Henry III.’s reign was indeed a notable one for the city, and one notable addition he made to it remains still as one of its foremost architectural and historical treasures. This is the great and noble hall which he added to the castle, and which retains still, with some alteration, much of its original character. Many a notable scene has this noble hall witnessed, both during Henry’s reign and since, the early Parliaments of 1265 and 1268 pre-eminent among them. One such dramatic scene was the one related in full by Matthew of Paris, as occurring in 1249, when the king unmasked and brought to justice a confederacy of robbers who had conspired to waylay the highways and rob the passers-by. None were safe from them: even the king’s own consignments of wine, coming to Winchester, were stopped and plundered. Matters were in this state of insecurity when the king, coming to Winchester, was approached by some Brabantine merchants, who complained that they had been stopped on the highroad near Winchester and robbed of 200 marks. The king’s anger boiled over, and in hot indignation he ordered the castle gates to be shut, and a jury empanelled then and there to find and disclose the offenders. The twelve citizens thus appointed pleaded inability to throw light on the matter, but the king, not to be thwarted, shouted, “Carry away those artful traitors; bind them, and cast them into the dungeons below, and let me have twelve other men, good and true, who will tell us the truth.” The second jury, with the fear of death thus before them, promptly displayed quicker powers of perception, and laid before the king the detects of a widespread conspiracy, in which many leading men of the city and neighbourhood, as well as of the king’s household, whose pay was probably long in arrear, were implicated. And so justice was done, and for a while travelling abroad was safer. Thus, now through good report, now through evil, the fortunes of our city waxed and waned, but, in a sense, her day was over. Mediaeval Winchester more and more grew to assume the character of a purely provincial city; one with importance, indeed, with prestige and dignity, but from which, like the so-called ‘buried cities’ of the Zuyder Zee, the wide shores whereon the tides of major national circumstance ebbed and flowed, continually receded more and more, while her citizens found themselves less and less ‘going down in ships’ to the broad sea of national life, and ‘occupying their business’ in those ‘great waters.’ CHAPTER XIV FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURY WINCHESTER What do you lack, what do you buy, mistress? a fine hobby horse to make your son a tilter? a drum to make him a soldier? a fiddle to make him a reveller? what is’t you lack? BEN JONSON.