Plates 3.1-3.3: Three Views of Magdalen Hospital, Winchester
Objects: According to the antiquary John Milner, Mary Magdalen Hospital was built in 1180 by Bishop Richard of Ilchester a mile outside the city of Winchester for the accommodation of nine lepers. Milner’s hypothesis has not been superseded. The artist Jacob Schnebbelie, who was working on a commission from the Society of Antiquaries in Winchester Cathedral in June of 1788, learned that the hospital was about to be demolished and made drawings on the site. Schnebbelie recorded the interior of the chapel (Plates 3.1-2) along with numerous architectural details and exterior views of three other structures (Plate 3.3): the Master’s house attached to the chapel, a barn, and a well. Stylistically, the chapel belongs to the transitional period following the Norman conquest. It was of great interest to eighteenth-century antiquaries who interpreted some of the chapel’s Romanesque features as “Saxon” and established it as an example of early Gothic architecture. Some pieces of the chapel were salvaged after demolition, including an early Norman gateway incorporated into St. Peter’s Church, Winchester (still standing).
Transcription:
Plate 3.1
J. Schnebbelie del. 1788.
J. Basire Sc.
Inside view of MAGDALEN CHAPEL, near WINCHESTER, from the West.
Sumptibus Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament [23 April 1790]. [The date is obscured by the binding of the volume reproduced here.]
Plate 3.2
Schnebbelie del.
Basire Sc.
Inside view of MAGDALEN CHAPEL near WINCHESTER, taken from the Chancel looking to the West.
Sumptibus Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament 23 April 1790.
Plate 3.3
Key for Plate, bottom center:
A[.] N.W. View of Magdalen Hospital near Winchester
B. Painting on soffit of arch at the east end of north aile of Chapel
C. Painting on North side the Chancel
D. Painting on South side the Chancel
E. Cross painted in sundry parts of the Chapel
F. Plan of the Chapel
G. Ground Plan of the Hospital
H. The West entrance into the Chapel
I. Gallery in the North aile
Plate title, bottom center:Magdalen Chapel near Winchester.
Key for Panel G, upper right:
A. Chapel
B. Master’s House
C. Barn
D. Well
J. Schnebbelie del. 1788.
J. Basire Sc.
Sumptibus Soc. Antiquar. Londini.
Publish’d according to Act of Parliament, 23 April 1790.
Original Explanatory Account: Click here to read the original explanatory account for Plates 3.1-3.3.
Commentary by Ariel Fried and Noah Heringman: On the 9th of June 1788, while on commission to produce drawings of monuments in Winchester Cathedral for the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL), Jacob Schnebbelie wrote to Richard Gough of “an order arrived for pulling down Magdalen Hospital which will be done in a few days” (SAL MS 267 fol. 34). Schnebbelie and Gough had traveled to Winchester together on 30 May, but Gough had already returned to London by the time this news arrived (SAL MS 891/2 fol. 39). Schnebbelie mentions two local antiquaries in this letter who might have learned of the twelfth-century hospital’s imminent destruction: Joseph Warton (the critic and headmaster of Winchester College) and the Catholic priest John Milner. Milner would go on to collaborate with Schnebbelie and Gough on the explanatory account that accompanied these plates and was elected to fellowship in the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) soon after their publication. Schnebbelie had come to Winchester to draw chantry chapels in the cathedral, which had been of particular interest to Gough and the SAL for several years and had already yielded two plates in Vetusta Monumenta (Plates 2.39-40). The arrival of a professional antiquarian draftsman was a significant event for the local antiquarian community, and it was an important commission for Schnebbelie, resulting in his first publication for the SAL (Plates 2.45-50).
