Wiltshire

by Edith Olivier

  “Stand anywhere near the crossing of the western transept, and look upwards. In every direction you see arches distorted and pillars leaning … stand close to either of the four slender pillars of Purbeck marble that act as the legs of the tower, and look up at it. The solid marble is bulging and warped and twisted like a willow wand.… You can appreciate the feelings of the fourteenth-century builders as they saw their labour on a knife-edge, knowing that if it fell, it must bring down the whole of the middle of the Church with it. But they saved it by those two inverted arches which they inserted without delay at the crossing of the eastern transept.… Those two arches saved the Cathedral from falling, and they are still saving it.”

  Those two arches are the only traces of Perpendicular which the visitor can find in the Cathedral, but if they were not there he would not find the Cathedral at all.

  There is another very lovely feature of the Cathedral which is not Early English. This is the serenely beautiful cloister in the Decorated style. This was built before the spire and was begun, with the Chapter House, in 1263, quite soon after the consecration of the Cathedral.

  Many people regret the removal, in 1777, by the famous iconoclast Wyatt, of the Bell Tower which stood in the north-east corner of the Green. As the spire was an afterthought to the Cathedral, so the Bell Tower was an afterthought to the spire; for even before the spire was begun it had already been suggested that it would be too frail to carry the bells. So before the architect, Richard of Farleigh, embarked upon his stupendous work, he made an agreement (1344) to house the bells elsewhere.

  To those who know the Close of Salisbury today it appears quite possible that the Bell Tower might have spoilt the incredibly beautiful effect now made by the Cathedral springing from the broad level grass of the lawn. This effect was planned and created by Bishop Barrington, who first let Wyatt loose in the Cathedral. He did a lot of harm there, but this is counterbalanced to a certain extent by the creation, at the Bishop’s suggestion, of that level green setting which now delights the eye. Till then, the Close, like other churchyards, had been filled with tombstones, though these were more simple and seemly than those erected by nineteenth-century masons.

  Bishop Barrington saw a vision of the Close as it is today, and he suggested levelling the graves and removing the tombs. The whole city rose in revolt against this desecration of the graves of their forefathers. The Bishop appeared to bow before the storm. He said no more of his proposal. But some time later he imported into the Palace garden a whole army of workmen. In one night the churchyard was levelled. Some of the stones were buried in the graves over which they had watched, and others were neatly stacked in the building. The whole space was turfed. The Close had in one night assumed the peaceful beauty which delights the world today. But at the time there was no peace. Instead there was an appalling row. The Bishop found it impossible to remain in the city, and he was quickly removed, as Bishops are, by the Biblical method of translation. He became Bishop of Durham, and in his new diocese he soon acquired a piece of property which eventually turned out to contain coal. With this he enriched his family for generations, as he had already, in perpetuity, enriched the city of Salisbury with the beautiful Close lawn. The Red Queen would certainly have said in the Looking Glass, “All have won so all shall have prizes.”

  The Cathedral now lacks colour and it must have glowed with it in the Middle Ages. First of all there were the wonderful windows taken out by Wyatt in order to sell the lead, and said to have been thrown by him into the town drain. But which drain? Salisbury contains more than one drainage system, and no one knew where to look. During about thirty years, beginning at the end of the last century, an enthusiastic minor canon spent every holiday in rummaging in every drain of every date and releasing every smell. With the help, it is said, of a dowser, he came at last upon a large cache of mediæval glass, much of which he re-leaded himself. But by this time the Chapter considered that Wyatt’s quite good white glass, which was still in the windows, satisfied the refined tastes of the present generation, and much of the old glass is now in Winchester Cathedral. The fourteenth-century ceiling paintings in the Choir were repainted in pastel colours in Wyatt’s day, although the original drawing remains; unfortunately they do not at present contribute much to the colour of the Cathedral. That only appears on festal days when the great church glows with ecclesiastic, civic and military robes, while the notes of the organ and the voices of the choir fill the arches.

