Norman house at Southampton, to have been no wall-passage connecting the building, as we might have expected, with the castle; but like it, its entrances, of which there were three, one opening out upon the stream, were on the ground floor.[1]
Coming down to later times, the great Lord Clarendon here possessed large property, and one of his favourite schemes was to make the Avon navigable to Salisbury. For this purpose it was surveyed by Yarranton, the hydrographer, who not only reported favourably of the idea, but proposed to make the harbour an anchorage for men-of-war, bringing forward the great natural advantages of Hengistbury Head, as also the facilities of procuring iron in the district, and wood from the New Forest.[2] All, however, fell to the ground with Clarendon's exile, and the harbour is now silted up with sand and choked with weeds.
Nothing else is there to be mentioned, except the visit by Edward VI. to the town, from whence he wrote a letter to his friend Barnaby Fitz-Patrick, far superior to most royal letters. The lazar-house, which stood in the Bargates, has long since been destroyed. The old market-place has been lately taken down; but in the main street, not far from the castle keep, remains, lately restored, one of those timbered houses so common in the midland counties and the Weald of Kent,
- ↑ Descriptions of it will be found in Hudson Turner's Domestic Architecture of England, vol. i. pp. 38, 39. Parker's Glossary of Architecture, vol. i. p. 167. Grose's Antiquities, vol. ii. Hampshire; in whose time it appears to have been cased with dressed stones. In the Chamberlain's Books of the Borough, under the date of the sixth year of Edward VI., 1553, we meet with repairs "for the house next the castle," which entry probably refers to some buildings belonging to the house, which, according to Grose, stretched away in a north-westerly direction to the castle.
- ↑ England's Improvements by Sea and Land. By Andrew Yarranton. Ed. 1677, pp. 67. 70.