His letter of 9 June focuses mainly on his drawings from the cathedral, which he sent to London two days later. It also mentions further “discoveries” he made there in his own right, and the unexpected opportunity to document Magdalen Hospital intensified his independent scholarly engagement with medieval architecture. It also gave his work a new artistic direction, as Martin Myrone has noted (Myrone 2007, 119). The plan to document Magdalen Hospital is mentioned again in Schnebbelie’s next letter from Winchester (SAL MS 267 fol. 75), but according to the printed text the drawings were not made until August (Gough et al. 1790, 1). Given the antiquarian interest aroused by the chapel especially, it may have received a temporary stay of execution. James Basire was ordered to engrave Schnebbelie’s drawings of the hospital soon afterward, and Schnebbelie was able to exhibit “the two inside views of Magdalen Chapel” at the Royal Academy in May of 1789 (SAL MS 267 fol. 64). Writing to Gough again on 15 September of that year, he reports that Basire has completed “very spirited” proofs of the first two plates (fol. 86) and that the full set is nearly ready. On 12 May 1790, the Council of the SAL fixed the price of these three prints with the accompanying letterpress at one guinea (SAL Council Minutes III.119). This would have been the price to book- and printsellers who received the sets that remained after copies were distributed to members of the SAL.
Milner’s History and Survey (1798) posits Bishop Richard of Ilchester (Richard Toclyve, bishop from 1173-88) as the long-sought founder of St. Mary Magdalen. Milner hypothesizes that Richard established the hospital as public penance for his “particularly active” persecution of Thomas Becket (c. 1118-1170) during the reign of Henry II (Milner 1839, 231). Excavations of Magdalen Hill performed between 2008 and 2010 by the University of Winchester also uncovered evidence of timber buildings, a chapel, and a cemetery which predated the twelfth-century hospital and masonry chapel known to Schnebbelie and Milner (Roffey 2012, 206). In his report on this excavation, Roffey (2010, 2) notes that Richard’s predecessor, Henry of Blois, has also been cited as a possible founder of St. Mary Magdalen, pointing to a date as early as 1148 for the hospital, if not for the chapel itself. The anonymous History and Antiquities of Winchester (1773) uses architectural clues to date the founding of this hospital to shortly after the Norman conquest, based on transitional features between the “old Saxon or Norman” and “Saracen” styles (156). Though this work--likely by J. Wavell, who was master of the hospital in 1773, though it is sometimes mistakenly attributed to the poet Thomas Warton, who authored a similar work in 1750—was dismissed by Milner in his later history (Milner 1839, xiv-xv), it provided Gough’s main source for the explanatory account published with these plates (Gough et al. 1790, 10). The author observes that “the pillars and the round Arch over the Western door are of the [Saxon] kind; the pointed Arches are of the [Saracen style],” and notes that although the pillars are recognizably “Saxon,” they appear “much neater” than other examples of this kind and have “some little ornament round their capitals, which is not usually found on the old Saxon column” (The History 1773, 156).
In the absence of any standing fabric or modern scholarship, the engravings themselves provide valuable information about the chapel building. The mid-to-late twelfth-century date, for example, though necessarily conjectural, is borne out by some of the architectural details. Notably, the decoration on many of the column capitals recalls similar designs at Winchester Cathedral (Kusaba 1988) and the Hospital of St. Cross, another twelfth-century chapel in Winchester that is still standing (Bullen and Pevsner 2010, 715-16). Other recognizably Norman features include the round arch over the west door (Plate 3.3 Fig. H), as noted by Wavell, and the dog-tooth molding most clearly seen in the two arches flanking the central arch shown in Plate 3.2. The wall paintings featured on Plates 3.1 and 3.3 recall the wall paintings at the cathedral, some of which Schnebbelie recorded at the same time. These include two life-size prophets from the north transept of the cathedral (c. 1170-80), later published in his own series, The Antiquaries Museum (1791, no. 1, plates i-iii; Park and Welford 1993, 125). Schnebbelie offers conjectural identifications of several of the figures painted in Magdalen Chapel, corresponding to Figures B-D of Plate 3.3 (Gough et al. 1790, 1-2).
