St Cross is, as it were, a rock of the old Christian time
still emerging from the grey sea of the modern world.
Bishop Henry de Blois intended, as I have said, to provide, by the
foundation of the Hospital of St Cross, for the maintenance of thirteen
poor men and the relief of an hundred others. His design was perverted
in the thirteenth century, but gloriously restored by the founder of
Winchester College and his successor in the Bishopric, Cardinal
Beaufort, who added to the original foundation the almshouse of Noble
Poverty, in which he hoped to support thirty-five brethren with two
priests and three nuns to minister to the inmates. The hospital, by the
merest good fortune, escaped suppression at the Reformation, but during
most of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and through
many years of the nineteenth its revenues were enjoyed by men
who, as often as not, had never seen the place, and so the poor
were robbed. Perhaps the most insolent abuse of the kind occurred
between 1808 and 1815. In the former year Bishop Brownlow North,
of Winchester, appointed his son Francis, later Earl of Guildford,
to be master.
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