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.

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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.

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