  Twelve years after the Cathedral was built the plan was completed for a new town to be planted round it. This is one of the earliest extant town-planning schemes and one of the best. While it remained unspoilt, Salisbury was a model for other planners. The parish boundaries of today are the same as those on the plan of 1270, and they are indicated by such homely landmarks as “ the houses of Walter Chynne, John the Whitener, William the Porton, Walter Das, and Simon the Tailor”.

  Bishop Poore’s layout shows a real civic sense. He built Salisbury in rectangular plots of specific size and shape, with straight streets much as they exist today, and plenty of open spaces—the Green Croft (then called St Martin’s Croft), the Market Place and the New Canal. Among the public buildings were the Guild Hall, the Stationers’ Hall, the Halle of John Halle and the Poultry Cross, while the old inns are a feature of the place. Many English cathedrals, including the neighbouring cathedral of Winchester, grew up on monastic foundations, and then the abbey buildings were the hotels of the period, but Salisbury was from the first a “secular” chapter. This is why Salisbury possesses such charming contemporary inns—the Pheasant, the Plume of Feathers, the White Hart, the Old George and the King’s Arms. What a romantic list of mediæval names, and most of those inns exist today, although the Old George was badly injured by two fires, the second in 1945.

  The original shape of the city of Salisbury can still be plainly seen; although, like other beautiful old towns, the nineteenth-century growth of population drove it to take to itself those accretions like the tentacles of octopuses which now welcome the arriving visitor—ribbon-like suburban streets upon all its borders.

  Even today the erection of Salisbury Cathedral appears a great engineering feat, but before embarking on it, in the first half of the thirteenth century, the canons who planned it carried out a preliminary enterprise which seems even more impossible. That arrow shot by the Bishop had landed in a piece of level land between two rivers, the Avon and the Nadder—just the place for a flood. Richard Poore and Elias de Dereham knew what that might mean, but they never doubted the Guiding Hand which had indicated this site. The position of the Cathedral should not be changed but the position of the river should be. The Avon then flowed south-east from Stratford to join the Nadder near where St Martin’s Church now stands, leaving the proposed cathedral city on its east. The Nadder came in on the south-west. New Salisbury would thus be on an island. There was the danger. But should any petty stream be allowed to stand in the way of a Great House of God? Not while Bishop Poore lived, he who had already defied the soldiers in the great castle. So he and his canons simply diverted the course of the Avon, bringing it directly south from Stratford, and making it, as it still is, the close boundary on its east side. The Nadder swung into line to join it at Harnham. Thus all the water was kept on one side and Mary’s Meadow was no longer an island.

  For six hundred years the citizens of Salisbury continued to show themselves worthy of their hereditary architectural traditions. Bishop Poore trusted his canons to build their own houses, and no wonder he did, for among them was Elias de Dereham, the canon who as Clerk of the Works was responsible for building the Cathedral itself. So the Bishop not only presented the land upon which the Cathedral and the Palace were built but he also gave the sites of the canons’ houses; and in 1219 “ a decree was made in Chapter that the heirs of those who then built houses of residence, should receive from their successors two-thirds of the value of the building, the remaining one-third part being yielded for the value of the
land”. Among the old Close houses which the present day owes to the enterprise of these early ecclesiastical builders are Leadenhall (said to be the oldest of all), Hemyngsby (the house of the vicar’s choral), No. 21, No. 59 and others. After this lead given by the canons of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, subsequent generations rose valiantly to the challenge. In a splendid succession there rose in the Close the King’s House, the Wardrobe, the Deanery, the Walton Canonry, Mrs Jacob’s House and a group of noble eighteenth-century houses standing round the Choristers’ Green, and dominated by the lovely Mompesson.

  And throughout all these centuries the Palace proved itself as not only the original architectural inspiration for the Close, but a living example in every style which came into being.

