Winchester Cathedral Exhibition
The main street of Winchester, a delightful cathedral city in Hampshire, is dominated by the glistening statue of Alfred the Great, King of Wessex (871-899) who famously repelled the Vikings and laid the foundations of a united English nation.
Despite Alfred’s imposing presence most of the eight million people who visit Winchester each year are here to pay homage to another British icon: Jane Austen, the author of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park.
Austen’s connections with Winchester are marginal since she spent most of her adult life in the rural village of Chawton, some 26kms north-east of the city. But Austen died in Winchester and is buried in the cathedral’s north nave aisle, where her large stone memorial has become a secular shrine.
Fueled by a constant stream of movie and TV adaptions, Austen’s novels, unread in her own lifetime, have achieved a global celebrity she could not have imagined. Winchester is now awash with Austen-themed tours, books and assorted memorabilia.
But Austen acolytes who make the pilgrimage to Winchester Cathedral should also venture upstairs to the purpose-built Kings & Scribes exhibition space which traces the building’s 1000-year history from its Anglo-Saxon origins to the present day.
Apart from the magnificent 12th Century Winchester Bible the modern exhibition space also houses the remains of Emma of Normandy, an early English queen whose bones were lost for over 400 years and only rediscovered in 2019. It an important historical find, often compared to the recent discovery of Richard III.
As Catherine Hodgson, the cathedral’s marketing manager, explains Emma of Normandy was a remarkable pan-European political figure. Occupying the thrones of England, Norway and Denmark, the Norman-born noblewoman was also the mother of Edward the Confessor, king of England from 1042-1066.
Emma was interred in Winchester’s Old Minster in 1052 and was later transferred to the newly built Winchester Cathedral where she lay peacefully until English Civil War, some 600 years later.
Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army had a particular loathing for Winchester, a Royalist stronghold, and once they had conquered the city set about vandalizing its magnificent Gothic cathedral. In addition to stabling their horses in the nave, Cromwell’s troops fired their muskets at its royal statues, pulled down six mortuary chests (including the one containing Queen Emma).
“Cromwell’s troops used the bones taken from the mortuary chests to smash the stained-glass windows. It was their reaction against privilege and religious iconography,” says Ms Hodgson.
“Later the bones were returned to the mortuary chests, but everything was jumbled up.”
A project to restore the mortuary chests has unlocked the mystery of Queen Emma’s whereabouts – while final radiocarbon testing is continuing, a team from the University of Bristol is confident that they have identified the remains of the long-lost English consort.
A 3D printed replica of the queen’s skeleton now forms the centerpiece of Kings & Scribes which tells the remarkable story of the cathedral and its role in shaping English national identity.
While Queen Emma does not enjoy the high public profile of Shakespeare’s kings and queens, historians stress that she was a major political player in Anglo-Saxon England, whose influence extended to Normandy and Scandinavia.
“Emma is the only English monarch to be crowned twice, was the mother of two kings (Edward the Confessor and Harthacnut) and great aunt of William the Conqueror,” explains Catherine.
Apart from the glass cabinet displaying Queen Emma’s bones, the £11.2 million exhibition space contains many of the cathedral’s treasures and a tribute to William Walker, the deep-sea diver who helped stabilize the cathedral’s foundations in the early 1900s.
Locals believe that the discovery of Queen Emma will bolster Winchester’s claim to being the birthplace of the English nation and underscores its role in the political and ecclesiastical life of the nation; the ruins of Wolvesey Castle provide a graphic reminder of the power and wealth that the bishops of Winchester enjoyed throughout the Middle Ages.
The presence of Winchester College ensures that the city’s political influence within the United Kingdom continues to this day. The elite public school has produced many MPs, cabinet ministers and two prime ministers, including Rishi Sunak. Just 80 minutes by train from London, Winchester is an ancient city whose history is still being written.