IN Chapter 4 I identified the important role of place within the Matter of England romances. The appropriation of place is highlighted as an important technique in the re-creation of the Anglo-Saxon past by these narratives, creating a sense of continuity with the past by constructing significant and signifying landscapes. As is evident in Guy of Warwick and Beues of Hamtoun, romance becomes encoded upon the landscape, producing a historically and culturally meaningful geography through which England's Anglo-Saxon past is used to express both national and regional discourses. In this chapter I wish to return to a discussion of place, and of one place in particular: the cathedral city of Winchester.

As we have seen, Winchester has a particular connection with a number of the Matter of England romances. The city is the site of the concluding national drama of Guy of Warwick, the locus of Anglo-Saxon political authority in Havelok the Dane, and the never-when Thraciens of the Auchinleck Sir Orfeo. Winchester's interaction with romance narrative is important to an understanding of the place of the past within the city and of the city's place within the past. This chapter seeks to examine two important processes: firstly, the narrative construction of place within Winchester; and secondly, the construction of Winchester as a place of national and historical significance. These two processes are inevitably intertwined, and the places that constitute Winchester's urban geography contribute to the nature of the city's national character. Important to an analysis of these two processes is the use that they make of the city’s Anglo-Saxon past, real and imagined. By focusing upon the relationship between Winchester and its Anglo-Saxon past, and the role that narrative geography plays in the construction and civic remembrance of this past, this chapter aims to demonstrate the significance of the idea of Anglo-Saxon England to a specific place and community.