The City walls were almost intact down to 1760.  Now we have but the fine West Gate and the King’s Gate, over which is St. Swithun’s church.  The churches of Winchester are little more than half their former number.  St. Maurice has a Norman doorway and St. Michael a Saxon sundial.  St. John Baptist and St. Peter, Cheesehill, are of the most general interest.  The former has a screen and pulpit over four hundred years old; transitional arches; and an Easter sepulchre.  The latter is a square church mostly in Perpendicular style but with some later additions more curious than beautiful.  Visitors to St. Lawrence’s should read the inscription to Martha Grace (1680).  St. Bartholomew’s, close to the site of Hyde Abbey, shows some Norman work.  In 1652 the Corporation petitioned Parliament to reduce the several city parishes into two, deeming a couple of ministers, one for each church, sufficient for the spiritual requirements of the city.  In connexion with this a tract was issued describing the ghastly condition of the churches, one, St. Mary Kalendar being a garbage den for butcher’s offal, another, St. Swithun’s, Kingsgate, was let by the corporation as a tenement and had a pigsty within it!

[Illustration:  City cross, Winchester.]

The ancient castle and residence of the Kings of England is now represented only by the Great Hall, dating from the early part of the thirteenth century.  It is used for county business and is a good specimen of the domestic architecture of the time.  The great interest of the hall is the reputed Round Table of King Arthur, placed at its west end.  Experts have decided that it cannot be older than 1200.  The painted names upon it are those of Arthur’s Knights.  These were executed in the reign of Henry VIII and replaced earlier inscriptions.  The Hospital of St. John Baptist is in Basket Lane.  Established by John Deverniche, one of the city fathers, in 1275 for the succour of aged wayfarers, it was suppressed at the Reformation, but reverted to its original purpose in 1829, and is thus one of the oldest living foundations of its kind in the kingdom.

Charles II desired to revive the royal glories of Winton and commissioned the erection of a palace which was unfinished when he died.  After being used as a barracks, the fine building was practically destroyed in 1894 by a disastrous fire.  This element was almost as great an enemy of old Winchester as the reformers themselves.  On one occasion the town was fired by a defender, Savaric de Mauleon, on the approach of a French army under Louis the Dauphin.  When the other, and junior, capital was receiving its cleansing by fire in 1666, Winchester was being more than decimated by the plague, which was as direful here as anywhere else.