When the Sarum story opens, there were around 20 dioceses in England and Wales, mostly set up in the 600s (yes! things did happen in Britain between the Romans leaving and William the Conqueror arriving!) and the bishops’ seats (called cathedras) were in a fairly even mix of monastic and secular cathedrals.

As part of William’s re-organisation of the British church, the dioceses of Sherborne and Ramsey were merged to form the new diocese of Salisbury and in 1078 his Chancellor Osmund took a sideways move from working on the Domesday project to become its bishop. Previously the cathedra had been in Sherborne Abbey, which was monastic.  Osmund was learned and chaste and very keen on order but he was not a monk. His cathedra was going to be based at (Old) Sarum, and so he led the project to build a fine new secular church for it.

One of the things that he did do, which is very important to our story, is that he developed the Rite of Sarum which spelled out the various processions required in different services.  And some of those – yes! – required going out into the cloisters, so the cathedral churches at Old Sarum and then at New Sarum were built with cloisters.

Here is a reconstruction of the original layout of the current cathedral, done by Christopher Wordsworth in his book “Salisbury Ceremonies and Processions”.

Another point about Osmund is that he was very keen on books, and built up a large library at the cathedral, reputedly even writing, illuminating and binding some of them himself.  In “The Medieval Scriptorium”, Sara Charles develops the theory that the cloisters contained carrels or study rooms – still observable in Gloucester Cathedral – offering a perfect combination of shade and light for writing and illuminating.  So although Osmund’s priests didn’t live the monkish “life in common” they may still have enjoyed having a quiet place to work on their manuscripts between services, or to study books too.

PS It is entirely coincidental that the cloisters are the perfect shape for pancake day races.

Questions arising from this might include:

• Were our cloisters ever used for other things?
• What has changed in the cathedral from the original layout?
• What happened to Osmund’s library?

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The standard guides’ answer is “We never had monks because our cathedral was secular, not monastic” although this just generates the very reasonable question “What is the difference between a secular and a monastic cathedral? And why did they have both types?”

The answer lies back in the earlier days of the Christian Church.  Christianity came to England by three routes – through the Roman Empire, then from monks arriving from Ireland and then from missionaries arriving from Gaul.

Originally followers of the Christian Church were encouraged to live a life “in common”, that is, with only shared possessions and spaces.  The Rules laid down by Augustine for his community in Hippo (Algeria) in the late 4^th century defined a precise and very austere daily timetable, with activities focused inwards into the community and celibacy required.  As the church expanded into the developing economic areas of Gaul and then England, the Benedictine monks established a way of living in common which could fit more easily into a feudal society.

Going into the time of the Conquest (mid-late 11^th century) the need to provide canons to fit in with the growth of towns and the expansion of education and to provide trained clerks for court administration meant that a more independent way of life would be needed for some of the clergy.  The full “secular” system allowed individual possessions and incomes and allocated individual estates or prebends to individual canons, and the requirement for celibacy was increasingly ignored.

A cathedral could decide to move between different systems, including moving back to being run by monks. In the early English cathedrals of Canterbury, Exeter, Wells and Hereford the “common life” with a refectory and a dormitory was re-introduced for the lower clergy although more senior clergy could still have their own houses and incomes.

William the Conqueror appointed his counsellor Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury after the Conquest and instigated a major reorganisation of the English church (referred to as the Council of London).  Perhaps partly due to Lanfranc’s own background as a Benedictine monk – and in the face of opposition from some of William’s bishops – he encouraged more cathedrals to keep or return to the monastic method, ending up with ten monastic cathedrals and nine secular ones (see lists at the bottom of this post).

The knotty problem of clerical celibacy remained unresolved, by the way.

So to answer the question: In a monastic cathedral, the cathedral is run by the head monk, the prior or abbot, taking on the additional job of Dean. In a secular cathedral, the Dean is the most senior priest.  “Secular” nowadays means not-religious, but back then (when everything was religious) it meant not-choosing-to-be-a-monk, so the Dean is a proper priest who has chosen not to join one of the monastic orders.

Which inevitably leads to some more questions:

• Why do you have cloisters if you didn’t have monks?
• Were there any monks in Salisbury?
• Can you tell me more about the different orders of monks?

