The bishops of Winchester were among the wealthiest and most powerful lords of medieval England, a position remarked upon by a number of contemporary writers. One fourteenth-century observer, noting the differences between the two cathedrals of Canterbury and Winchester and the wealth that supported them, declared that ‘Canterbury hath the finer stable butWinchester the deeper manger’. The bishopric of Winchester was indeed the richest in England throughout the later Middle Ages and on a par with the wealthiest in Europe as a whole. An income of about £4,000 a year in the late thirteenth century comfortably outstripped the £2,600 collected by the archbishop of Canterbury from his estate, or the £2,550 of the bishopric of Ely, or the £1,200 of the bishopric of Worcester. Such great wealth sometimes gave rise to jealousy and suspicion. Matthew Paris worried that, as bishop of Winchester, Aymer de Valence (1250–60) would be ‘second to none in England in wealth and power except possibly the king’. Severe criticisms were expressed after the death of John of Pontoise (1282–1304), who was accused of misappropriating the revenues of the estate, at a personal profit of 40,000 marks. It was also said that 12,000 florins were found hidden in the ground next to his bed. In the case of William Wykeham, suggestions of simony were made concerning his appointment, Edward III having made him guardian of the temporalities of the see ‘for a certain large sum of money’.

The wealth of the bishops of Winchester derived mainly from their possession of one of the largest and richest estates of medieval England, which extended far beyond the spiritual boundaries of the see. The diocese comprised the counties of Hampshire, including the Isle of Wight, and Surrey. The estate, on the other hand, included lands in a further five southern counties: Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Somerset and Wiltshire (Map 1). Established in c.660, the see of Winchester benefited from its ancient associations with the rulers of Wessex, by whose pious gifts between the seventh and the tenth centuries the bishops acquired the bulk of their later medieval estate. Domesday Book reveals that, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, Bishop Stigand (1047–70) was possessed of most of the manors held by his thirteenth- and fourteenth-century successors.