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In spite of these royal fancies, however, Winchester, which had suffered badly in the plague of 1667, continued to decline in importance and in population, and to depend more and more upon the two great establishments which remained to it, the Cathedral, founded by Kynegils in 635 and re-established under a new Protestant administration in the sixteenth century, and the College of St Mary of Winchester founded by William of Wykeham in connection with the College of St Mary, Winton, in Oxford, called New College, for the education of youth and the advancement of learning.
To me, there's no cathedral in England that means as much of the past as Winchester. You know how, in the nave, you see so plainly the transition from one architectural period to another? And then, there are those splendid Mortuary Chests. Think of old Kynegils, and the other Saxon kings lying inside, little heaps of haunted dust.
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.
Till then, Dorchester in the Thames Valley had been the seat of the Bishop of Wessex, but in that year Kynewalch, the son and successor of Kynegils, completed the church of Winchester, in which he had been crowned, and his father buried, as for the most part were their successors, and there he established a bishop. It was now that Winchester began her great career.
Cuichelme and Cuthwin, his sons, governed jointly the kingdom, till the expulsion of the latter in 591, and the death of the former in 593, made way for Cealric, to whom succeeded Ceobald in 593, by whose death, which happened in 611, Kynegils inherited the crown. Escwin then peaceably acquired the crown, and after a short reign of two years made way for Kentwin, who governed nine years.
In that year St Birinus converted the West Saxons and their King Kynegils to Christianity. Though Kynegils seems immediately to have begun to build a church in Winchester in which he established monks and endowed it with the whole of the land for a space of seven miles round the city, Winchester did not become an episcopal See until the year 662.
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