Early Medieval Winchester

Communities, Authority and Power in an Urban Space, c.800-c.1200

Ryan Lavelle, Simon Roffey, Katherine Weikert, Ryan Lavelle, Simon Roffey, Katherine Weikert

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781789256246
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

Winchester's identity as a royal centre became well established between the ninth and twelfth centuries, closely tied to the significance of the religious communities who lived within and without the city walls. The reach of power of Winchester was felt throughout England and into the Continent through the relationships of the bishops, the power fluctuations of the Norman period, the pursuit of arts and history writing, the reach of the city's saints, and more. The essays contained in this volume present early medieval Winchester not as a city alone, but a city emmeshed in wider political, social, and cultural movements and, in many cases, providing examples of authority and power that are representative of early medieval England as a whole.

Chapter 1

Communities, Authority and Power in Winchester, c. 800–c. 1200

Katherine Weikert, Ryan Lavelle and Simon Roffey

Winchester, though now a quiet and rather small city, contains hidden depths in its past as a place of settlement for over two thousand years. Its place at the heart of the interests of an early medieval ruling family who dominated Wessex and England gives it part of that lustre, but its timeline stretches long before the years on which this volume focuses.¹ As the location of two Iron Age settlements, one of which morphed into the Roman city, the ancient and medieval layers provide a palimpsest of urban landscapes which remains to this day. Its size and population throughout the early and into the central Middle Ages distinctly reflect the development of an urban centre and growth of its population during the period covered by this volume, at the height of its power and influence. By the seventh century, as a central place within the West Saxon kingdom, the city contained its own bishop and bishopric, established in the building known as the Old Minster, which began the start of centuries of Wintonian episcopal power matching that of its royal and political significance. The period of the tenth and eleventh centuries, bridging into the twelfth, saw Winchester shift from the focus of the West Saxon royal family to the then-nascent English kingdom, propelling the city, its culture, community and peoples into a central city in the affairs of the kingdom.

With this centrality, and the centuries of evidence available, writing medieval Winchester as a city of power and community can, and does, take many angles. There is sometimes-sporadic written evidence such as chronicles, particularly the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which originated as an Alfredian, Wessex-centric view of the past.² The rich monastic traditions of hagiography, especially with Winchester’s internationally-revered St Swithun, give great insight into the thriving medieval religious, civic and intellectual city.³ Charters from the period tell of the network of royal, ecclesiastical and aristocratic interests associated with the city, with the records of estates held in the city’s hinterland and sometimes within the urban space itself revealing competing interests and rivalries, particularly between the Old and New Minsters.⁴ There were also other records: Domesday Book was kept in the royal castle in the form of the Exchequer manuscript, sometimes known as ‘Great Domesday’; as Sally Harvey has noted, its contemporary title as the ‘Book of Winchester’ is intrinsically linked with the governmental functions of the city in the eleventh century and in that manner the creation and very survival of such a valuable ‘Book of the Treasury’ (another medieval name) should be seen as evidence of Winchester’s early medieval importance.⁵

The Hampshire folios of Domesday Book do not provide a separate record of the city itself as a shire town in the manner of many other eleventh-century English towns, including neighbouring Southampton.⁶ The Domesday record does provide us with indications of the wealth of city institutions in its entries of landholdings of the bishopric and the New Minster, as well as the Nunnaminster, known by the later eleventh century as St Mary’s Abbey.⁷ Domesday entries also reveal the many royal and aristocratic estates with attached properties in the city, perhaps functioning as pieds-à-terre, the estates’ owners retaining a stake in the urban economy and urban politics.⁸ However, the city has its own surveys in the manuscript known as Winton Domesday. The Winton Domesday manuscript, written at the orders of Bishop Henry of Blois in the middle of the twelfth century, records one earlier survey and one from Henry’s own time. The first of these surveys records information from the reigns of Henry I and, like Great Domesday, of Edward the Confessor, regarding royal properties, mainly on the High Street; the second is concerned with a greater number of properties in the mid-twelfth century city and provides evidence on details of the lives and the wealth of the inhabitants of areas of the city.⁹

Perhaps even more importantly, the material remains of medieval Winchester play the dual role of not only interpreting the city, but in the development of archaeological techniques and methodologies themselves. Major excavations in the 1960s and early 1970s investigated nearly 12,000 square metres of urban settlement within the walls, making Winchester not only one of the most extensively excavated medieval towns in England, but also a training ground for an entire generation of British archaeologists.¹⁰ Many of the finds from these extensive excavations were diagnostically ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ roughly 700–1100, pointing to the impact this period had on the development of the city – including the secular and sacred politics and communities which the city hosted. Winchester, for all its small-town feel in the present, was a hub of not only local and regional power and networks, but one that extended throughout the West Saxon and English kingdoms and indeed western Europe, home of many communities and a part of important transnational exchanges of ideas and culture.

