crown that changed England’s history forever. That September, William, Duke of Normandy, landed at Pevensey Bay. He disputed Harold’s right to the throne, claiming Edward had promised him the crown.
The Battle of Hastings decided the fate of both the crown and the country. On Christmas Day 1066, William was crowned in Edward’s newly completed Westminster Abbey. It was the beginning of the power shift from the ancient Saxon capital of Winchester to the new Norman one of London. As Winchester’s status declined through the Middle Ages, its economy suffered and much of its Saxon heritage disappeared.
Then in 1642 disaster struck. The Civil War divided the city’s loyalties between Charles I and Parliament. Parliamentary soldiers looted the city and cathedral twice. Then in September 1645, from an area known as Oliver’s Battery, they turned their guns on the castle and pounded it for a week.
Cromwell declared the castle should never again threaten him, and its remaining fortifications were torn down. Only the Great Hall survived. With only the Norman cathedral and the Plantagenet Great Hall left standing, it seemed Winchester’s ancient past had been purged. Yet there is something here that opens another world — where fact meets fiction.
The Round Table. No one knows how it came to be here. Everyone associates it with King Arthur and his legendary knights. Arthur, if he existed, would have lived in the sixth century.
It is said he helped weld together a number of feuding Celtic tribes to organize opposition to the invading Saxons. Since no one really knows about his death, he disappeared under mysterious circumstances. From that moment onward, people kept saying: Arthur will come back. Arthur will come back to help us in our time of need.
That became the beginning of the romantic legend. From the Middle Ages onward, there has been a strong association — one that still exists today — that this was somehow connected to the original Round Table, that this was the original Camelot. Of course, this particular table is a medieval copy, possibly made for Edward I, and painted by command of Henry VIII for a visit by Emperor Charles V. Henry wanted it painted to capture the whole idea of Arthur and chivalry.
The figure of Arthur on the table is in fact Henry himself. Henry probably inherited this fascination with Arthur from his father, Henry VII, whose claim to the English throne was tenuous beyond belief. Henry VII used the Arthurian legend to strengthen his position and image. He named his elder son Arthur and had him christened at Winchester Cathedral, probably at the font.
This Arthur died before he became king, and his widow, Catherine of Aragon, married his younger brother — who later became Henry VIII. When Henry VIII had the table painted in 1522, it was to impress Charles V. Henry hoped to secure his own place in history and wanted to suggest that his lineage went back to the legendary hero himself. Where better to bring Charles than to the ancient capital?
Trying to prove your history is longer than someone else’s is a practice that continues to this day. Britain is lucky to have such a rich, varied, and well-documented history, much of it encapsulated in this city — the capital of the ancient kingdom of Wessex and the former capital of England.
