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 abbey of nuns within the city and the
monastery which is called Hyde without the walls.
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