Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [265]
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