It is pleasant to turn away from the direct stream of the national flood, and to explore some of the by-streams, the more local whirls and eddies in the life of our city, and this theme is naturally suggested by the thought of Winchester in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when imperial politics had largely ceased to affect her, and the wider growth of interests and domestic features had given her life within a greater diversity, and rendered possible a minuter degree of specialization. Interest in the main centres round her civic rule, the pilgrim stream, the great annual Fair of St. Giles, and the domestic architecture, while supreme over all these was the dominating interest and control exercised by the ecclesiastical powers within her--the sway of the crozier and the tonsure, the cloister and the cowl. We shall deal in this chapter with the city at large, leaving to the chapter following the more purely monastic aspects. The city as a city had been growing--as always was the case with mediaeval towns closely walled in--continually more and more congested. The southeastern quarter occupied by the Convent of St. Swithun’s, with its Cathedral and great churchyard, the adjoining Abbey of St. Mary, and the bishop’s residence at Wolvesey, was a lung open indeed and well ventilated, but elsewhere the hemmed in area was a maze of narrow and crowded thoroughfares, with houses, whose curiously timbered, but inconveniently picturesque fronts, almost jostled one another across the narrow passage-ways between,--houses, of the type still to be seen in the so-called ‘Old Rectory’ in Cheesehill Street, in the pseudo-antique houses in ‘the Brooks,’ in Mr. Mayne’s Tudor House near the Butter Cross, and the present Godbegot House almost opposite, of later date though most of these be--as if the chief office of neighbourly regard of a mediaeval dwelling to those round her was not merely to Not beteem the winds of Heaven, Visit _their_ face too roughly, but also to religiously exclude that indiscreet and unwelcome intruder, the all-prying and inquisitive sun, while through many of the low-lying streets ran broad and open ditches, not always, alas! the _dulcia et piscosae flumina aquae_, the sweet refreshing streams which Precentor Wulfstan had once commemorated,--streams whose channels flow now in well-regulated courses, some open, some underground, but which then made their way, often through filth and accumulated garbage, in far less well-ordered circulation through the city. Though the city, judged by contemporary standards, might be a ‘joly cité,’ of which The aere was god both inne and oute, it must have fallen far short of almost every modern standard of health and convenience, and its narrow, confined, and ill-cleansed courts were the lurking-places of contagion and of never wholly absent plague.