Domum 2023
Winchester, I suggest, has four principal qualities. Beauty is the easiest of the four to define. ‘One of the cardinal monuments of English architecture’ is how one historian describes Wykeham’s original College: it is ‘the perfected example of the perpendicular style’. The poet John Keats describes the river as beautifully clear and the air as worth ‘sixpence a pint’. Quality comes next. This is not just educational but moral and philosophical, the outer beauty being a sign of the inner spiritual strength. According to Abbot Suger of St Denis, Gothic architecture represented man’s striving after something higher. Our curriculum refuses to deliver only exam results, but safeguards that final relic of Renaissance humanism called Div. Winchester’s past, my third quality, is of course distinguished. We all know it. We all experience it at Medal Speaking or Founder’s Obit, or in Moberly Library or in Treasury, or on the daily walk through War Cloister.
