The only medieval church remaining to Southampton is St. Michael’s, which has a lofty eighteenth-century spire on a low Norman tower.  Here is another of those black sculptured Tournai fonts one of which has been noticed in Winchester.  The interior must have presented a curious appearance in the early years of Queen Victoria.  During her predecessor’s reign the incumbent placed the pulpit and reading-desk at the west end and reversed all the seats so that the congregation sat with their backs to the altar.  The purpose of this is beyond conjecture.  St. Mary’s, designed by Street, was erected on the site of the old town church in 1879 as a memorial to Bishop Wilberforce.  All Saints’ in High Street is a classic building standing on the ground occupied by a very ancient church.  Isaac Watts was deacon of Above Bar Chapel, noteworthy for the fact that the immortal hymn “Oh God, our help in ages past” was first sung within its walls from manuscript copies supplied to the congregation by the young poet.  Among other famous men who were natives of Southampton may be mentioned Dibdin and Millais.

As might be expected from its geographical position and the many centuries it has been a gate to central England, Southampton has had a chequered and eventful history.  Before the days of those supposedly impregnable forts in Spithead which bar to all inimical visitors a passage up the Water, the town was not immune from attack from the sea and in 1338 an allied French, Genoese and Spanish fleet sailed up the estuary and attacked the town to such good purpose that the burgesses were forced to fly and from a safe distance saw their homes burned to the ground.  Another assault was made by the French in 1432, but profiting by bitter experience, the citizens had by now constructed such defences and armed them so well that this attack was an ignominious failure.

The port was the scene of several great expeditions overseas before it gave its quota to that greatest of all crusades in 1914.  It saw the start of Richard Lion-Heart’s transports, filled with the chivalry of England, on their way to challenge the power of Islam.  The town records show that 800 hogs were supplied by the citizens for feeding the army en route.  Perhaps the most famous of the sailings was that of the twenty-one ships that carried the English army to the victory of Crecy.  Again seventy years later there was another great sallying forth to the field of Agincourt, nearly frustrated by the machinations of Richard, Earl of Cambridge.  This scion of the Plantagenets and his fellow conspirators were beheaded and afterwards buried, as recorded on a tablet there, in the chapel of God’s House.  From Southampton the Mayflower and Speedwell sailed in 1620:  the latter being discarded at Plymouth.