The
very street by which he leaves the city, as it were, by the now
destroyed North Gate, is Roman, one of the four roads which met in the
Forum of Venta Belgarum and divided Roman Winchester into four
quarters, though, perhaps because of the marshes of the Itchen, not
into four equal parts as in Chichester. The present name of this road,
Jewry Street, indicates its character all through the Middle Ages, when
here by the North Gate, upon the road to London, the Jews had their
booths, and the quarter of Winchester which this road served was
doubtless their ghetto, the richest quarter of the city.
It was not, however, of the Middle Age, but of the Dark Age I thought
as I issued out of Winchester where, not much more than a hundred years
ago, the old North Gate still held the way. In the year 1001, after the
battle of Alton, in which the men of Hampshire were utterly broken by
Sweyn and his Danes, this road was filled with the routed Saxons in
flight pouring into the city of Winchester. The record of that
appalling business is very brief in the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," a few
lines under the date 1001.
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