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.

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Oak Apple day or Royal Oak Day is the 29th of May. On this day all English citizens used to celebrate the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660. They HAD to celebrate it, because it was a public holiday with a special service required in the Book of Common Prayer.  It was only removed in 1859 by the Anniversary Days Observance Act (which also removed the 5th November, Guy Fawkes Night). It is called Oak Apple Day because Charles II successfully evaded his pursuers by hiding up an oak tree, not a feat of courage that everyone would want to have commemorated publicly, but there you go.

Coincidentally, or maybe not, the villagers of Great Wishford celebrate on Oak Apple Day their ongoing right from a Charter of 1603 to gather green wood from the local Grovely Woods. They get up early – waking the whole village in the process – gather wood up to the prescribed maximum size, and march with sprigs of oak to Salisbury Cathedral where they perform a (slightly embarrassed) commemorative dance, are blessed by a (somewhat surprised) Vicar of the Close, and have their rights read out and affirmed with a shout of “Grovely! Grovely! Grovely! And all Grovely” inside the cathedral.

The 50p bookstall in Salisbury Market often has a box of local history booklets which are well worth leafing through.  One has the entire charter printed out:

“Item the lords freeholders Tennants and Inhabitance of the Mannor of greate Wisheford or soe many of them as would in auntient tyme have used to goe in a daunce to the Cathedrall Church of our blessed Ladie in the Cittie of newe Sarum… and theire made theire clayme to theire custome in the Forrest of Grovely in theis words: Groveley Groveley and all Groveley.”

It is much more restrained than rolling a cheese down a hill, and the commercial opportunities remain unexploited.

The book “Old Church Lore” by William Andrews mysteriously doesn’t mention this particular ceremony in its chapter on Royal Oak Day although the requirement in Yorkshire to pelt with eggs anyone not wearing oak leaves does stick in the memory.

PS What is the link between Oak Apples and the Magna Carta and Jane Austen?

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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?

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So if we add up the Chilmark, Purbeck, Lead, Timber, and an allowance of 75 tonnes for the stained glass plus another 50 tonnes or so of random artefacts (stalls, pulpits, altars etc) we get around 80,000 tonnes or 80 million kgs.

One litre of helium can lift about 1g (making a small allowance for the weight of the balloon itself) so to lift the cathedral you would need 80 billion litres of helium, or a balloon approximately 530m across.

(image produced by ME with no help from any AI agents)

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The links on each book are to Goodreads.

Edward Rutherfurd’s “Sarum” – best by far. Read it at least twice, and then you can use it as a handy doorstop as it weighs about 3kg. The story of the stonemason Osmund carving the chapter house frieze is just great.

Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth” – not about Salisbury despite what everyone says. Also everyone in the book ends up exactly as unhappy as they were when it started. However the setting of the book during the period of maximum cathedral building is very interesting.

William Golding’s “The Spire” – written as an entry for the Nobel Literature Prize, which it won. No need to read this one – you can tell people you’ve read it because they won’t have got to the end either. The story finishes before the spire does, by the way.

Instead see if you can find a copy of “Elias – A story of the founding of Salisbury” which has been written by Sue Allenby, one of the guides at the cathedral.  It is thoroughly researched and is the book I wish I could have been clever enough to write.  It is however out of print so you will need to find a second hand copy.

And also sitting proudly on the line between non-fiction and fiction is Leslie Thomas’ “Almost Heaven” – I suspect that the byline “True and almost true tales about a cathedral” is simply there to allow him to tell true stories more freely.

You may be able to guess from this blog that I have spent more time reading non-fiction than fiction about Salisbury.  Some other Salisbury-based books I haven’t yet read are:

“Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plain” by local author Barnaby Norris,

“Cathedral of Bones” which is the first in the Ela of Salisbury Medieval Mysteries series starring our very own Ela Longespee as a fictional detective (hmm) by J.G. Lewis, and

“The Red Room” in the Atticus Priest series by Mark Dawson.

And finally, in my constant quest to ensure that you spend even more time discovering things, there is a marvellous site called Mappit which allows you to search books by their location.

Here is the entry for Salisbury Cathedral – as always, check your diary for the rest of the day before clicking on this one: https://www.mappit.net/bookmap/places/605/salisbury-cathedral-salisbury-england-gb/

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Here they are:

With the Wylye joining 3 miles upstream, the Bourne 1 mile downstream and the Ebble joining 3 miles downstream of Salisbury, I guess the phrase “where two rivers meet” isn’t quite so distinctive.