The most striking piece of wall painting depicted here is at the center of Plate 3.1, one of a pair of censing angels painted on the spandrels above the chancel, prominently framed in the print by the central arch in front of it. Beneath this angel, a hint may be seen of the of three figures detailed in Figure C of Plate 3.3, and delicate foliate designs are visible on the spandrels of the foreground arch. This rich decoration echoes the contemporary program of wall painting in the cathedral, where the Holy Sepulchre chapel provides a notable late twelfth-century example. This series of scenes from the life of Christ is described by Park and Welford as “the finest of all late Romanesque wall paintings in England” (1993, 126). It had not yet been uncovered in Schnebbelie’s time, but Park and Welford suggest that the two prophets drawn by him in the north transept in 1788 (and since destroyed) were “very likely by the same hand” as the Holy Sepulchre paintings (125). As his letters to Gough also attest, Schnebbelie was keenly attuned to the ecclesiastical wall painting of this period and this interest no doubt contributed to his dedication to documenting Magdalen Chapel. The next year, it became the subject of a substantial set of watercolor drawings when Gough commissioned him to document a large series of thirteenth-century wall paintings in Salisbury Cathedral just before they were painted over (Reeve 2008, 63 and passim). The wall paintings shown here may well be thirteenth-century works, and Schnebbelie’s views of the chapel also give a sense of some later features, most likely added in the fourteenth century, including the canopy just below the painted angel (Plate 3.1) and the tracery in the window over the west door (Plate 3.2).
While there is no direct evidence that Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester (1129-71), was involved with the foundation of Magdalen Hospital, his influence on twelfth-century architecture in the city is well-documented. Henry founded the Hospital of St. Cross in the 1130s (Bullen and Pevsner 2010, 710) and the treasury in the south transept of Winchester Cathedral was built by his direction, probably in the late 1150s (Kusaba 1988, 45). Kusaba cites three stylistic elements of one of the treasury arches as evidence of “Henry’s artistic disposition” (44): the dog-tooth or “three-dimensionally carved right-angle chevron” decoration that may also be seen in the arches on either side of the foreground in Plate 3.2 (cf. Kusaba 1988, plate 3); the fluted pilasters supporting this arch; and their multiple-scallop capitals. No pilasters are visible in the prints of Magdalen Chapel, but the columns supporting the arches do have scalloped capitals roughly comparable to those in the cathedral treasury. The first and third of these features are shared by the north transept windows of the surviving chapel at St. Cross, which dates to the 1160s, and might have served as a model for Magdalen Chapel. If Milner’s 1170s date for this chapel is accurate, then it seems plausible that Henry’s successor Richard of Ilchester would have emulated his style as a patron of architecture. Henry also pioneered the use of Purbeck marble as a local alternative to the Tournai marble that was still used for the font in the cathedral (Plates 2.39-40). This material, which soon came into wider use, may be seen in the column capitals at St. Cross and may also have been used in Magdalen Chapel. The trumpet scallop capitals so clearly documented in these prints may have closer analogues in the twelfth-century parish churches of Holy Cross, Binstead, and St. Faith, Havant, both (like Winchester) in the county of Hampshire.1
The stone rubble strewn across the chapel floor in Plates 3.1 and 3.2, and the broken-down wall and encroaching plant life in the foreground of panel H in Plate 3.3, all emphasize the relatively dilapidated state of the chapel when Schnebbelie encountered it in 1788. Indeed, Magdalen Hospital had suffered a long history of abuses, ruinings, and rebuildings by the time Schnebbelie visited at the end of the eighteenth century. This history is perhaps most thoroughly detailed by editors H. Arthur Doubleday and William Page in volume II of their History of the County of Hampshire (1903). Doubleday and Page discuss the apparently extensive (since lost) report ordered in 1400 by Bishop William of Wykeham (1324-1404) detailing the “delinquencies, crimes, and excesses, [which] had been brought to light” in the management of the hospital up to that period. Doubleday and Page conclude that “it is fair to assume that the condition of the hospital was materially improved” in response to this report, “otherwise he [Wykeham] would scarcely have made the hospital a bequest in his will, which was drawn up about two and a half years after the inquiry had been held.” Wykeham’s register is cited extensively by Gough in the explanatory account, which also includes the full text of a thirteenth-century manuscript detailing the hospital’s property (Gough et al.1790, 11-12). Later, during the Civil War (1642-1651), the hospital sought redress for abuses committed by Commonwealth troops, including the killing of the hospital’s sheep, the stealing of corn, and the burning of furniture and other wood for fuel. Soon after rebuilding and refurnishing, the government of Charles II removed the people living in the almshouses to Winchester (at the expense of the crown), in order to use the hospital to house Dutch prisoners of war, which ultimately led to more structural damage (Doubleday and Page 1903).
