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contrivance. Above these stands a rod with golden balls, and at the top a mighty golden cock, which boldly turns its face to every wind that blows."

The translation of St. Swithun's body into the new building in the year 980 was delayed by forty days of rain, and in consequence this festival (July 15) still predicts the next forty days of weather for the English peasant. The original church had been dedicated to the Holy Trinity. The new one was dedicated to Sts. Peter and Paul. But St. Swithun was revered as its real patron, and medieval writers call it the Old Minster, or St. Swithun's Abbey. The chapter had originally been a secular one, but Ethelwold offered the canons, many of whom were married men, their choice between a monkish cowl and the loss of their seats; and when all but three refused the cowl, he filled the vacant stalls with Benedictine monks from Abingdon.

During the days of the threatened and accomplished Danish dominion, national existence still centered at Winchester. In its cathedral Canute was crowned, and here he placed his golden crown on the head of the crucified Christ, refusing to wear it again after his courtiers' blasphemous adulation on the borders of Southampton Water. Here, too, the legend runs, his widow Emma - widow also of Ethelred the Unready and mother of the Confessor-was forced by her pious, weakly son to walk upon hot plowshares in refutation of a charge of too close friendship with Bishop Aldwin. The great Godwin died suddenly at a royal feast at Winchester and was buried in the cathedral while all the people of England mourned aloud. William the Conqueror respected the town as the dower city of the Confessor's widow, Edith, and it quietly submitted to his rule. Stigand was bishop of Winchester as well as archbishop of Canterbury at this time, and he too died here and was buried in the cathedral. And on a neighboring hilltop Waltheof (whose birthplace we saw at York), the "last English Earl," was beheaded by the Conqueror and "meanly buried on the place of his martyrdom."

The first Norman bishop was Walkelin, a relative of the Conqueror's. He rebuilt the cathedral from the foundations up, on a site that was far more cramped than it remains today, the New Minster standing so close to its northern side that the chanting in one church could be heard in the other, and William's great castle crowding close upon its western front.

II.

ALTHOUGH the Confessor had been crowned at the old capital his love for Westminster and

the development of commercial life started London in its successful rivalry with Winchester. But it was generations still ere Winchester lost its rank. It was William's English capital, where he was crowned for the second time with Matilda. Domesday Book was called the "Book of Winton," probably because it was here presented to the king; and here, where it first rang out by his hated order, the curfewbell still tolls night after night. William Rufus too was crowned here, and, shot near by in the New Forest which his father had watered with the tears of its dispossessed peasants, was buried without religious rites in the center of St. Swithun's church. Seven years later Walkelin's massive tower fell down, as though "ashamed to shelter the Red King's corpse." On the day of his burial the witan at Winchester elected Henry to the throne; and in a neighboring cloister he found his wife, Edith,— afterwards, as Norman tongues could not pronounce her name, called Matilda or Maud,— the daughter of Margaret of Scotland and niece of Edgar the Atheling, last scion of Cerdic's stock. In Henry's reign the New Minster was removed to another site and became Hyde Abbey, while the ground it left vacant was used for the city cemetery and now forms part of the cathedral close.

Henry of Blois, a grandson of the Conqueror, Bishop of Winchester from 1129 to 1171, was not only the most powerful prelate but the most powerful man in England. A prime favorite with his uncle, King Henry, to whom he owed his bishopric, neither gratitude nor oaths guided his course in the war which followed Henry's death. Siding now with his cousin Matilda and now with his brother Stephen, he worse confounded the confusion of his time, but at last was the chief promoter of the settlement which put Stephen on the throne. His political acts may be variously judged. His private life was pure, and he labored steadily for the good of his diocese. Becket was consecrated by his hands. He was legate of the pope, a great warrior in deed as well as counsel, and the builder of the beautiful and famous Hospital of St. Cross, which still stands in its old usefulness a mile away from the cathedral. But in his latter days, in the reign of Stephen, Winchester's rank as the capital of the realm finally passed away. It is true that Henry spent much time at Winchester, married his daughter there to the Duke of Saxony, and there kept the enormous treasure, which, when he died, Richard eagerly came to seize. It is true, as well, that Richard's second coronation, after his captivity, took place at Winchester. But he was first crowned at Westminster, as had been the case with Stephen and with Henry II., when Winchester

lay almost in ruins after the long war, and indeed, years before, with Henry I.; and no subsequent English king has thought of Wessex as the political heart of his realm.

