The same account tells us that the bones of St. Birinus were similarly deposited in another shrine, but St. Swithun was the popular saint, and the miracles wrought at his shrine soon made the Old Minster renowned throughout the whole land. Indeed, as Rudborne, the monk, quaintly and naïvely tells us, “as long as canons held the Church at Winchester there were no miracles performed, but no sooner were they ejected and replaced by monks than miracles were wrought abundantly.” Doubtless Rudborne was right. At all events crowds of pilgrims thronged to Winchester, and the name of Swithun, the Saxon saint, became a power in the land. But all this time Æthelwold was at work rebuilding the Cathedral, and the church he reared was the finest in the land--one of the wonders of the age. Wulfstan in his long-winded way describes the building, its aisles, its towers, its crypt, both mystifying the reader and losing himself over and over again in the description, as he relates how the newcomer passes bewildered from one wonder to another, till he knows neither how to advance nor to get back again. Nesciat unde meat, quove pedem referat. The gilded weather-cock on the top of one of the towers in particular fired his imagination. Glorious and superb, it grasped the ball of empire with its splendid talons, and from its lofty standard dominated the whole populace of the city:-- Imperii sceptrum pedibus tenet ille superbis, Stat super et cunctum Wintoniae populum. The mighty organ placed in the church by Æthelwold’s successor he also enlarges upon. This mighty instrument had twenty-six bellows--twelve above, fourteen below--worked laboriously by seventy full-grown men, who sweated at their task, while two organists hammered vigorously upon the manuals, flooding the whole city with the volume of the sound. Wulfstan not only gives us these details of the building, but he describes the various splendid ceremonies which he himself witnessed within it--the translation of St. Swithun’s bones in the presence of King Edgar; the dedication in 980, when King Æthelred and nine bishops were present, including the “white-haired and angelic Dunstan”:-- Canitie nivens Dunstan et angelicus. Then of the feast which followed, telling us how a tenth bishop--one Poca--who arrived too late for the labours of the ceremony, atoned for it amply by the depth of his potations. Nulla laboris agens, pocula multa bibens. [Illustration: ST. PETER’S, CHEESEHILL, WINCHESTER One of the oldest of Winchester Parish Churches, of Norman date. Cheesehill--a corruption of Chesil--a word still surviving in Chesil Beach, near Portland--denotes the dry or gravelly strand along the bank of the Itchen, and has no connection with cheese. Cheesehill Street, though somewhat ‘slummy,’ is very picturesque and contains many interesting old houses.] Later on there was a second dedication. Altogether it was a period of splendid and impressive ceremonial.