This final period of abuse sealed the fate of the hospital and its chapel. According to Milner, the clergy affiliated with the institution did not pursue any restoration work after this time: “None of its masters or other friends, after that period, having had the spirit to fit it up again, in order to answer its original purpose, or even to keep it in repair, as a tenement for the individuals who occasionally rented it; this ancient fabric became a prey to ruin” (Milner 1839, 232). Schnebbelie seems keen to capture the contrast between this ruinous condition and the still-evident architectural beauty of the chapel’s arched entryways and vaulted nave in his representations. Indeed, at first glance the ruinous condition of the chapel is not necessarily evident. The viewer’s eye is likely to be drawn first to the mix of floral and geometric designs on the layered arch mouldings, or to the trumpet and waterleaf capitals on the columns in the foreground of plates 3.1 and 3.2. It might only be upon closer examination that one notices the crumbling mouldings of the foreground arch on the left side of plate 3.1, or the boarded windows in the background of the perspective drawings of all three plates. Schnebbelie’s play with light and shadow in these perspective drawings adds to an overall mood of decay or decline, but also highlights the stonework and ribbed vaulting within. The end-of-day sunlight slanting low through the chapel windows in Plates 3.1 and 3.2 seems both reverently to illuminate an ancient, holy space and, at the same time, to symbolize the chapel’s imminent demolition, as day falls into night.
Schnebbelie was an accomplished young artist whose extensive corpus of antiquarian images, many of them produced in collaboration with Gough, has been noted by modern scholars. Schnebbelie’s drawing of Waltham Cross, also engraved by Basire for Vetusta Monumenta (Plate 3.16), has drawn particular attention for its depiction of ruin, rendered here in a starker light than in his views of the chapel but still “close to Romanticism” (Lolla 1999, 22; cf. Sweet 2004, 448-49). Schnebbelie began his career as a draftsman when he turned from the confectionery business of his Swiss immigrant father to topographical drawing in his mid-twenties and became a drawing-master at Westminster School (O’Donoghue and Dias 2004). Gough became acquainted with Schnebbelie’s work in 1786 and hired him to make drawings of monuments in Canterbury Cathedral for his plate book Sepulchral Monuments (1786; 1796). Before his untimely death in 1792, Schnebbelie had produced hundreds of antiquarian drawings for the second volume of this work and for Vetusta Monumenta, in which twenty-three plates bear his signature as draftsman (as these three do). He also published four prints of St. Albans independently in 1788 and launched his own serial publication, The Antiquaries Museum, in 1791. For this series, as noted above, he made an etching of one of his own “discoveries” from Winchester Cathedral, using drawings of previously unknown wall paintings that Gough had rejected in 1788 (Heringman 2013, 261-63). Gough did commission a large set of drawings of the thirteenth-century wall paintings in Salisbury Cathedral from Schnebbelie the next year, and these remain the only surviving record of those paintings, praised by Reeve as “the earliest systematic antiquarian study of a medieval painted cycle in England” (2008, 63). Gough claimed that the drawings would “serve as actual vindications of painters from Henry [III]’s reign from rudeness” (qtd. in Reeve 2008, 143), thus offering a motive for the study and preservation of these works.
