A ‘lost’ palace of the bishops of Winchester

Winchester palace

He wrote to Brian Durham, the excavation director, to enquire if a drawing held in the Southwark Library collections, which purported to show Winchester House in Southwark, matched anything discovered at Witney. Durham was able to show that the drawing could not represent anything found at Witney, and suggested Humphrey should contact the present writer. [1]

The drawing with its short piece of text that described it as showing Winchester House was amongst a collection of materials gathered together by Henry Laverock Phillips (1835-1917). He gathered large quantities of documents and other materials relating to Bermondsey into several scrapbooks, some of which survive in their entirety and others as loose materials. He frequently copied old illustrations and manuscripts, and did so in a style which is clearly identifiable. Most of his illustrations are copies of eighteenth and nineteenth century prints, or of early nineteenth century watercolours; many of the originals survive and can thus be compared for the precision with which Phillips made his copies.

Amongst the manuscripts he copied were the parish registers and churchwardens’ accounts for Bermondsey and a cross-check between the originals and Phillips’ copies shows he was accurate in his transcripts. He seems also to have seen and copied other materials that have since been lost. That said, there are no grounds for thinking that he invented any of the material and such details as there are seem entirely plausible.

The drawing of a ruined palace was included by Phillips amongst his materials for Bermondsey probably because some of the monastic land was bought by Bishop Henry to add to that on which Bishop Giffard had previously built a London house, in Southwark, for the bishops – Winchester House. By the late 1980s it had become clear from Martha Carlin’s researches and Brian Yule’s excavations, [2] alongside a collection of drawings and prints that depicted Winchester House from the sixteenth century onwards, that the Phillips drawing was most unlikely to be of Winchester House. Given what we know of Phillips’s work and his scrupulous accuracy, it seems more than likely that the error of identification was made by the unknown artist who sketched these buildings in the first place.

The drawing shows in the foreground a stretch of walling linking what appears to be a pair of square towers. The style of the building work is clearly Romanesque, and it closely compares with the south frontage at Wolvesey palace, the bishops’ principal house and their home in Winchester.

Set some way behind this Romanesque curtain is a range of buildings that belong to the later medieval period; details of the fenestration of these buildings suggesting they were still in use late in the fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries.

Standing in the centre of this range of buildings is a structure that should most likely be identified as a hall. This has a steeply pitched roof and might indicate that this was roofed with slate, rather than with ceramic roof tiles.

The six principal residences of the bishops in the twelfth century were the five castles and a palace listed in the Annales Monastici under the year 1138, as follows: a palatial house in Winchester (Wolvesey) and castles at Merdon, Farnham, Bishop’s Waltham, Downton and Taunton. [3] This volume of monastic annals was compiled at Waverley Abbey (Surrey) towards the end of the twelfth century by Richard of Devizes, and while not strictly contemporary with the events they describe is nonetheless considered to be generally accurate. [4] Archaeological evidence from Wolvesey, Farnham and Bishop’s Waltham shows that at all of these sites structures dating to the earlier twelfth century were probably in place before 1138. The vast earthworks at Merdon and Downton indicate a possibility that both of these castles also belong to the eleventh century, as may also the earliest phases at Farnham. The layout of surviving ranges of buildings at Farnham, Bishop’s Waltham and Taunton all indicate that the Southwark drawing could not illustrate any of these. At Farnham the great hall and kitchen form a long rectangular range that has at its centre the massive, brick-built Fox’s tower with, when viewed from the south, a backdrop formed by the towered shell keep. Bishop’s Waltham has a similar arrangement for hall and kitchen, but here a second range is set at right angles with a tower keep articulating the two main ranges. The now levelled keep at Taunton would have resembled those at Dover or Corfe, and had ranges of buildings lining the bailey with an external wet moat. The lack of any major earthworks or a moat shown in the drawing suggests it is unlikely that either Merdon or Downton is represented.

This might conceivably leave Wolvesey palace, but here too the layout of the palace buildings cannot be matched with those shown in the drawing. However, as noted above, there is a striking similarity between the building depicted in the Southwark drawing and the south face of the East Hall and Wymonds Tower at Wolvesey Palace, a particular characteristic aspect being the use of a decorative bullnose stringcourse, which at Wolvesey Martin Biddle dated to work of Period VI (c.1141-54). [5] The general Romanesque character of the building shown in the Southwark drawing otherwise matches the slightly earlier phase, Period III, at Wolvesey which Biddle dated to c.1135-8. [6] We can therefore probably assign a date of the mid-twelfth century to the Romanesque building shown in the Southwark drawing, and, given the similarity to the work at Wolvesey, it remains a possibility that it was one of the buildings erected for Henry de Blois.

While the 1138 annal made mention of Bishop Henry’s principal residences, and in particular noting his castles, it has become clear from the archaeological excavations at Witney (Oxfordshire) that other major complexes that were primarily houses, but which were fortified during the mid-twelfth century, were omitted for some reason. It may be that the writer of the 1138 annal had a clear understanding of what constituted a castellum, thus sites

[3] Annales Monastici in Annales de Monasterii de Wintonia, II, ed H. R. Luard, 1865, 51.

[4] For a discussion of this annal and its historical accuracy, see Riall 2003, 115-29.

[5] Biddle 1986, 40.

[6] Ibid., 32.

[7] Pipe Roll 2 Henry II, p. 54; and see Biddle 1974, 326 n. 5; Riall 2003, 121.

[8] On Highclere, see Dunlop 1940.

[9] Details of the involvement of Hampshire in the warfare of the Anarchy (1142-53) are given in Riall 1994.

[10] Regesta 3, charter 944; and see Franklin 1993, actum 108.

[11] Schadla-Hall 1977, 150

[12] Duthy 1839