Winchester, Painted by Wilfrid BallVarley, Telford
History
Winchester, Painted by Wilfrid Ball
Varley, Telford
Winchester (England) -- Description and travel; Winchester (England) -- History; Winchester (England) -- Pictorial works
Present-day Wolvesey Palace stands on your left as you enter from
College Street with the Norman ruins and the old Tilt yard in front of
it and on your right. Bishop Morley, the friend of Ken and Izaak Walton,
erected it. But Wolvesey and Farnham together proved too heavy an
episcopal burden, and later bishops have preferred to reside at Farnham.
So Wolvesey ceased to be the Bishop of Winchester’s official residence,
and the greater part of Morley’s building was pulled down by Bishop
North at the end of the eighteenth century. The growing need for the
division of the diocese makes it quite possible, however, that the
Bishops of Winchester may again be residing in Wolvesey Palace, as their
predecessors did for so many hundreds of years.
Wykeham’s College, ‘the Newe Saint Marie College of Wynchester,’ is but
a stone’s-throw from Wolvesey. The story of the College has been fully
dealt with in a former chapter, and so, now, as we pass along College
Street from Wolvesey, our thoughts may well turn to a house on the left
adjoining College, with memories of a different kind, those of Jane
Austen. A tablet over the door recalls the fact of Jane Austen’s death
within its walls in 1817. She had removed here from her home at Chawton,
near Alton, in hope of recovery under the medical treatment which
Winchester could afford her. But the hope was vain. She lies buried in
the north aisle of the Cathedral nave. We know her now as among the
rarest and most charming of women novelists. Of her we shall speak again
in the chapter on ‘Winchester in Literature.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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