For estimating the course of Winchester history at this important and interesting stage we have fortunately more than an abundance--a wealth of historical materials. Not only do the _English Chronicle_ and all the leading monkish chroniclers contain full references, but numerous other local sources of history, _e.g._ Rudborne, the various Winchester annalists, and the _Liber de Hyda_, exist, which deal fully with it. Besides these we have a minutely circumstantial life of Æthelwold himself, and, perhaps most interesting of all, a remarkable account by the same author, Wulfstan, precentor of Winchester, describing, in curiously involved and almost interminable Latin elegiacs, the wonders of the new Winchester cathedral which Æthelwold built, and the splendour of various great and striking ceremonies which he saw performed within it. Æthelwold did more than merely leave his mark on Winchester; he transformed it. He found its ecclesiastical life poor, self-centred, and stagnant; he left it active, influential, creative; he found the Old Minster, with its cathedral church, bare, distanced, and neglected, eclipsed and outshone by Alfred’s later foundation, the Newan Mynstre. He left it not merely with an acknowledged ascendancy, but a new fabric, the finest in the land, the pride of the city, and almost one of the wonders of the age, a centre of pilgrimage of great resort and renown, with a new shrine containing a new patron saint, the wonder-working shrine of St. Swithun. He found the domestic buildings small, damp, unhealthy; he rebuilt them and brought to them a supply of pure water, irrigating the city and its river valley by streams whose courses still remain, to all intents and purposes, unchanged. _Nullum tetigit quod non ornavit_ might well have been the epitaph over his tomb.