It was not a fortified hill, like the old Norman founding town, nor a semi-fortified burgh, like the older Saxon foundations. It lay in a broad valley; it contained large, open spaces; it had no defensive wall, no castle keep; it was built for comfort and for trade.
To understand how it came to be there, it is necessary to go back a little.
Since the troubled reign of King Stephen, England had been, for the most part, at peace. It was a peace that had been laid by Stephen’s nephew and successor, the son of the Empress Matilda, Henry II. From his parents, Henry received a huge Angevin inheritance across the Channel so that during his long reign he ruled not only England, but Normandy and huge tracts of France as well. His wars were fought abroad, while to the island he had given peace and a strong administration, law codes and the King’s Justice founded on trial by jury. It was a legacy to England that neither his heroic but absentee son Richard Coeur de Lion, nor his younger and unlucky son John, who had lost most of the Angevin and Norman Empire, had managed to destroy. The order and peace of England was broken briefly at the end of John’s reign by the revolt of the barons that culminated in the king’s capitulation and sealing of the contract known as Magna Carta, and a short invasion of the eastern part of the island by the French king. When John died soon afterwards, it was the magnates themselves who wisely expelled the French, restored peace, and gave their support to John’s son, the pious boy king, Henry III.
With the peace at home had come prosperity: a spectacular new prosperity – the richness of medieval England – that provided magnificent new cathedrals, and stately towns.
It was founded upon two things: rising agricultural prices, from a rising population – and sheep.
The wool of England was some of the best in Europe, it was plentiful, and the merchants of Flanders and Italy, with their huge cloth business, could not get enough of it. Vast quantities of wool were exported and, for most of the time, the taxes and excise duties on it were low. In the early thirteenth century in feudal England, there was a huge capital expansion.
They were good times for most holders of land.
Above all, they were good times for the magnates.
The magnates were powerful. They allowed the monarch to rule – but only just. When a king like John found himself in the impossible position of having too little income from his feudal dues to pay for extraordinary expenses – usually wars – they resisted his efforts to raise money at every opportunity. The crisis of Magna Carta was as much the result of this natural tension as any tactlessness or wrongdoing on the part of King John. Indeed, the monarch was even short of funds with which to run his administration.
Partly for this last reason, and partly to appease the feudal vanity of these men, successive monarchs had allowed the magnates to govern huge tracts of land for them. In these great feudal domains, variously called honours, baronies or liberties, it was the magnate, acting as the representative of the king, whose courts tried all but grave offences; it was the magnates’ servants who collected the taxes and fines; indeed, in some of these areas, even the king’s own sheriff was not allowed to set foot unless the king had evidence of some major abuse of privilege on the magnate’s part. For this kingdom within a kingdom, the magnate paid the king either by knight service or fixed rents.
True, as time went on and the king’s courts grew more developed, the scope of these feudal authorities became less; but they were still sought after, not only because such feudal authority carried prestige, but also because the revenues, even from the trial of minor cases, were still extremely valuable.
By the time of King John, a third of the hundreds of Wiltshire, each with their own courts and administration, were in private hands; a century later, two thirds of them were. Great houses like that of the Longspées who had succeeded by marriage to the estates of the earldom of Salisbury, other notables like the families of Peverel, Pavely, and Giffard, all held these private feudal domains.
And amongst the greatest of all the magnates was the Church. The abbeys of Glastonbury, Malmesbury and Wilton, the priories of St Swithuns in Winchester and nearby Amesbury, and of course the Bishop of Salisbury all held private hundreds in the shire.
They paid the king a rent for these privileges, but the profits were theirs.
And one of the most profitable possessions a magnate could have on his domain in the changing world, was a town.
There were the rents from the buildings, the proceeds of the courts, the tolls and duties on incoming goods: the value of the franchise of a town was considerable.
In the new prosperity and peace of England, the opportunities for new towns seemed to grow every day. In the latter part of the previous century, the Bishop of Winchester had founded a number, nearly all of which were yielding a handsome profit for his diocese. It was natural therefore that the Bishop of Salisbury should want to follow suit.
He had a perfect excuse – or rather a catalogue of excuses. The site of the old cathedral was unsatisfactory. The cramped hillfort with its straggling suburbs was windy and poorly watered; the glaring chalk hurt the eyes; the cathedral priests were supposed to share this confined space with the king’s military garrison, who, it was claimed, even interrupted the celebration of the divine services. But to the south of the hill, in the bowl of land where the five rivers met, lay the broad meadows known as Myrifields. There was only the little parish of St Martins down there. And this large, well-watered stretch of ground already belonged to the diocese.
In the year of Our Lord 1218, Bishop Poore – the second of two rich and powerful brothers to be Sarum’s bishop – obtained permission from the pope and from the pious English boy king Henry III, to move the cathedral to a new and more pleasant site in the meadows below. He also, of course, got an agreement that he might found a new town beside it.
The new city was typical of the larger foundations of its day. All over England, for nearly a century, new market towns had been laid out with sophisticated geometric plans. Some were wedge-shaped, some semi-circular; but the largest like New Salisbury were usually laid out on a rectangular grid. Such civilized urban planning had not been seen on the island since Roman times, a thousand years before.
The bishop’s new city lay in the gentle curve of the river Avon which came from the north and swept around its western and southern sides like an embracing arm. It consisted of two cells. One was the cathedral precincts – the close – a broad expanse of open ground in which the new cathedral would stand and around the edge of which the houses of the priests were being built. The other was the market town beside it, with its rectangular grid of streets and a huge market place at its centre.