Schnebbelie’s correspondence with Gough attests to the immediate impact of his drawings of both the Winchester chantry chapels and Magdalen Hospital and provides a richly detailed record of their collaboration at this time. Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy of Arts, expressed a strong interest in Schnebbelie’s depiction of Cardinal Beaufort’s monument, with the result that Schnebbelie submitted his drawings of Beaufort’s and Waynflete’s monuments along with the “two inside views” of Magdalen Chapel for the Royal Academy’s exhibition in May of 1789, as previously noted (SAL MS 267 fol. 64). Later that year Schnebbelie reported on the progress of Basire’s engraving work on the Magdalen Hospital plates as well as Plates 3.4-5, which also feature Schnebbelie drawings from 1788 and bear the same publication date of 23 April 1790. As described by Richard Goddard in his commentary on this set, the most arresting images here were also prompted by the imminent destruction of the monument, and in this case the print shows laborers with pickaxes engaged in the work of destruction, juxtaposed against “lapidoptery presentation” of sculptural details (Reeve 2007, 81). Both plate sets might be said, in Matthew Reeve’s words, to illustrate the “passage from destruction to discovery and from preservation to curiosity” (81). Notably, Schnebbelie is named as a co-author in the explanatory accounts accompanying both sets. Plate 3.6 presents drawings made in Lincolnshire in 1789 as part of an itinerary that allowed Schnebbelie to follow up on his work in Winchester: this plate, a conspectus view somewhat like Plates 3.3 and 3.4, focuses on the birthplace of Bishop Waynflete, whose monument he had drawn in Winchester Cathedral.
These representations of Magdalen Chapel stand in contrast to Schnebbelie’s primary commission at Winchester, his June 1788 drawings of the chantry chapels in the cathedral, which appear much more pristine in comparison. The engravings of these chantry chapels and their effigies (Plates 2.45-2.50) feature better-lit renderings with crisp, clean lines that emphasize the architectural and sculptural details of these monuments. Further, Lesley Milner notes in her commentary on Plates 2.45-2.50 that Schnebbelie’s drawing for Plate 2.50, depicting the chantry chapel of Bishop Fox, purposely omits the iron grille set in front of the bishop’s remains. This compositional choice was presumably an attempt to emphasize the effigy of Fox at the bottom of the plate, and perhaps to “declutter” the elaborate architecture of the stone-cage monument. The difference in style between Plates 2.45-2.50 and 3.1-3.3 appears to reflect something of Schnebbelie’s perception of Magdalen Chapel—or, at least, something of the perception of this monument that he hoped to produce through his representations. The well-lit, relatively clean depictions of the chantry chapels in Winchester Cathedral appear to present the memorials as living monuments, comparatively undisturbed by time and decay. In contrast, the shadowy, rubble-strewn, nearly overgrown depictions of Magdalen Chapel seem to emphasize the building as a monument decidedly subject to the wear of the elements and of human destruction (now poised for the final blow). Myrone (2007) reproduces Plates 3.1 and 3.3 to illustrate the transition from “a more traditional presentation of plans, details, and exterior views juxtaposed without regard to pictorial space” (Plate 3.3) to the “atmospheric depiction” seen in Plates 3.1-3.2 (119). Citing Sally Badham (1987), Myrone associates the latter with “romantic antiquarianism” (113) and makes Schnebbelie’s technique in these two interior views representative of that new trend.
Moreover, the ground plan and exterior view of the chapel on Plate 3.3 seem to emphasize a state of isolation. The ground plan (Fig. G) depicts the four buildings of Magdalen Hospital—the chapel and attached master’s house, barn, and well—all clustered together at the east end of the plot, leaving much of the land represented as blank space. Similarly, in drawing the exterior view of the chapel from the northwest (Fig. A), Schnebbelie was able to capture all four buildings in his landscape. The linear perspective and more distanced view make the structures seem to huddle together against the overgrown vegetation in the foreground and the blank, partly-cloudy sky of the background. While other plates in Vetusta Monumenta sometimes seem to isolate or decontextualize their content by depicting them on blank backgrounds (see, among others, Plate 1.2 and Plates 2.29-35), in contrast, both of these panels seem to indicate a physical context of isolation by including visual information about the hospital grounds, which themselves seem blank or empty.