  The Palace began with Bishop Poore’s Hall, contemporary with the Cathedral and completed before the Bishop was translated to Durham in 1228. This Hall was the kernel from which there grew in the following centuries the whole of the large rambling house which stands today. And more than the existing house; for, of course, the ubiquitous Wyatt had a hand in the Palace in his own day. He built the south-west wing, with its large kitchens and offices. But as happened with other buildings of his, that end of the Palace began to collapse in 1933. Then Bishop Donaldson pulled it down and left the Palace to terminate with the William and Mary block which contains the Double Cube drawing-room. While the Bishop was in the Palace he always made his entry to a service in the Cathedral by way of the cloisters, which have a private door into the Palace garden. When the Bishop had signified his intention of being present, the Bishop’s Boy (the leading choir-boy) was sent to escort him, wearing a special cross hung round his neck, and thus he preceded the Bishop as he marched through the Park to the Cathedral.

  Salisbury Close is thus an epitome of English domestic architecture, with a Palace at one of its ends, and at the other the Matrons’ College just inside the High Street Close gate. This was built by Wren for Bishop Seth Ward, and Wren also designed the Choristers’ School to the west of the Choristers’ Green.

  Meantime outside the Close the citizens were doing their part to maintain the beauty of their city. The Mitre House is said to have been the home of Bishop Poore before the Palace was built, and to this day every newly consecrated Bishop of Salisbury is robed in this house before he goes in procession to the Cathedral for his enthronement. Other fine houses in the city are Audley House, the Hall and St Edmund’s College. Then there is Trinity Hospital, and also Salisbury Infirmary, which is not only “ the first establishment of this nature to be attempted in the county”, but is architecturally one of the finest. It was founded in 1767 by Lord Feversham, who contributed the first five hundred pounds to its building; and twenty years later a young girl named Florence Nightingale was vainly imploring her parents to allow her to train as a nurse here.

  The back of this hospital in Crane Bridge Road is in typical “utility” twentieth-century style. It is a workmanlike building and contains some fine wards. It cannot be called really ugly. It is merely incongruous, or would be so if it were not placed out of sight of the fine old Salisbury buildings, but it does not attempt to enter into competition with them.

  As late as the eighteenth century Britton says that:

  “Among the middling class of inhabitants in this city, I have observed, with much pleasure, a characterising propensity, which seldom prevails with the sons of trade in a country town; I allude to their habit of collecting pictures, and decorating their houses with the productions of celebrated artists. This conduct is nobly praiseworthy, when guided by the hand of taste, and limited by the control of reason. A new world is open to those who derive pleasure through the medium of the finer senses; who forego the sorceries of Circe, and the orgies of Bacchus, for the rational delights of intellectual gratification. This peculiar bias of the people of Salisbury may be ascribed to the operation of two causes. The many show-houses in the vicinity of the city, occasions a great influx of strangers, who by conversation and enquiry in the subject of the polite arts, excite a liberal curiosity; and the exertions of a public-spirited individual, who has opened a gallery for the exhibition and sale of eminent pictures. His collection is composed of many valuable pieces.”

  But in spite of the good taste of the sons of trade the standard of buildings in Salisbury has sadly deteriorated. It must be confessed that the Church, which has set the standard of taste for the city, was the first to fall below the level of good building which it initiated in 1220, and it is sad to say that one of the earliest blots is to be found in the Close, where Butterfield built the most inappropriate chapel for the Theological College. This stands staring the Cathedral full in the face. Its example was followed by the Congregationalist Chapel in Fisherton Street, with its caricature of a spire, the Maundrel Hall almost next door (its architecture very like its name) and an odd chapel in Dew’s Road, built of varnished red brick and stone. These buildings are all frightfully ugly.

  But the building which most glaringly offends against what Sir Geoffrey Scott called “ good manners of architecture” is Woolworth’s new shop in High Street, which was taken over during the 1939–45 war as a Red Cross Club for soldiers. If this ill-proportioned block remains after the war, it will spoil the very middle of the city.