In 1189 Godfrey de Lucy was made bishop, and rebuilt the east end of the cathedral while King John was beginning his reign. Bishop Peter de Roches, a Poitevin by birth, and one of the first of those haughty foreign prelates who troubled the realm so sorely, stood fast by John while he struggled with his people,

and frequent monkish quarrels with the townsfolk. But a happy day came at last to Winchester, when, at the parliament held there in 1268, Henry made his peace with his son and with the memory of Simon de Montfort. Ethelmar, or Aylmar, de Valence, Henry's halfbrother, had finally been chosen bishop through his insistence. After this name come a few of small significance, and then Bishop Edingdon's in 1346. The Black Death all but depopulated England in Edingdon's time and left Winchester with only two thousand inhabitants, yet his architectural works were many and ambitious, both within and without his cathedral. From 1367 to 1486 (a period of 119 years) the chair was filled by three prelates only, and each was a man of exceptional note, even for a bishop of Winchester - William of Wykeham, Cardinal Beaufort, and William Waynflete. Before I speak of them, however, it will be best to glance at the fabric of the cathedral church upon which Wykeham imperishably set his seal.

III.

THE ambiguous words of early writers led, even in medieval times, to a belief that Walkelin the Norman did not entirely renew Ethelwold's cathedral, built only a hundred years before. It was long argued that its tower at least remained and fell upon the grave of Rufus, and that the new tower was called by Walkelin's name because it was raised with moneys he had bequeathed. But it is certain now that a new site was chosen for the Norman church, the Saxon church standing close beside it till it was complete; that Walkelin's tower did fall,-as two centuries later fell the one which his brother, Bishop Simeon, erected at Ely,-and was promptly rebuilt as we see it to-day.

Walkelin's church was begun in 1076 and dedicated, with infinite pomp, in 1093. The purely Norman character of the crypt helps to prove the change of site, and its plan shows that the shape of the east-end of the church above must have been more complex than that of other Anglo-Norman churches. The "ritual choir "projected as usual across the intersection of nave and transept, and it has never been withdrawn within the eastern limb- the architectural choir- as it has in many other cases. The presbytery beyond it ended, at about the point marked X on our plan, in the customary semicircular apse. But around this apse a wide aisle was carried, flanked by a pair of towers; and a great doorway in the center of the curve admitted to a narrower Lady-Chapel, which extended past the point marked N on the plan. Modern excavations have shown that the nave extended forty feet farther west than

the line of its present front and had two enormous towers. Except the transept no part of this vast church-five hundred feet in length -now stands intact; and the gradual process by which the whole greater limb was reconstructed is perhaps the most curious on record.

In the year 1202 Bishop de Lucy began, in the Early-English style, a new retro-choir and Lady-Chapel, starting at the fourth pier to the eastward of the crossing. His exterior walls were constructed first and carried past the narrow Norman Lady-Chapel without disturbing it. Later this chapel, together with the aisle around the apse, was torn down and new pier-arcades and vaults were built. The old apse stood inside this newer work until 1320, when the present termination of the presbytery was built in the Decorated style, with a great window in the gable rising close behind the high-altar, far above the lower roofs of De Lucy's retro-choir. In 1350, in the time of Bishop Edingdon, the central alley of the four choirbays next the crossing was rebuilt in an Early-Perpendicular style, while their Norman aisles were still suffered to remain. Then Edingdon tore down the west-end of the church with its towers, rebuilt it forty feet farther east, and began to rebuild the nave. William of Wykeham continued his work, but he did not rebuild; he merely transformed a great part of the nave, leaving it at his death, in 1404, to be finished by his successors. About 1470 the Lady-Chapel was lengthened towards the east, where three chapels of equal depth had hitherto stood side by side. After the year 1500, the Norman aisles of the choir were at last rebuilt in a style like that of Wykeham's work. For fifty years longer splendid tombs and chantries were erected in Late-Perpendicular ways, and Renaissance architects then added their quota in the shape of minor decorative features. So there is no style or period later than the Conquest which does not reveal itself in this remarkably handled church. Not much need be said about the transeptwe have seen Norman work of the same character in the great Eastern cathedrals. It has an aisle on each side, and across each end runs another which rises only to the level of

