Postcard from Winchester - the Great Hall and the round table

One of the most common occupations for the guides at Winchester Cathedral is redirecting tourists who wander the place in search of the Round Table. Apparently they take quite some convincing that the round table is not, in fact, in the cathedral, but is in the nearby Great Hall and no, you can't have your entrance fee back.

The Great Hall is a pretty spectacular space, it has four main attractions, the table itself, high on the wall at one end, huge and imposing, like a vast medieval dart board, the stained glass windows, the wall decorated with a family tree so vast it's like a family forest, and the gates.

The space itself is astonishing, huge thick walls and lofty beams. This is the sort of place that can be easily populated by the imagination with feast tables crammed with people eating medieval food, which I think was basically things killed in the forest that could have an apple shoved in their mouths or up their arse for a garnish, or equally filled with soldiers and nervous horses about to ride into battle. Or tourists. Actually you didn't have to imagine that last one. There weren't actually that many tourists there but the ones that did come and go were at least polite enough to shut the door, not that it mattered as the Hall was unheated but it was a nice thought.


The table itself is an astonishing piece of work, and the connection with the Arthurian legend is a powerful pull. It's seven hundred years old which means, even if Arthur himself didn't sit there sipping mead from the grail or whatever, it's a pretty potent artefact. And it's round! How cool is that! That means everyone is equal and so sits at the head, or that there's no head. It also means that the folk sitting at the table had to find other means of establishing their seniority, such as getting a tall chair, or a swivel chair, or butchering their neighbour with a broadsword following a trifling argument over pudding. It is not known if the round table etiquette also did away with he traditional knight maiden knight maiden dinner party seating arrangement, and if a kiddy table version was ever used, it is no longer in existence.


At the other end of the Great Hall is a very imposing piece that must have seemed like a really, really good idea at the time. Two gates, made of stainless steel, at least thirty feet high and breathtaking in their design, looking like a something from Lord of the Rings, crossed with art deco, they remind one of the sort of doors that Flash Gordon used to punch Ming the Merciless through. Cut into the top is a C circling a D. Yup, these gates were installed to celebrate the marriage of Charles and Diana. Oops. Guess that makes them as historic an artefact now as the round table.