Inculcation by Communication

It's hard to live in Winchester and ignore the cathedral. It is monumental - you can immediately grasp its scale, but it is harder to recapture the medieval mindset and recognise its ambition and its sheer presence in the landscape. The Normans invaded England in 1066. Construction of the cathedral began in 1087, almost twenty years after the arrival of these French interlopers. They brought with them a new culture, one far closer to the concept of Western civilization that we are so familiar with today. They spread it throughout England via a concentrated colonisation that affected every level of English life. The cathedral was a means of communicating with everyone, from the peasants to the disenchanted local nobles, from the uneducated to the devout. Pope Gregory the Great had written, centuries earlier, that painting can do for the illiterate what writing does for those who can read, and so the architecture, the sculpture and the decoration of Winchester Cathedral taught the native Anglo-Saxons of the religion, the power, and the prestige of the newly-arrived Normans. 

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