The cathedral and Benedictine priory of St Swithun at Winchester, begun by Bishop Walkelin in 1079 beside the Anglo-Saxon Old and New Minsters, where the mixed bones of West Saxon and Danish kings lie in mortuary chests and the Winchester Bible is kept.
Winchester Cathedral stands in the south-east quarter of Winchester, on low ground near the River Itchen where the West Saxon kings built their first church. The present building, begun by Bishop Walkelin in 1079, replaced two Anglo-Saxon churches that stood immediately to its north, the Old Minster and the New Minster, and inherited their saints and their royal dead. About 170 metres from end to end, it is one of the longest medieval churches in Europe.
For most of the Middle Ages it was also a Benedictine monastery, the priory of St Swithun, whose monks served the cathedral under the bishop. Its fabric records three great campaigns: Walkelin's transepts and crypt, the Early English retrochoir begun in 1202, and the nave that William of Wykeham recased in the Perpendicular style from 1394. Its bishops were among the richest men in England, and the chantry chapels they built for themselves still crowd the east end.
The first church, later called the Old Minster, stood just north of the present nave. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle credits King Cenwalh with building it in 648, but that entry was written two centuries later, and the church may date instead from about 660, when the West Saxon bishop's seat moved from Dorchester-on-Thames under Bishop Wine. Bishop Æthelwold, who held the see from 963 to 984, rebuilt it on a vast scale, extending it west over the place of Swithun's first grave and adding an apse over an eastern crypt; the enlarged church was dedicated in 980 and again in 993 or 994.
Edward the Elder founded the New Minster in 901 so close to the north side that later writers said the chanting of the two communities ran together. It carried out a plan of Alfred the Great, whose body was moved into it. In 964 Æthelwold, backed by Edgar the Peaceful, expelled the secular canons from both churches and installed monks. The New Minster's book of benefactors, the Liber Vitae of about 1031, opens with a drawing of Cnut the Great and Emma of Normandy placing a gold cross on its altar. That community left in 1110 for Hyde Abbey outside the walls, and excavations by Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle between 1962 and 1969 recovered the Old Minster's plan, now marked out in brick in the grass north of the cathedral.
Swithun was bishop from 852 until his death in 863 and, according to William of Malmesbury, asked to be buried outside the church, where passers-by would tread on his grave and rain from the eaves would fall on it. More than a century later Æthelwold made him patron of the reformed cathedral, and on 15 July 971 his bones were carried inside amid reports of cures. A story told at Winchester has the monks so worn out by being called to give thanks for miracles several times a night that the saint had to rebuke them in a vision. The relics were later divided: his head went to Canterbury and an arm to Peterborough.
The shrine drew pilgrims for more than five centuries. On 15 July 1093 it was carried in procession from the Old Minster into Walkelin's church, and in the later Middle Ages it stood in the retrochoir behind the high altar, where pilgrims could crawl into a low passage beneath the relic platform known as the Holy Hole. Two famous stories are later growths: the legend that Queen Emma proved her chastity by walking over red-hot ploughshares under Swithun's protection first appears in the thirteenth century, and the saying that rain on St Swithun's day brings forty days of rain cannot be traced before the seventeenth. Henry VIII's commissioners Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Pollard broke up the shrine in September 1538.
The Old Minster was the chief burial church of the West Saxon dynasty. Egbert of Wessex was buried at Winchester in 839, and the remains of his son Æthelwulf of Wessex, first buried at Steyning, were later brought there. Alfred the Great lay in the Old Minster from 899 until his move to the New Minster, and Eadred of England was buried there in 955, perhaps not where his will shows he had wished to lie. Cnut the Great, who gave the church a shrine for the relics of St Birinus, was buried there in 1035, followed by his son Harthacnut in 1042, his widow Emma in 1052 and Earl Godwin in 1053.
The church was also a stage for royal ceremony. Edward the Confessor was crowned in the Old Minster on 3 April 1043. Later that year he rode back to Winchester with the earls Leofric, Godwin and Siward, accused his mother of treason and stripped her of her lands and treasure, which he soon restored. Queen Emma then lived out her life beside the minster, and her burial next to Cnut and Harthacnut made the church the resting place of the whole Danish royal family in England.
Walkelin, a royal chaplain from Normandy and probably a former canon of Rouen, became bishop in 1070 after papal legates deposed Stigand at a council in Winchester. In 1079 he began a new cathedral immediately south of the Old Minster, built of limestone brought from Quarr on the Isle of Wight and of stone taken from the old church. The Annals of Winchester tell how William the Conqueror granted him as much timber from a royal wood as his carpenters could take in three or four days, and how Walkelin brought in so many carpenters that the whole wood was felled, and had to beg the angry king's pardon.
In 1093 the monks moved into the finished eastern parts; on 15 July they brought Swithun's shrine across, and the next day Walkelin's workmen began pulling the Old Minster down. His church was more than 150 metres long, and its transepts and crypt survive almost as he left them, with massive piers, three storeys of round arches and aisles on both sides of each arm. The central tower collapsed in 1107, and William of Malmesbury reported that some blamed the burial beneath it of William II of England, killed unconfessed in the New Forest in 1100. It was rebuilt low and plain, and the nave was completed under Bishop William Giffard, who died in 1129.
The kings and bishops of the Old Minster were exhumed in 1093 or soon after and reburied in the new church. In 1158 Bishop Henry of Blois moved their bones from what a chronicler called an unseemly place into lead coffers near the high altar, and the same writer complained that kings had been mixed with bishops. In the early sixteenth century, traditionally under Bishop Richard Fox, the remains were placed in painted wooden chests set on top of the new stone screens around the presbytery, where the chests still stand.
In December 1642 Parliamentarian soldiers ransacked the cathedral, threw the chests down and scattered the bones across the pavement; an account printed in 1685 says they hurled them at windows they could not reach with their swords. Four chests survived, two replacements were made in 1662, and the bones were gathered up and put back with no way of telling whose they were. The six chests now carry Latin names for Cynegils, Cynewulf, Egbert, Æthelwulf, Eadred, Edmund, Cnut, William Rufus, the bishops Wine and Ælfwine, and Queen Emma. Harthacnut, named in the 1642 account, may also lie among them, and no chest can be trusted to hold the people painted on it.
Scientific study began with the conservation of the chests in 2012. Radiocarbon dates obtained with the University of Oxford in 2015 showed that the bones belong to the Anglo-Saxon and early Norman centuries rather than to later burials. A University of Bristol team led by Kate Robson Brown sorted more than 1,300 bones into at least 23 partial skeletons, where no more than fifteen people had been expected, and in May 2019 announced the scattered remains of a mature woman who could be Emma of Normandy, and of two unrecorded boys aged between 10 and 15 who died between the mid-eleventh and late twelfth centuries. In January 2026 the cathedral began returning the bones to the chests grouped by radiocarbon date, with the identifications still to be published.