the springing of the arches, where it bears a narrow gallery. The tower was once open as a lantern to its full height, but was ceiled lower down in the time of Charles I. The four piers that support it are extraordinarily massive, and their masonry is distinctly of two different dates, while the four piers next them in the transept are stronger than those beyond and likewise show marks of alteration. Yet all the work is Norman, and thus structural as well as historical voices witness that Walkelin's great tower fell and that his successors were frightened into sturdier building.

Striking indeed is the contrast between these stern and massive transept-arms and the rich perspectives which stretch out east and west. The picture on page 328 puts the spectator upon the raised floor of the south aisle of the choir. A vast Norman arch curves above him. To the right he sees the wall which incloses the ritual choir, still extending in the Norman fashion beneath the tower; and if he bends forward and looks to the left, the bald majesty of the transept is relieved by few touches of carven decoration. But the wall of the ritual choir is adorned with the work of a much later age: behind him extends the late-built Per

CROSSING the transept now and turning into the nave we see one of the most singular and interesting architectural works in the world. In many other churches there are major or minor parts which have been changed by the touch of later ages into marked unlikeness to their former selves. But nowhere else in England was such a transformation effected on so vast a scale, yet nowhere did it leave so little patent evidence of change behind it.

When Edingdon, as I have told, saw fit to take the nave in hand he pulled down the western end. The west-front is entirely his

work, inside and out, except for the turrets and gable, which were added by Wykeham; and so are the outer walls and windows of one bay on the southern and two on the northern side of the nave. But when Wykeham took up his task he showed a more economical yet a bolder spirit. He tore down only a portion of the fabric and then added what was lacking to define the proportions and complete the features of a Perpendicular design. Just how he went to work is clearly shown in the illustration on page 327, which was first printed with Professor Willis's admirable account of the cathedral. The right-hand compartment shows the original design of the nave (similar to the design we still see in the transept), with its pier-arcade, triforium, and clerestory of almost equal height; the left-hand compartment shows what Wykeham took away - the pierarch, the sub-arches of the triforium, and the whole front of the clerestory stage; and the middle compartment shows what he added — a pier-arch much loftier and slighter than its predecessor, and a tall clerestory, the lower part of which, with its blank traceries on the solid wall and its projecting parapet, simulates a triforium, and, indeed, incloses a passage which opens into the nave through small undecorated windows. On the outside of the building only two stories show - the outer wall of the aisle being carried as high as the base of the glazed clerestory lights. The elaborate vaults of nave and aisles — with their main ribs grouped in the characteristic English way1 but connected by minor ribs in starlike patterns - are part of Wykeham's design, and were finished by Beaufort and Waynflete. In the first portion of the work that Wykeham himself accomplished he allowed many of the Norman surface stones to remain, shaping the piers to the proper form by cutting Perpendicular moldings upon them. But he found this process too troublesome or too costly, for the portions afterwards built are entirely cased with stone-work of his time, behind which, however, the sturdy Norman core remains.

A fine Norman font stands on the north side of the nave, and on the south side, fittingly placed amid the work of their hands, are the sumptuous oratory-tombs of Edingdon and Wykeham. Wykeham's chantry is an especially beautiful piece of work-a tall rectangular structure, with sides that are open above a wall some ten feet in height, and a canopy roof supported on slender shafts and faced with graceful gables. Within it, on an altar tomb, lies the effigy of the great architect in full canonicals, two angels bearing his pillow and three monks praying at his feet. A great square 1 See "Lincoln Cathedral," CENTURY MAGAZINE, August, 1888, p. 587.