Fortunately I had just been given a 1958 Souvenir Guide to the cathedral, and you can see it on the right hand side of this picture – it’s the little dalek-like thing.

The vergers are the font (sic) of all knowledge here, and Andy said that indeed he remembered this stove, which after retiring from active use (its stovepipe hole can still be seen in the ceiling) did duty as a collecting box in the cloisters.

It is called a Gurney Stove, and our visitors were from the Gurney family, having recently visited The Castle, Bude, who have displays about the inventions of Sir Goldsworthy Gurney.  “Grace’s Guide To British Industrial History” contains lots more details on his life and inventions, and says his stoves were popular for heating the large spaces in cathedrals and are still installed in Ely, Durham and Peterborough.

Andy’s help and knowledge were key to understanding this. As volunteers and staff age we need to capture their knowledge somehow.  These oral histories are really important, especially as we are moving from paper/film into an e-only society.

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

The standard guides’ answer is “We never had monks because our cathedral was secular, not monastic.”

The problem is that this just generates a whole lot of extra questions:

• What is the difference between a secular and a monastic cathedral?
• Why did they have a mixture of secular and monastic cathedrals?
• Why do you have cloisters if you don’t have monks?
• Is the head person in a monastic cathedral a monk or a bishop?
• Were there any monks in Salisbury?

This may take a few posts to answer, and I’ll revise these posts if I get things wrong (please comment).

Let’s pick somewhere to start.

For administrative purposes, England and Wales are divided up into geographical areas called dioceses.  Each diocese is given a bishop by the central church organisation.  The bishop runs the diocese and the priests and churches in it.

One of the churches in the diocese has been chosen to site the bishop’s seat (the cathedra).

Because monks stay in one place, they have the time and the money and the land and the motivation to build large lovely churches/abbeys, and when these are in a decent sized town (Canterbury, Winchester, Durham) they make a great place to base a bishop.  In other cases (London, York, Exeter) the bishop – whose role would include plenty of land and income – could build a large church himself.

This church is then called a cathedral church.  Which means by the way that “cathedral” is actually an adjective, not a noun.  Anyway, in common parlance this “cathedral” includes the building and the people who work in that building and the activities that go on in that building, and it is run by the Dean.

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) meant not-choosing-to-be-a-monk, so the Dean was a proper priest but had chosen not to join one of the monastic orders.

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

The dioceses of Sherborne and Ramsey were merged to form the new diocese of Salisbury and in 1078 Osmund (about whom more later) became its first 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 documented the Rite of Sarum which spelled out the various processions required in different services.  And some of those – yes! – required the cloisters, so the cathedral churches at Old Sarum and then at New Sarum were built with cloisters.

I think that has answered most of the questions except “were there any monks in Salisbury”, which will repay a bit more investigation.

PS I hope you like the caption of the map “..at the close of the Middle Ages”.  I have a mental image of a committee back in maybe 1499 meeting and saying “Can we declare that the Middle Ages have finished now?”

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

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

Oak Apple 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, 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 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.

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

PS There are breadstones in Great Wishford keeping a record since the year 1800 of the price of bread. The latest of these has been carved by Grays Stone Carving where I did my stone carving course.

The post Why is Oak Apple Day being celebrated? appeared first on 332 Steps.

The whispery ones are made of wood and the boomy ones are made of metal.  There are many pipes hidden in the boxes and there are some really deep ones in the North Transept.

I decided it was time to do a bit more homework.

The metal is usually lead with some tin, and zinc if you need a really big pipe (the biggest ones in the Cathedral are 32’).  The metal pipes are mainly cylindrical.  Tin and lead don’t form an alloy and they separate when they are mixed and cooled, so the result is called “spotted metal”.

The wood is usually hardwood although softwood can be used on the bigger ones.  The wooden pipes are mainly rectangular.

As Salisbury Cathedral’s organ has 65 stops, which means 65 different collections of pipes each producing a different noise, it has a LOT of pipes – 3,870 of them or maybe 3,852 depending on who you believe.  The stops have names which could feature in a somewhat specific pub quiz:

“Question: Which of these are NOT stops on our organ:

• • Hautboy
  • Salicional
  • Nazard
  • Fagotto
  • Octave Flute”

“Answer: I hope that you spotted that we don’t have a “Fagotto” – ours is a Contra Fagotto!!”

Hearty laughter and much rueful thigh slapping from the assembled quiz participants.

Our “Father Willis” Organ was made by Henry Willis & Sons who have a Facebook page here with some great photos including these which help to answer your next question: “How do they get all those pipes into those two little boxes?”  Click on that link with caution because there are loads of interesting videos there too…

The “Theatre Organ Fact Finder” site has tons of information but a pretty terrible menu structure, so the link above takes you to the general search for “pipe”.  Although it is supposed to be about theatre organs, it gives tons of information about classical ones and clearly explains where they are different.

Enough from me.  Here are 12 minutes of John Challenger explaining the sound it produces.  The little writing down each side of the screen shows you which stops/controls he is using.

One of the best bits of guiding in the cathedral is when the organ is being played.

The post What are the organ pipes made of? appeared first on 332 Steps.

On the 16th March I led a tower tour at 12:45. As usual when we arrived at the top of the tower/ base of the spire I turned on the FalconCam and there was Mrs Falcon sitting on the nesting box.

We did the usual sightseeing out of the doors, looked at the spire construction and then back to the camera where Mrs Falcon had disappeared, leaving… a potato?

The camera picture on the PC inside the spire is pretty grainy but it certainly looked like a rather tasty russet potato.

We agreed that for some reason the falcon had turned vegetarian and set off back down the stairs.

There are a few simple rules in detective stories and one is that the obvious answer can sometimes be the answer. If a bird is sitting on a nest and then the bird is not on the nest but something else is, the thing on the nest might, just might, be an egg. Even if it looks like a potato.

Because your guide didn’t know that the way birds look after eggs, is that they lay them one at a time over several days, and only when the clutch is complete do they start sitting on them full time to incubate them so that they all hatch together.

This picture is from a few days later.

This guiding business is harder than it looks.

The post Is that a potato? appeared first on 332 Steps.

Salisbury has a lot invested in the “Five Rivers” tag. But after reading the phrase “where five rivers meet” once too often in a book, I thought it was time to be Curious.

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 now yearning to read books containing the phrase “where five rivers meet” then some of the Salisbury-based fiction that was recommended to me are:

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 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 read “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.

I’ll add more to this post as I find them. Please put suggestions in the comments.

The post Do five rivers really meet here? appeared first on 332 Steps.

When I was a newly-qualified tower guide I tried to learn the core facts and figures, but fortunately someone has nailed them to the model of the cathedral.

So if we add up the Chilmark, Purbeck, Tower/Spire, 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 86,000 tonnes or 86 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 86 billion litres of helium, or a balloon approximately 550m across.

The post How much does the cathedral weigh? appeared first on 332 Steps.