The covenant - James A. Michener [221]
One afternoon during the first years of the 1800s, Josiah Saltwood, the present master of Sentinels, sat with his wife on a bench beneath the oaks and said, 'I deem it time we meet with the boys.' He paused, as if matters of gravity impended, then added promptly, 'Nothing serious, of course. Merely their entire future.'
His wife laughed. 'They're all about somewhere. I could summon them.'
'Not just yet. I must ride to Old Sarum with the Proprietor. The election, you know.' And with his wife at his side, and the swans following, he walked across the lawn to where his horse was being saddled.
The beautiful cathedral had not always stood in its present location. In the early days of Christianity in England a much different cathedral-castle-fort, keystone to security in this part of the country, had rested on a low hill some two miles to the north, and here devout bishops exercised as much leadership as the masters of the castle would permit. It was called by a bewildering variety of Roman and Saxon names, but in time it came to be known as Sarum, and from it came that set of orders and regulations for worship known as the Use of Sarum, which would be adopted by much of the English church.
The first cathedral, begun in 1075, was a large, rugged building in the French manner, set down within the walls of the castle-fort; between the two groups of occupants, clergy and soldiers, so much friction arose that rupture was inescapable. Rarely has a formal complaint been more comprehensive than that issued by Pope Honorius III in 1219 when he summarized the difficulties of his priests at Sarum:
The clergy cannot stay there without danger to their persons. The wind howls so furiously that priests can hardly hear each other speak. The building is ruinous. The congregation is so small it cannot provide repairs. Water is scarce. People wishing to visit the cathedral are prevented by the garrison. Housing is insufficient for the clergy, who must buy their own houses. The whiteness of the chalk causes blindness.
The bishop solved these difficulties by offering to move his cathedral from Sarum to a vacant field well to the south, where the town of Salisbury would belatedly arise. The exchange worked and the cathedral at Sarum was abandoned, to the pleasure of the bishop; he owned the vacant field and sold it to the church for a nice profit.
With the loss of its cathedral, Sarum declined. Once it boasted more than two thousand residents, then one thousand, then five hundred, then only a handful, and the day came in the early 1700s when it had almost none. Cathedral and castle alike were in ruins.
But tradition dies hard in England, and in rural England, hardest of all. When Parliament convened in the late 1200s, Sarum as a major settlement and support of the king, was awarded two seats; in its heyday it sent some mighty men to London. With the disappearance of its cathedral and its population, those seats, in any other country, would have been lost. But not in England, where precedent was prized. If Sarum had once been entitled to two seats, Old Sarum, as it was now called, was still entitled to them, and these empty fields with barely a single human being residing on or near them retained the right to send two members to Parliament and arrogantly exercised that right.
It became famous as 'the rottenest of the English rotten boroughs,' referring to those former towns, now abandoned or much reduced in population, which clung to ancient privileges on the principle that 'Parliament represents land, not people.' So that even in these early years of the nineteenth century one-fourth of the members of Parliament came from boroughs which in common sense should have returned nobody, and a shocking percentage of these were from boroughs like Old Sarum, which contained almost no one.
When a sitting Parliament was dissolved and a new one authorized, who selected the men to represent a rotten borough, especially when it had no voters? Custom said that whoever owned the land reserved the right to nominate whom