central tower, having a spire and
weathercock, in accordance with the Bull of Pope Urban, and a crypt,
both the work of St Elphege. This church, which, like its successor
until the Reformation, was served by monks, stood till the year 1093,
when it was destroyed as useless, for the new Norman church of Bishop
Walkelin begun in 1079 was then far enough advanced to be used. It is
thus practically certain that the two churches did not stand on the
same site, the newer, it would seem, rising to the south of the older
building. But the sacred spot which, it would seem, every church, that
may ever have stood in this place, must have covered is the holy well,
immediately beneath the present high altar in the crypt of the Norman
building. This surely was within the Saxon building as it must have
been within any church that may have stood here in Roman times?

The two great shrines of the Saxon church were, however, those of St
Birinus, the Apostle of Wessex, and of St Swithin, Bishop of Winchester
in the ninth century, the day of whose translation, July 15th, was,
till the Reformation, a universal festival throughout England. In his
honour the Saxon church, till then known as the church of SS. Peter and
Paul, was rededicated in 964.

The great Norman church which Bishop Walkelin built to take the place
of the Saxon minster cannot fundamentally have differed very much from
the church we see, at any rate so far as its nave and transepts were
concerned. The eastern arm was, however, different. It consisted of
four bays, with north and south aisles at the end of which were
rectangular chapels, an apse about which the aisles ran as an
ambulatory, and beyond the apse an eastern apsidal chapel. Of this
church all that really remains to us is the crypt and the transept. In
the crypt we divine the old eastern limb of the church, and are
doubtless in the presence of the earliest work in the Cathedral. It is,
however, in the double aisled transepts that we can best appreciate how
very glorious that first Norman church must have been; there is nothing
in England more wonderful; and so far as I know there is nothing in
Europe quite to put beside them. If only the whole mighty church could
have remained to us!

The first disaster that befell Bishop Walkelin's building was the fall
of the central tower in 1107, which all England, at the time,
attributed to the burial beneath it of William Rufus. The tower was
rebuilt, though not to its ori