  But the Woolworth taste is an alien elevation. Salisbury Cathedral was built upon woolpacks and its principal cinema is now in the famous fifteenth-century hall of John Halle, built by the most prosperous of Salisbury wool merchants. He was several times mayor of the city and was at one time its M. P.; but he was a quarrelsome, argumentative fellow, with a personality that even yet has not been forgotten. His real memento will not be his quarrels but the harmonious building which he left in the Canal, on a larger scale, but not in better taste, than many smaller houses built by his contemporaries.

  Literature and the arts also flourished in Salisbury during the eighteenth century. The first concert ever given in England by Handel was given in a room over St Anne’s Close gateway, then attached to a house belonging to Mr James Harris, the father of Lord Malmesbury.

  Salisbury was interested too in publishing at that time and the Salisbury and Winchester Journal is the fifth oldest provincial newspaper. The printing and illustrations of the early numbers are most remarkable, but the Salisbury Journal is connected with English literature from its having in 1766 published the first edition of The Vicar of Wakefield.

  The buildings of Salisbury remain, and its traditions, but what gives life to the place are the people in it. Salisbury streets are narrow, too narrow for the crowds who throng them, and who greatly outnumber the population of the city. In Salisbury, even more than elsewhere, the answer to a question as to the way is pretty certain to be answered by, “I am a stranger here”.

  This cathedral city is entirely in touch with the life of the soil. It is the market town of a wide area, and farmers and labourers with their wives from all South Wilts bring every Tuesday and Saturday, into its otherwise rarefied atmosphere, the fresh air of the land. Village accents are commoner in the streets than are the refined voices of clerics. Sheep and cattle, pigs and ducks and all kinds of poultry are to be heard in the city more widely than the chanting of the choir; and there is no part of Salisbury more bubbling with life than is the market place with its motley variety of stalls.

  During the war Salisbury was even fuller than were most English towns with soldiers from all quarters of the British Empire and of the American armies. Both the British and American armies had headquarters within a mile or two of the city and these overflowed into it when work was over for the day. There continues to be the large number of visitors drawn to the most famous of all cathedral cities and they make Salisbury into a cosmopolitan assembly. So from all countries and from many a trade and career the lovers of beauty and of peace are drawn to Salisbury by the powerful magnet of the spire.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE WILTSHIRE BOROUGHS

  LEAVING out the city of Salisbury, ther
e are seven Boroughs, and because all but one existed for centuries before the superstition arose that a charter created a borough, seven of them have descended to us with their own individual characters and constitutions. Till the Municipal Corporations Act of 1882, all borough charters had been granted by different Sovereigns in order to confirm certain rights and privileges which they had already possessed, “from time out of mind”, as the old formula expressed it. In 1882 Parliament decreed that “ Close Corporations” must cease to exist, and an ancient borough could only escape extinction by accepting the principle of democratic election, and then petitioning the Crown for reincorporation. To abolish these sturdy little boroughs would have been a sad loss for the county, for they show democratic government at its best. They really do approach the Attic ideal, for the Athenians believed that a democracy could only exist in a place small enough for the voice of one single orator to reach simultaneously its whole population. Neither the people of Athens nor the Wiltshire burgesses had as yet been initiated into the horrors of loudspeakers. These know no territorial boundary, and if they had already existed, the idea of locality might have been wiped out altogether; but as it was, the six ancient boroughs qualified for continued municipal existence. They are Calne, Chippenham, Devizes, Malmesbury, Marlborough and Wilton. While the boroughs were thus fighting for their future, Swindon consisted of the two urban district councils of old and new Swindon, which had both been established in 1864, but it was going through a period of growth in its population which completely changed its character. Between 1851 and 1939 the population grew from 4,876 to 61,000, and in 1900 the two district councils united to form a new borough, the present borough of Swindon. So, with the city of Salisbury in South Wilts, there are now eight boroughs in the county.