Finally, a couple of lists, for people who like lists:

1. The secular cathedrals:

• Chichester
• Exeter
• Hereford
• Lichfield
• Lincoln
• London
• Salisbury
• Wells
• York

2. The monastic cathedrals:

• Bath
• Canterbury
• Carlisle
• Coventry
• Durham
• Ely
• Norwich
• Rochester
• Winchester
• Worcester

And for a bonus extra point in a rather specialist pub quiz, the monastic cathedrals were all Benedictine except for Carlisle which was Augustinian.

The post Where are the monks? appeared first on 332 Steps.

So here is the current list of tall-ests, complete with disqualification for comparison with Salisbury:

When the spire took the cathedral’s total height up to 123m some time in the early 1300s it could have briefly been said to be the tallest building in the world, depending on whether or not you count the Great Pyramid of Giza (139m) as a building or simply a very large pile of stones.

Old St Paul’s and Lincoln achieved greater heights at around the same time but didn’t manage to sustain them.  Old St Paul’s had a 149m timber and lead spire which fell down after it was struck by lightning in 1561, before the whole cathedral was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1665. Lincoln reached 160m also using a central spire made of timber and lead but it collapsed in 1548.

And ever since then Salisbury Cathedral has been the tall-est cathedral in the UK, and indeed it was the tall-est building of any sort in the UK until the Post Office Tower was built in 1964.

Over in France Beauvais reached 153m but the tower fell down in 1573 and the whole project became an object lesson in how to, and how not to, build very high naves.

Strasbourg Cathedral which was topped out in 1439 at 142m claims, with a pointed jibe at Salisbury’s vertical extension, to be the “earliest church to have been the world’s tallest which still stands at its original height”.  Ha ha so much for you people who go for a Spire Upgrade.  Close inspection of the photo would seem to imply that it is also the tallest cathedral with a penthouse and possibly en-suite swimming pool.

The Basilica Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, with its highest point at 172.5m reached in February 2026 is not a cathedral, despite having something like 17 spires (depending on when you are reading this).  But it did replace Ulm Minister, 161.5m completed in 1890 and apparently “intentionally built a few metres taller than Cologne Cathedral” in the quest to be the tall-est church building in the world.

And although the Basilica in Yamoussoukro in the Ivory Coast at 158m is doubly disqualified from our Salisbury-centric -est definition because it is a non-cathedral with a dome, not a spire, it has managed to bag the Guiness Record for the larg-est church by dint of being very wide as well as very tall.

However Cologne Cathedral which was finally completed after a project lasting 630 years in 1880 is irritatingly non-disqualifiable and is therefore officially the tall-est cathedral, sorry Strasbourg.  Just to rub salt in the wound, it has two spires each over 157m tall, giving them a spare one just in case.  However, as Mr Wikipedia points out, it is handily Not Medieval.

So the scoreboard is:

• Tallest ever church in the UK to be still standing: Salisbury whoo hoo
• Tallest medieval church: Strasbourg
• Tallest cathedral: Cologne
• Tallest church: Sagrada Familia

Follow-up questions might include:

• How tall was the cathedral originally?
• Where should you put a spire on a cathedral?
• Why is Strasbourg Cathedral so interesting?
• What happened to Beauvais Cathedral?

If you are a statistics fiend there are more facts about our cathedral in this post.

The post Is it the tallest spire in the world? appeared first on 332 Steps.

Nope.

The book “Endless Street” by John Challenger is very helpful here.

The Bishop already had a manor at Milford – which was also and confusingly called Old Sarisburie  –with a small village including St Martin’s church.  The churchmen’s plans were bigger than just a cathedral – they were going to lay out a whole new town, and they needed a lot of space for it.

The land chosen was conveniently near the crossroads between the east-west road from Winchester via Clarendon Palace to Wilton, and the north-south road from Old Sarum to the Avon ford and onwards to the important port at Christchurch.

The lines of these key roads can still be seen, incorporated into, and distorting a bit, the new town’s grid of roads.

The bishop would get the planning uplift (as we now call it) from the conversion of fairly low-grade agricultural land into residential plots which could be rented out for 12d a year.  More money would come from running a market and having a water mill, so although the bishop would be putting a lot of money into the construction project, he could also expect to get plenty back.

Other villages already established nearby were Fisherton Anger to the west and Harnham to the south.

A Curious Reader might be wondering:

• What is Clarendon Palace?
• Was Salisbury the only New Town being built?
• Why are some of the streets in the grid wiggly?
• Do five rivers really meet here?

PS Both the old and new cathedrals are apparently on a ley line joining Stonehenge to Clearbury Ring through Old Sarum.  I am not sure why I told you this.

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