And Winchester, too, has all and more than all, the surprise of the plainsong; the better you know it the more you are impressed.  No one certainly has ever come by the narrow way out of the High Street, down the avenue of limes to the West Front without being disappointed; but no one thus disappointed has ever entered into the church without astonishment, wonder and complete satisfaction.  It was not always so.  That long nave was once forty feet longer and was flanked upon either side by a Norman tower as at Ely.  Must one regret their loss?  No, the astonishment of the nave within makes up for everything; there is no grander interior in the world, nor anywhere anything at all like it.  Up that vast Perpendicular nave one looks far and far away into the height, majesty and dominion of the glorious Norman transept, and beyond into the light of the sanctuary.  It has not the beauty of Westminster Abbey, nor the exquisite charm of Wells, but it has a majesty and venerable nobility all its own that I think no other church in England can match.

Of the old Saxon church, so far as we really know, the only predecessor of the present church, nothing really remains.  This, as I have said, had been founded by King Kynegils upon his conversion, by St Birinus in 635.  We know very little about it, except that it was enlarged or rebuilt in the middle of the tenth century by St Aethwold, and if we may believe the poetical description of Wolstan, we shall be inclined to believe the church was enlarged, for it appears to have been a very complex building with a lofty central tower, having a spire and weathercock, in accordance with the Bull of Pope Urban, and a crypt, both the work of St Elphege.  This church, which, like its successor until the Reformation, was served by monks, stood till the year 1093, when it was destroyed as useless, for the new Norman church of Bishop Walkelin begun in 1079 was then far enough advanced to be used.  It is thus practically certain that the two churches did not stand on the same site, the newer, it would seem, rising to the south of the older building.  But the sacred spot which, it would seem, every church, that may ever have stood in this place, must have covered is the holy well, immediately beneath the present high altar in the crypt of the Norman building.  This surely was within the Saxon building as it must have been within any church that may have stood here in Roman times?

The two great shrines of the Saxon church were, however, those of St Birinus, the Apostle of Wessex, and of St Swithin, Bishop of Winchester in the ninth century, the day of whose translation, July 15th, was, till the Reformation, a universal festival throughout England.  In his honour the Saxon church, till then known as the church of SS.  Peter and Paul, was rededicated in 964.