This isolated context aligns with what was for centuries the prevailing scholarly conception of medieval understandings of leprosy: namely, that leprosaria were purely exclusionary, expelling disease and sin from general society. However, Carole Rawcliffe has argued that the long-lived conception of leprosaria as quarantine wards of segregation and shame is largely a result of a “specific biomedical and segregationist agenda” originating from the Victorian era, rather than an accurate representation of medieval conceptions of the disease (qtd. in Roffey 2012, 221; see also Welch and Brown 2016, 49). Both the material conditions of St. Mary Magdalen revealed by the excavation directed by Simon Roffey (2012) and the medieval vernacular literature and theology explored by Christina Welch and Rohan Brown (2016) support the idea of a more ambivalent view of leprosy in medieval times, one more nuanced than the view presented by straightforward narratives of segregation.
In fact, Welch and Brown observe that “while the leper was in everyday society an abhorrent outcast, a socially dead unwanted wanderer wearing his depravity, once contained within the liminal space of the leper hospital, his socially dead status and living dead appearance could be utilized by the church for religious purposes” (2016, 53). While they identify figures such as the Abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1099-1179), who believed leprosy resulted from “lustful sex,” Welch and Brown also observe the biblical ambivalence to leprosy as simultaneously sinful and curable, both a social death and indicative of “an elect status postmortem” (2016, 54). Indeed, the cardinal Jacques de Vitry (c. 1160-1240) asserted that “lepers [would] be certain of their celestial rewards, having endured suffering on earth rather than in purgatory, provided they devote their life to their spiritual health” (Welch and Brown 2016, 55). Welch and Brown describe this view as “an unprecedented opportunity to pay off their purgatorial debt in this life rather than the next” (2016, 56)—a construction which upholds the idea of lepers as both morally corrupt sinners in need of punishment and repentance and, at the same time, as “especially beloved by God,” principal atoners—in short, a sense of lepers as “both holy and horrific” (Welch and Brown 2016, 57).
Further, as a result of the 2008-2010 excavations of Magdalen Hill performed by the University of Winchester, Roffey (2012) has compiled evidence of material care that afforded the lepers of St. Mary Magdalen both dignity and respect. Roffey notes that “the period AD 1050–1350 marks a particularly active phase of the disease that made necessary the introduction of large-scale specialist and institutional care” (2012, 204). While institutions like Magdalen Hospital often served not only lepers but also other infirm persons and the poor, 84% of individuals in the cemetery showed signs of leprosy, a higher percentage than that found by many other hospital excavations (Roffey 2012, 216). Roffey cites the individual, “regular-cut anthropomorphic graves with carved head niches” as suggesting a certain level of respect for the deceased persons interred there (221). These excavations identified ceramic objects found in one individual’s grave as personal food bowls or some other kind of specialized medical utensil; the skeleton in this grave displayed evidence of severe debilitation as a result of leprosy, including facial deformation, an amputated leg, and bone degradation that would have led to loss of functionality in the hands and remaining foot (Roffey 2012, 227). The severe disability this person faced would have required almost constant care, and the inclusion of sanative utensils in their gravesite suggests that innovative specialist attention was afforded to the tenants of St. Mary Magdalen’s and similar institutions, including another St. Mary Magdalene, in Cambridge, where the twelfth-century chapel survives (Rees 2017). Thus, although leprosy was indeed associated with sinfulness and sexual immorality, in medieval culture it also necessitated specialized institutional, financial, and medical supports.
