ormandy was crowned King of England, not in the old
Minster of Winchester but in that of St Peter, Westminster, which Pope
Nicholas II. in King Edward's time had constituted as the place of the
inauguration of the kings of England. It is true that William was later
crowned again in Winchester, as were Stephen and Coeur de Lion, but the
fact remains that from the time of William the Conqueror down to our
own day, as the Papal Bull had ordered, Westminster and not Winchester
has been the coronation church of our kings. This Bull marks, as it
were, the beginning of the decline of Winchester. Little by little, in
the following centuries, it was to cease to be the capital of England.
Little by little London was to take its place, a thing finally achieved
by Edward I., when he removed the royal residence from Winchester.

Norman Winchester was, however, by no means less splendid than had been
the old capital of the Saxon kings. There Domesday Book was compiled,
and there it was kept in the Treasury of the Norman kings, and the only
name which it gives itself is that of the "Book of Winchester." There
the great Fair of St Giles was established by the Conqueror, which
attracted merchants from every part of Europe, and there in 1079 Bishop
Walkelin began, from the foundations, a new cathedral church completed
in 1093, of which the mighty transepts still remain. In 1109 the monks
of New Minster, which had suffered greatly from fire and mismanagement,
removed to a great new house without the walls upon the north, and
since this new site was called Hyde Meads, New Minster was thenceforth
known as the Abbey of Hyde; and certainly after the fire in 1141, if
not before, the great Benedictine Nunnery of St Mary was rebuilt.

As for the Castle of Wolvesey, Bishop Henry of Blois rebuilt it in
1138. It was indeed in his time that Winchester suffered the most
disastrous of all its sieges, as we may believe, and this at the hands
of the Empress Matilda in 1141. The greater part of the city is then
said to have been destroyed; the new Abbey of Hyde was burned down not
to be rebuilt till 1182; the old Nunnery of St Mary was destroyed also
by fire; and we are told of more than forty churches which then
perished. "Combustibles were hurled from the Bishop's Castle," William
of Malmesbury tells us, "in the houses of the townspeople, who, as I
have said, rather wished success to the empress than to the bishop,
which caught and burned the whole abb