to believe that a town so plentifully supplied by nature with water was without considerable baths.  Legend has it indeed that Winchester was the capital of the King Lucius, who is said in the second century to have introduced Christianity into Britain.  The first Christian church, which he erected, traditionally stood upon the site of the Cathedral.  But alas, Lucius is a myth, his cathedral a church never built with hands.  We know nothing of any Christian church in Roman Winchester, and though we may be sure that such a building certainly existed, no excavation has so far laid bare its foundations.  Indeed we are almost as ignorant of Roman as we are of Celtic Winchester.  Even the lines of its walls are conjectural, we suppose them to be the same as those of the Middle Age, yet such foundations of Roman buildings as have been discovered, lie not only within an area much more restricted than that which the mediaeval walls enclosed, but in certain instances outside them.  No discoveries of Roman foundations have been made to the north of the High Street.  This fact, however, formidable though it be, does not of itself prove that the Roman walls did not coincide with the mediaeval fortifications; it is even probable that they did, except at the south-west corner, where stood the mediaeval castle.  In any case, the Roman walls, built we may think in the fourth century, enclosed an irregular quadrilateral, and possessed four gates out of which issued those four roads to Old Sarum, to Silchester, to Clausentum and to Porchester.

In the beginning of the fifth century the Roman administration which had long been failing, to which one may think the building of those walls bears witness, collapsed altogether, and with the final departure of the Legions full of our youth and strength, Britain was left defenceless.  What happened to Winchester in the appalling confusion which followed, we shall never know.  It is said that in 495, three generations that is to say after the departure of the Legions for the defence of Rome, Cerdic and his son, Cymric, landed upon the southern coast, and presently seized Winchester within whose broken walls they established themselves.  In the year 519, according to the “Saxon Chronicle,” “Cerdic and Cymric obtained the kingdom of the West Saxons; and the same year they fought against the Britons where it is now named Cerdicsford.  And from that time forth the royal offspring of the West Saxons reigned.”  That is all we know about it, and it is not enough upon which to build an historical narrative or from which to draw any clear idea even of what befell.  All we can say with any sort of certainty is that the Saxons, through long years of probably spasmodic fighting, very gradually established themselves in southern England, and out of it carved a dominion, the kingdom of Wessex, whose capital was Winchester.  Until the year 635 this kingdom, such as it was, was pagan.  In that year St Birinus converted the West Saxons and their King