Anyway, it is important if you live here to be able to name all the rivers, and the trick is to know that they go in alphabetical order clockwise from the top: Avon, Bourne, Ebble, Nadder, Wylye.

And you will know that the word Avon means river and the word Bourne also means river, so the confluence of the Avon and the Bourne is truly where two rivers meet.

If you are still questing after the phrase “where five rivers meet” then you may want to see the post on some Lighter Reading.

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And even if there was, where would it have come from?

Certainly not from the Calendario Romano, which takes itself very seriously as a purveyor of useful and accurate information about the Vatian City.

The fact that all the illustrations are of, er, well, young men in clerical attire is, I am assured, entirely coincidental.

The calendar costs €24.90 and I believe it can be dispatched in a plain paper wrapping if you wish to purchase it discreetly.

PS There are two versions of the calendar this year, and the second includes a picture of a cat. I suspect they are trying to broaden its appeal to Childless Cat Ladies just in case the offer of non-stop historical notes about the Vatican wasn’t sufficient.

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This was installed by Francis Price, who was re-creating an experiment suggested by Christopher Wren, to “plumb” the spire, that is, to drop a plumb line from the inside of the top all the way down to the cathedral floor.

In Francis Price’s own words:

“Sir Christopher directs, in his Survey of 1668, to remove some of the timbers in the tower, and spire, that a plummet might be let fall from the highest part possible, to the pavement at once; and that this trial were often repeated, at some distance of time, to see if it continue in its decline. 

“In 1681, Mr. Thomas Naish (then clerk of the works) and since that, Mr. William Naish, in the same office, used a particular method in trying this experiment, viz. after many trials they fixed a staple near the weather door, in the north-east angle of the octagon, which doubtless was the highest part manageable for the principal timbers.  At the middle and outside of this staple, the line, with a plummet of sufficient weight, was let down to the pavement at once, and there the centre of the plummet was marked upon the said pavement, for future repetition.  This was the most simple and easy way, by which to keep a register.  Both these gentlemen concluded from their trials, that there has been no change in the declination. 

“In 1736, the late Mr. Naish tried the same experiment, and found all as usual.”

After a discussion of an alternative method, Mr Price continues:

“I think [this] method used by Mr. Naish and his father, is most to be relied on, till accidents shall hinder the application of it.  Their remarks being made upon the common pavement of the church, my lord bishop thought it might be the better way to take all possible care of, and remark the point of the plummet’s centre, that it might be transferred to a stone of more substance, with a foundation brought up from the natural soil to rest upon, as thereby less subject to be moved. 

“And in taking the necessary care, it was thought the best way to find the true centre of the building, or rather of the grand legs, which it was easy to measure from the square parts of the marble bases, that stand clear and measurable in the north and south aisles.  These lines being drawn, so as to point out the true centre of the grand legs, the centre of the aforesaid plummet falls to the north two inches and a quarter, and to the east seven inches and a half.  This may be a guide in times to come, and to mark it the better, there are holes drilled into the marble steps leading up in to the choir, as likewise on the old marble tombs to the westward.  There are likewise holes drilled into the common pavement, north and south, which may become a guide while the pavement remains in its present situation.

“By these means the new stone was fixed, and on November 3, 1739, the late Mr. Naish tried the usual experiment, and found no variation; therefore a brass pin is inserted in the new stone, where the centre of the plummet did usually fall.  This will remain a sufficient direction for future observation; and it serves to show, that there has not been the least increase of the declination, during the space of fifty-eight years, viz. since the first observation was made.”

And here indeed we have the Center of the Tower (the mark in the middle of the square) and, 2 ¼ ” N and 7 ½” E, a little picture of the staple attached to an octagon, which is the size of the spire inside the weather door.

Which may lead you to some further questions:

What is the weather door?

Why did Christopher Wren survey the cathedral?

What other methods have people tried to measure the spire’s lean?

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375′ or 114m above the ground is as high as you can go inside the spire, and at that point you have to climb through a very little door on the north side of the spire.  It’s just above the third decorated band, on the north side of the cathedral, and can clearly (if microscopically) be seen in the usual picture that everyone takes.  To add some variety to your life, here’s a picture at night with the door indicated.

The Salisbury Journal have kindly published a picture of it being used, which might make a fun caption competition:

Possible questions inspired (ha ha) by this might include:

Did people historically climb the spire?

How do you get to the weather door?

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