It is useless to declaim that the great hall of the castle was not completed until the time of Henry the Third, that it did not exist at all before the Norman Conquest, that the castle occupied by King Arthur is more likely to have been on the site of the more ancient one which stood near the river (now known as Wolvesey), and that the great round table (eighteen feet in diameter, of stout old English oak, cunningly bolted together) was made during the former king's reign and was never used by Arthur at all. What are such crude exactitudes to us? As well object to the heavy plate-armour worn by the knights--everybody knows this to be an anachronism of nigh a thousand years. Romantic phantasy and scientific data are as far apart as the poles, and none but a fool would try to reconcile them. King Arthur feasted in the castle hall, says Malory, and so far as our book-hunter is concerned he shall feast there as often and as long as he likes.
There is a romance, too, about the name of this older castle. _Wolvesey_ its scanty ruins are called to-day, and the antiquarians tell us that this was originally WULF'S EY, or 'the wolf's isle.' Was it once the scene of a battue by the young bloods of the tribe to drive out some wolves that had established themselves there, a fierce fight with axes and spears at close quarters whilst the rest of the tribe lined the opposite banks and prevented any escape? Or was it the scene of some homeric combat _seul à seul_? Perhaps some day a wolf's skull will be dug up there, with a stone axe sticking in it. But the history of it has gone for ever, had gone, probably, long centuries before King Kynegils found it a strong site for his castle.
It was at Wolvesey that King Alfred himself is said to have penned some part of the Saxon Chronicle now treasured in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He was a true book-lover, this great English king, and it is to the school of illuminators which arose later in the 'new minster' by St. Swithun's that we are indebted for some of the most beautiful examples of mediæval art that have come down to us. The Golden Book of Edgar, Bede's 'Ecclesiastical History'--in the Cathedral library--and the exquisitely illuminated 'benedictional' of St. Æthelwold possessed by the Duke of Devonshire, all these were produced before the end of the tenth century by the artists who laboured so patiently in the Scriptorium beside those peaceful meadows. For two centuries the Winchester school of illuminators was renowned throughout the western world.