The Great Hall

The Westgate in Winchester, England, is one of the city’s most significant medieval structures. It served as the main western entrance to the city and is the last remaining medieval gate of Winchester, dating mainly to the 12th–14th centuries, which stands on the site of earlier gates stretching back to Roman times.

Westgate Museum features displays telling the story of Winchester in the 16th and 17th centuries. In 1554, Queen Mary I married Philip of Spain in Winchester Cathedral, and Westgate Museum is now home to a beautiful Tudor ceiling commissioned by Warden White of Winchester College, with a frieze probably added by him on the occasion of the royal wedding. A portrait of Ralph Lamb who attended the wedding can also be seen, dressed in the finest Spanish style.

The Westgate once served as an entrance to the city of Winchester. A fortified stronghold, the monument also protected Winchester Castle from potential attacks.

The medieval gateway still stands proudly on the high street, serving as a poignant landmark, reflecting the city’s rich history.

The city suffered during the English Civil War, with Oliver Cromwell capturing the castle and later demolishing it. In 1648, on his way to trial and execution in London, Charles I was presented with the city mace at the Westgate by the royalist mayor; his son, Charles II, planned a great royal palace in the city. Civil War armour, King Charles II’s boot and a staff belonging to Oliver Cromwell’s son and successor, Richard Cromwell, can be seen in the museum today.

In a corner of the Westgate chamber hangs a gruesome set of gibbeting irons reputedly used to display the executed body of Jack the Painter, a notorious traitor who was caught trying to burn the docks in Portsmouth at the time of the American War of Independence. Leg irons hang from the walls as a reminder of crime and punishment in former days.

For 200 years, Westgate Museum chamber was used as a debtors’ prison, with Little Ease – to the left of the original door in the archway – used as a lock-up for drunkards and petty criminals.

Look out for graffiti carved by debtor prisoners from the 16th–18th centuries; the prisoners whiled away their time cutting their names, dates and pictures on the walls of the room and these can be seen today, carved into the softer chalk. There is even a prisoner’s inscription carved onto a floorboard.

Westgate Museum is home to a unique set of standard weights and measures, used in the city to prevent unscrupulous traders from ‘giving short measure’. In Anglo-Saxon times, a law decreed that all measures must agree with the standards kept in London and Winchester. From that time, the bushel for weighing dry goods became known as the ‘Winchester Measure’; the Winchester Bushel is still in use in the United States today.

Climb the stairs to the atmospheric Westgate chamber, where you can see the portcullis arch and gun ports that were part of the city defences, the earliest in the country. Imagine yourself as a city guard looking out over views of the city.