There is, as Martin Biddle’s contribution to this volume makes clear, a significant element of antiquity to the city as a place already settled before the Middle Ages, and the topography of the earlier history affected the medieval city. The Iron Age enclosures on the edges of the city at St Catherine’s Hill (an impressive double-ringed hill fort) to its south-east and at Oram’s Arbour to its north-west gave first shape to the growing city (see Fig. 1.1 and Chapter 2, Fig. 2.1). Aspects of Oram’s Arbour were retained by the first-century Roman establishment of a walled city with the status of civitas, a planned and organised local government centre. For example, a road and site roughly along modern Jewry Street, at the bottom of Oram’s Arbour, were settled before Roman occupation, and were folded into the Roman town as both a major street and the main road north out of the walled city.¹¹ Roman Winchester, Venta Belgarum, named after the Iron Age Belgae, became one of the larger towns in Britannia.¹² Even if very little of the Roman wall is actually visible in situ today, the shape of Roman Winchester can still be roughly seen in the modern city topography – Eastgate, Southgate and North Walls streets marking each boundary.¹³ After the withdrawal of Roman imperial control in the fifth century, the archaeological evidence of Winchester suggests that while there was minimal continuous urban occupation, particularly when compared with the continuity of Roman cities in continental Europe, the city continued to have a significance as a regional centre.¹⁴ The Roman walls ultimately provided an area for a comparatively large medieval city (58.2 ha).¹⁵

With the growth and intensification of royal power in Britain in the seventh century, especially with newly established monastic and episcopal networks emerging through connections to continental Europe and particularly Gaul,¹⁶ interest grew in the symbolic power of direct connection with Rome and the Romanised world. Winchester, with its Roman ruins and spolia, would provide a locus of political and ecclesiastical power for the fledgling kingdom with its powerful bishop and probably a royal palace.¹⁷ By the mid-seventh century, Winchester had its first cathedral at the Old Minster and its first bishop, Wine – albeit a figure whose incumbency was short-lived and who fell out with the then-king, according to Bede.¹⁸ This episcopal seat had been transferred to Winchester from the earlier foundation at Dorchester-on-Thames as the West Saxon dynasty’s interests shifted from the Thames Valley in the face of Mercian pressure (and probably also related to the West Saxons’ interests in territory to the south of Winchester); the body of the West Saxons’ first bishop, Birinus, was also transferred from Dorchester by the end of the seventh century.¹⁹ Excavations directed by Martin Biddle have revealed that the Old Minster’s active community encouraged an almost continuous programme of building, rebuilding and expansion through to the tenth century (see Biddle’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 2). To this establishment were added the royal foundations of Nunnaminster, by King Alfred’s widow Ealhswith (d. 902), probably after Alfred’s death in 899, on the site of her own estate in Winchester, and New Minster, by Alfred’s son Edward.²⁰ The connection between royal and ecclesiastical rule, almost always important in the Middle Ages, reached new heights via the connection between the house of Wessex, the kings of England and the bishops of Winchester.

Winchester’s regional significance in the (eventually dominant) West Saxon kingdom provided a major link in its importance in the central Middle Ages. The intersecting factors of a significant and diverse urban population, a major palace complex, an important episcopal centre and a Roman past combined to their fullest fruition as an expression of power. This is somewhat removed from the popular portrait of a sub-Roman palatial complex in the Last Kingdom books of Bernard Cornwell, recently adapted for television, which might give an impression of a permanent royal sanctuary in the city. Winchester’s ‘capital’ authority was a mixture of the influence of ecclesiastical communities coupled with economic wealth for a peripatetic royal governance over a diverse population with (then as now...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editors’ Preface
• List of Contributors
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• 1. Communities, Authority and Power in Winchester, c. 800–c. 1200
• 2. Capital Considerations: Winchester and the Birth of Urban Archaeology
• 3. The King’s Stone: Peace, Power and the Highway in Early Medieval Winchester
• 4. Royal Burial in Winchester: Context and Significance
• 5. Constructing Early Medieval Winchester: Historical Narratives and the Compilation of British Library Cotton MS Otho B.XI
• 6. Winchester, Æthelings and Clitones: The Political Significance of the City for Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy and Norman Nobility
• 7. The Execution of Earl Waltheof: Public Space and Royal Authority at the Edge of Eleventh-Century Winchester
• 8. The Queen, the Countess and the Conflict: Winchester 1141
• 9. Lantfred and Local Life at Winchester in the 960s and 970s
• 10. Wælcyrian in the Water Meadows: Lantfred’s Furies
• 11. SK27, Or a Winchester Pilgrim’s Tale
• 12. The Early Jewish Community in Twelfth-Century Winchester: An Interdisciplinary View
• 13. Henry of Blois and an Archbishopric of Winchester: Medieval Rationale and Anglo-Saxon Sources
• 14. Swithun in the North: A Winchester Saint in Norway