Gough and Schnebbelie had much less information about the original use of the site at their disposal. Though their research did lead to some archaeological discoveries, these were accidental and attested to Roman occupation of the new hospital site in ancient times, not to the medieval hospital’s dedication to the care of lepers. In fact, leprosy is only mentioned in passing in the explanatory account, as occurring in one primary source document dated 1420 (Gough et al. 1790, 3). In earlier sources, Gough explains, “these lepers are called infirmi,” and most often the beneficiaries of the hospital’s foundation are referred to simply as “the pore.” Since the decline of leprosy in the fifteenth century, the hospital likely served a broader population of poor people, like St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London (Plates 2.36-37) and like the fictional hospital in Anthony Trollope’s novel The Warden (1855). Trollope depicts Hiram’s Hospital as an early medieval foundation that continued on into the nineteenth century, as Magdalen also did. The narrative portion of the explanatory account concludes with a reference to Mr. Baker, the “present master” of the Magdalen Hospital at the time of writing in 1789 (Gough et al. 1790, 12).
Though lacking the evidence base available to modern scholars, the images and text by Gough and Schnebbelie provide continuity in a historical record disrupted by the demolition of the chapel and other remains of the hospital in 1788. Gough’s account, using material from Wavell and Milner, among others, surveys the long history of the site up to the present. This substantial text is notable for including supplementary images, also drawn by Schnebbelie and engraved by Basire (Gough et al. 1790, 12-13). Apparently written in the absence of significant information concerning the foundation of Magdalen Hospital, this account takes a comprehensive approach. It begins with a detailed description of the chapel and grounds recorded by Schnebbelie when he made the drawings. The account continues with a conspectus compiled from the History attributed to Wavell, which Gough acknowledges (10); the extensive quotations from medieval manuscript sources are apparently second-hand, with the exception of a long passage from a manuscript in the Harleian collection (11-12). Gough concentrates especially on the period of William of Wykeham, who became Bishop of Winchester in 1366. In Wykeham’s registers, Magdalen is mainly referred to as an “almshouse or hospital” (Gough et al. 1790, 3-4). The hospital’s nine statutory beneficiaries are more often referred to as poor rather than ill or infirm in later sources, as noted above.
The continuous record in the episcopal archives confirms that the hospital was not rebuilt after being badly damaged by the Dutch prisoners of war in 1666. The foundation nonetheless continued to support nine poor “brothers and sisters” and a priest or master, as it had in medieval times: “the hospital was irrecoverably ruined, and the master and society never returned to it more,” Gough writes, anticipating the state in which Schnebbelie’s images capture it (Gough et al. 1790, 9). After 1666 they were housed in rental properties in the city, and benevolent bequests as late as 1720 continued to augment the capital that supported them. As opposed to the modern emphasis on leprosy and medical care, Gough accentuates the benevolent character of the institution, noting reforms in its management made by Wykeham and the generous dimensions of the living spaces in the original buildings (9). A visual reconstruction of the hospital’s “original state” appears in the 1773 History, apparently confirming this prosperity. Gough notes that the barn depicted in Plate 3.3 is a remnant of the women’s portion of the almshouse. Baker, the “present master,” evidently saw to it that a new building was constructed for the hospital’s nine beneficiaries in 1789. The account concludes with an appendix containing three documents: a long Latin text concerning the hospital found in the Harleian Library; the hospital’s institutional seal, drawn by Schnebbelie; and a letter by Milner documenting the archaeological discoveries made by workmen digging foundations for the new building in 1789, on what was then the eastern edge of Winchester. Schnebbelie’s accompanying illustrations depict the Roman artifacts found in the chalk at this site. This late addition brings even deeper archaeological strata into view in what is already a complex and many-layered history.
Schnebbelie’s evocative images have remained essential to the reception of this site and its monuments, as shown by their inclusion in Roffey’s archaeological publications (2012) and on the City of Winchester’s and other web pages. These “elaborate” drawings have also been cited or reprinted by Doubleday and Page (1903, 197) and by Myrone (2007, 115), who cites this plate set as evidence of a massive transition in antiquarian image-making. The ghosts of Magdalen Hospital and its richly ornamented chapel continue to haunt the historical record through these lively and detailed engravings.
1We thank our anonymous reviewer for these instructive comparanda, which may be seen in the CRSBI database.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank our anonymous reviewer for valuable insights and references, which have greatly improved this commentary.
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