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By Root 4336 0

the stately cathedral was sealed off in its private world behind the walls of the close, and the citizens of the town paid little attention to that either. For although the great schism had been settled in the early years of the century and the popes ruled over a united Catholic Church from Rome once more, that rule was passive. No terrible Interdicts fell upon the king or his people; Italy was far away and there were few foreign priests on the island now. The townspeople had their craft guilds and religious fraternities, with their own chapels and chantries – not in the huge and solemn cathedral but in the smaller parish churches of St Thomas, St Martin and St Edmund in the town itself. Religion too was a local affair, from which the outside world of bishops and popes could be excluded.

As far as the cathedral was concerned, the citizens of Salisbury cared about only one thing: the fact that the Bishop of Salisbury was still the city’s feudal overlord: and this they hated, not because his rule was oppressive, but because they resented any interference.

This resentment was nothing new. Even a century and a half before, the mayor and aldermen had tried unsuccessfully to throw off this feudal yoke and get a town charter of their own; but in recent years the friction between the bishop and the town he owned had become greater. The last bishop, Ayscough, had been especially unpopular and when Jack Cade led a brief and confused revolt in Kent six years before, a party of Sarum men, inspired by the rebellion, actually killed the bishop on Salisbury Plain. The ringleaders were hanged and the king sent a quarter of Jack Cade’s dismembered body to be strung up in the market place to encourage the people to good behaviour in future. But the quarrel still went on. Successive mayors had done all they could to ignore the new bishop, and only two years ago, mayor Hall had tried once again to get a new town charter from the king.

“The truth is, we don’t want the bishop – and we don’t need him,” Shockley remarked. It was a parochial self-confidence which most of the merchants in Salisbury shared.

For no place in fifteenth century England was more fortunate than Sarum.

Two things mattered: first, it was so perfectly situated.

To the north lay the sweeping chalk ridges where huge flocks of sheep grazed, and beyond them one entered the rich cheese and dairy country of north Wiltshire.

“Chalk and cheese,” the men of Wiltshire would say to describe their country. And Salisbury was the central market for all.

While wars and trading disputes in Europe had weakened many of England’s ports, Salisbury lay at the centre of a network of the three most successful: to the east was London, to the west Bristol, and to the south, closest of all, lay Southampton.

Second, the region produced cloth. And cloth was the key to everything. When Shockley and Wilson had started to engage in cloth exporting the previous century, they had joined a growing business. Now it had surpassed all others. While the trade in exporting raw wool had gradually declined, hitting many great cities like Winchester, Lincoln and Oxford, the areas that were strong in cloth had boomed. Salisbury lay at the very heart of the business. Not only did the city itself manufacture its rays and other textiles, but all over the western part of ancient Wessex, from Wiltshire to Somerset, the huge broadcloth business was at its greatest. Fortunes were being made by great merchants and landowners, like the soldier adventurer Fastolf. Every village now seemed to have its weavers and dyers, every stream – and swift flowing streams were abundant – its fulling mill. The place where the five rivers met was a focal point for trade, drawing in wealth all over the rich heartland of Wessex.

The town was organised for business: from the lowliest apprentice serving his seven long years’ apprenticeship in his craft, to the great men of the council of forty-eight and the inner group of twenty-four merchants who directed its affairs.

But today, in the thirty-fourth year of the reign of King Henry