The Roman town that became the see of the West Saxon bishops, Alfred the Great's burh and the burial place of Anglo-Saxon and Danish kings, home of the Norman treasury, a battleground of the civil war in 1141, and the seat of some of England's richest bishops.
Winchester lies in the valley of the River Itchen, where it cuts through the chalk downs of Hampshire. The Roman town of Venta Belgarum became the seat of the West Saxon bishops in the seventh century and a fortified burh under Alfred the Great in the ninth, and for two centuries it was where the kings of Wessex, and then of England, were buried, kept their treasure and wore their crowns.
It was never a capital in the modern sense, because the royal court moved from estate to estate, but no English town was more closely tied to the crown until London and Westminster overtook it in the twelfth century. After 1200 it became a middling cathedral and cloth town, dominated by some of the richest bishops in Europe.
The Romans made Venta Belgarum the chief town of the Belgae and in the early third century walled an area of about 140 acres, one of the largest towns in the province. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the West Saxon king Cenwalh built a church there in 648, and in the 660s the bishop's seat of Wessex moved to it from Dorchester-on-Thames, making the church, later called the Old Minster, the cathedral of the kingdom. Swithun, bishop from 852 until his death in 863, asked to be buried outside its west door, and the moving of his bones into the church on 15 July 971 made him one of the most popular saints in England.
The Viking wars turned Winchester into a fortress. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that a Danish fleet stormed the town in 860, and under Alfred the Great it was rebuilt as one of the burhs of his defensive network; the document known as the Burghal Hidage assigns 2,400 hides to the upkeep and manning of its walls. The Roman streets gave way to a new grid of lanes off a straight High Street, a plan that still shapes the city centre.
Alfred died on 26 October 899 and was buried in the Old Minster. His widow Ealhswith founded a nunnery, the Nunnaminster, and their son Edward the Elder built the New Minster beside the cathedral, where Alfred's body was reburied. In 964 Bishop Æthelwold, backed by Edgar the Peaceful, replaced the canons of both minsters with monks, and under him Winchester produced some of the finest late Anglo-Saxon art, including the gilded Benedictional of St Æthelwold.
Winchester kept its royal role under the Danish kings. Cnut the Great was buried in the Old Minster in 1035, his son Harthacnut in 1042, and his widow Emma of Normandy, who lived in the city, in 1052. Edward the Confessor was crowned there on 3 April 1043.
William the Conqueror built a castle on the high western edge of the town in 1067 and, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, wore his crown at Winchester at Easter when he was in England. Domesday Book was kept in the treasury there, and some twelfth-century officials called it the book of Winchester. When William II of England was killed hunting in the New Forest on 2 August 1100, he was buried in Winchester Cathedral, and his brother Henry I of England rode straight to Winchester to seize the treasury before claiming the throne.
After Stephen of England was captured at Lincoln in February 1141, his brother Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester, received the Empress Matilda in the city, then turned against her. That summer her army besieged the bishop in his palace of Wolvesey and was itself surrounded by the forces of Stephen's queen, Matilda of Boulogne. On 14 September the empress's army broke out and was routed, her half-brother Robert of Gloucester was captured, and fires started in the fighting destroyed the Nunnaminster and much of the town.
Winchester also sealed the peace: in November 1153 Stephen announced there the settlement that made the empress's son, the future Henry II of England, his heir. In April 1194 Richard the Lionheart, freed from captivity in Germany, wore his crown in the cathedral to show that he was still king. Henry III of England was born in the castle on 1 October 1207 and built its great hall between 1222 and 1235. By then the Exchequer and the courts had settled at Westminster, and Winchester was becoming a provincial city, though Prince Louis of France still thought it worth capturing in June 1216.
Winchester's bishops shaped the city as much as its kings. Henry of Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror and papal legate from 1139 to 1143, was the richest prelate of his age. He fortified Wolvesey, founded the Hospital of St Cross outside the city for thirteen poor men, and was probably the patron of the great Winchester Bible, illuminated in the cathedral priory and never finished.
Licoricia of Winchester, a Jewish widow, was one of the leading moneylenders of thirteenth-century England and dealt directly with Henry III, who took much of her late husband's estate to pay for the shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster. She was murdered in her house in 1277, thirteen years before Edward I of England expelled the city's Jews with the rest of England's.
William of Wykeham rose through the royal building works at Windsor to be chancellor of England and bishop of Winchester from 1367 to 1404. In 1382 he founded Winchester College for seventy poor scholars who were to go on to his New College at Oxford, and he recased the Norman nave of the cathedral in the Perpendicular style.