CHAPTER VI 



" HILLS " 



AMONG the most popular saints in England 

 during the Middle Ages must be reckoned St 

 Catherine of Alexandria. Indeed, of female saints she 

 ranked in general esteem next to St Mary Magdalene. 

 Martyred according to tradition, under the tyrant 

 Maximin in the third century, her body was taken by 

 angels and carried over the desert and the Red Sea and 

 finally deposited in a marble sarcophagus on the summit 

 of Mount Sinai. Hence the chapels dedicated to her 

 honour were mostly erected on the tops of hills. In the 

 south of England a number of such chapels existed, the 

 remains of which may, in many cases, be seen unto this 

 day. There were shrines, for example, to her memory 

 on St Catherine's Hill, near Guildford, on Chale Down 

 in the Isle of Wight, on St Catherine's Hill, to the north 

 of Christ church on the borders of the New Forest, and 

 on the lofty height overlooking the sea above Abbots- 

 bury in Dorsetshire. 



There was also a chapel, all traces of which have now 

 unfortunately disappeared, on the top of St Catherine's 

 Hill at Winchester. This hill, or " hills," as it has been 

 called by generations of college men, is a prominent and 

 beautiful feature in the landscape. A circular chalk 

 down, crowned with its clump of beech-trees, it rises 

 some 300 feet, immediately above the valley of the 

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