The two cells each had their different functions: one spiritual, the other commercial. And both together, church and priests, market and traders belonged to the bishop, lock, stock and barrel. For the city was a feudal liberty and by the charter gained in 1227, the Bishop of Salisbury was its undisputed feudal lord.
It was a hot July day. The little gang of labourers were not enjoying their work.
Nor, in particular, was a small, stocky thirteen-year-old boy with a head too big for his body, tiny stubby hands, and solemn grey eyes, who though he was working under the watch of the stern cathedral canon, could not help glancing anxiously up the street.
For in the valley, north of the city, unknown to the canon, a small group of men including Godefroi and Shockley were meeting, and soon, if their meeting was successful, they had told him they would come and give him the chance to escape from this drudgery.
Several times he looked hopefully away from his work. It was back-breaking labour and he hated it. How he longed to change his life.
Canon Stephen Portehors stared at him coldly.
Of all the people in Sarum, no one was more insignificant, more utterly unimportant, than young Osmund the Mason. Osmund knew it too, for Canon Stephen had told him so himself.
“In the eye of God, you are as small, Osmund, as a grain of dust,” the priest had explained. “But remember,” he added ominously, “he sees everything that you do – for not even a grain of dust can hide from the Father. Your sins will all be known.”
Now the canon was beckoning. And Osmund knew why: he had sinned.
It seemed to Osmund that, wherever he looked, there was dust.
There was dust like a shimmering haze around the huge grey pile of the rising cathedral looming a few hundred yards to the south. There was dust on the broad open space of the cathedral close – the two-hundred-acre precinct around the cathedral, which stretched from the eastern boundary ditch to the river. There was dust on the piles of grey Chilmark stone around the construction site, dust on the carts, planks, scaffolding, on the coils of rope and the heaps of rubble to fill the walls; dust all over the spacious plots where the fine stone houses of the priests were being built with gardens backing on to the curve of the sweeping of the Avon river; dust on the river itself; dust on the long dark riverweeds that waved slowly in the stream. The swans who drifted at their secret, measured pace past the green banks were half grey with it. There was dust on the flat marshy meadows that stretched past Fisherton and Bemerton villages to Wilton beyond. All over the half-completed chequerboard of the new town beside the cathedral precincts there was dust from the lathe and plaster houses.
There was dust, he could even see it, like a pale grey mantle over the dark, half-deserted castle on its hill. And on the slopes above, on the bare high ground, whenever the wind came from the south, the sheep gave off a puff of grey chalk if you handled them. The pale blue butterflies, too, seemed to carry a subtle coating of it as they shimmered up in their summer clouds from the hard warm ground. Even that great curious circle of fallen stones to which he had once walked, eight miles away, had seemed to have collected the dust from the new city. It looked like a strange, outlying satellite of the building site itself, as if it might be arising once again, instead of falling silently into decay.
He was covered with dust himself. The dour canon, too, had collected a rim of dust on his shoulders.
It choked Osmund, and irritated him.
Yet he knew he should be grateful.
“Our city is built on a rock,” the canon had told him. “Our foundations are sure.”
Indeed, this was literally true, for although much of the surrounding terrain was marshy, the ground the wise bishop had chosen in Myrifield was firm.
“See,” Canon Stephen had pointed out to young Osmund the day before, “though this site is low, if you dig down a little you come to a thick layer of gravel.” And as Osmund had looked into the trench beside which they were standing, he could see that this was so. “The gravel is strong – it will support even the greatest cathedral we could build,” the priest assured him. “Be grateful that you were born at such a time, when you can see such great works undertaken, to the glory of God.”
But now the priest was angry. His hair was grey and thin but his eyebrows were bushy and still mainly black, curling up at the outer corners like a tawny owl. The eyes themselves were dark brown and piercing. As he spoke, it seemed to Osmund that his voice was as hard and cutting as flint.
“Name the seven deadly sins, Osmund.”
The sins committed deliberately and with knowledge, the sins that ensured the sinner would go to hell: the priest at Avonsford had made sure he knew those from his earliest childhood.
“Anger, gluttony, envy, sloth, avarice, lust, and pride,” he recited glumly.
Portehors nodded.
“And of which are you guilty today?”
How much did the canon know? Osmund considered carefully.
The work on which he had been engaged all summer, this splendid and unusual feature of the new city was, everyone knew, Canon Stephen Portehors’s particular pride and joy. The water courses of New Salisbury, though still unfinished, were already much admired. Tapping off the Avon just above the city, they formed a network of stone channels that ran down the centre of the most significant streets; they varied from two to six or seven feet wide and were crossed by tiny foot-bridges every few yards.
“They bring the river into the very town itself,” Portehors would announce proudly. “What could be more pleasant – or more healthy?”
Indeed, they were more important to him than the streets themselves: and when a few months before he had noticed that the ground along one of the main north-south streets being laid out was not quite level, he had altered the course of the street itself, and hence the whole of one side of the new town, in order to keep his precious watercourse on even ground.
“Precision,” he insisted. “The water will only run if the levels are exact.”
Exact. When the labourers had heard that word they shrugged gloomily; for it was well known in Sarum that the priest and his brother in the town had their family’s mania for exactness, and as soon as a word like precision was spoken, it was useless to argue. They had had to lay out the whole street and dig a new channel again.
And how the boy hated it!