of its benefactors left to it four flitches of bacon yearly, this being an important article of diet.  The original plan of the hospital was quadrangular:  on two sides were the inmates’ rooms and the chapel, the remaining sides being occupied by the Master’s House and the common hall.  The buildings were much damaged in the time of Charles I by the troops stationed there, and again in the reign of Charles II by the Dutch prisoners confined within the hospital.  The chapel was pulled down in 1788, and the materials were used for building purposes, when the fine Early Norman doorway was used in the Roman Catholic Church in St. Peter Street, where it may still be seen.  This was the west doorway of the ancient hospital chapel.  The site is now occupied by a hospital of another character, the isolation hospital, but the old “lepers’ well” can still be seen.  The charity survives to some extent in six cottages in Water Lane, built in 1788, wherein are housed four men and four women.

In Symond’s Street stands the picturesque “Christes Hospital”, founded in 1586 by James Symonds.  It is generally called the “Bluecoat” Hospital, from the distinctive dress worn by the inmates.  A scholastic institution was attached to this charity for the education of four poor boys, chosen by the mayor and corporation, who also elected their teacher.  The latter was not to be, in the terms of the founder, either a “Scotchman, an Irishman, a Welshman, a foreigner, or a North-countryman”, lest their pronunciation of the English language should suffer.

From among the fertile meadows bordering the banks of the Itchen to the south of Winchester rises the stately grey pile of St. Cross, standing where it has stood for over seven and a half centuries, a witness alike to the munificence of its founders, de Blois and Beaufort, and to the skill of the mediaeval builders.

A good road leads from the city to the pleasing suburb in which the hospital is situated, though a far pleasanter way is by one of the field paths through the meadows.

Henry de Blois became bishop when only twenty-eight years old, and in 1136 he founded the hospital for the entire support of “thirteen poor men, feeble and so reduced in strength that they can hardly or with difficulty support themselves without another’s aid”; and they were to be supplied with “garments and beds suitable to their infirmities, good wheate bread daily of the weight of 5 marks, and three dishes at dinner and one at supper, suitable to the day, and drink of good stuff”.

Besides this, he provided for a hundred poor men to be supplied daily with dinner.  Bishop Toclyve, de Blois’s successor in the see, added to the charity the feeding of yet another hundred poor men daily; and it has been said, on somewhat slight evidence, that the poorer scholars of Winchester College dined without fee in the “Hundred Men’s Hall”.

In 1137 the management of the institution was given over to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem; the cross still worn as a badge by the Brethren is a link with the ancient Order, being the cross potent, or Jerusalem cross, which was an insignia of the Kingdom of Jerusalem established by the Crusaders.