Sarum Read online

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Edward Rutherfurd was born in Salisbury and educated in Wiltshire and Cambridge. He did live in New York, but returned to his roots to research and write his vast, best-selling saga, Sarum, based on the history of Salisbury. Russka, his second novel, tells the sweeping history of Russia from the Cossack horsemen of the steppes to the epic events of the Bolshevik revolution. His third novel, London, is the remarkable story of the greatest city on earth, bringing all the richness of London’s past unforgettably to life. In his fourth novel, The Forest, Rutherfurd weaves the history and legends of the New Forest into compelling form. Sarum, Russka, London, The Forest, Dublin and Ireland Awakening are all available in Arrow.

  Also by Edward Rutherfurd

  Russka

  London

  The Forest

  Dublin: Foundation

  Ireland Awakening

  New York

  SARUM

  Edward Rutherfurd

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446472026

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Arrow Books in 1988

  33

  Copyright © Edward Rutherfurd 1987

  The right of Edward Rutherfurd to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published in Great Britain in 1987 by

  Century

  Arrow Books

  Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9780099527305

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am deeply indebted to the following, all experts in their respective fields, who with great kindness and patience read different parts of this book and corrected errors. Any errors that remain, however, are mine alone.

  Dr J. H. Bettey, University of Bristol; Mr Desmond Bonney, Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England; Miss Alison Borthwick, formerly of the Archaeological Section, Wiltshire County Council Library and Museum Service; Dr John Chandler, Local Studies Officer, Wiltshire County Council Library and Museum Service; Miss Suzanne Eward, Librarian and Keeper of the Muniments of Salisbury Cathedral; Mr David A. Hinton, University of Southampton; Dr T. B. James, King Alfred’s College of Higher Education, Winchester; Mr K. H. Rogers, County Archivist and Diocesan Records Officer, Wiltshire County Council; Mr Roy Spring, Clerk of the Works, Salisbury Cathedral.

  Thanks are also due to the following, all of whom gave valuable help and advice in different ways:

  The Right Reverend John Austin Baker, Bishop of Salisbury; The Very Reverend Doctor Sydney Evans, Dean Emeritus of Salisbury; Mr David Algar; Miss S. A. Cross, formerly of The Museum of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society; Mrs Elizabeth Godfrey; Sir Westrow Hulse, Bt.; Mrs Alison Campbell Jensen; Dr P. H. Robinson, Curator, The Museum of the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society; Mr Peter R. Saunders, Curator, Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum; Mr and Mrs H. S. Taylor-Young; Mrs Jane Walford.

  I am grateful to the Director of the Wiltshire County Council Library and Museum Service for kindly allowing his library to become my second home over a period of more than three years, and to the staff of Salisbury Library for much valuable assistance.

  No thanks can be enough to Mrs Margaret Hunter and the staff of Saxon Office Services, Shaftesbury for their unfailing help and good humour in the typing and constant altering of the manuscript.

  I have also been most fortunate in finding an agent, Gill Coleridge of Anthony Sheil Associates and two editors, Rosie Cheetham of Century Hutchinson and Betty Prashker of Crown Publishers who early on had faith in this project and gave me such unfailing help and encouragement.

  I am deeply grateful to my wife Susan, my mother and the Hon. Diana Makgill for their respective patience, unstinting help and hospitality.

  Special thanks are also due to Miss Alison Borthwick for her expert maps and illustrations.

  Finally, and most important of all, I owe the greatest possible debt of gratitude to Dr John Chandler whose book, Endless Street opened the doors of Salisbury’s history to me and has been my constant companion. For over three years, with unfailing patience and courtesy he has guided me towards my objective, and without his kind help and expert advice this book could not have been written.

  PREFACE

  The name Sarum

  The word Sarum is, strictly speaking, an inaccurate rendering of the abbreviation used by medieval scribes when they wished to write the name of the place called Salisbury.

  But having misread the scribal hand, men found the name pleasing; and the term Sarum has been used in writing and probably in speech for seven hundred and fifty years, to describe the town, the diocese and the area of Salisbury.

  For purposes of clarity, I have chosen throughout this novel to apply the term Sarum to the immediate area around the city. When describing the individual settlements or towns on the site, I have used the names they carried at the time reached in the narrative – Sorviodunum in Roman times, Sarisberie in Norman, and Salisbury thereafter. Old Sarum is the proper name of the original town and is used as such in context.

  The novel Sarum

  Sarum is a novel and to see it as anything else would be a mistake.

  All the families of Porteus, Wilson, Shockley, Mason, Godfrey, Moody, Barnikel are fictitious as are, therefore, their individual parts in all events described.

  But in following the story of these imaginary families down the centuries I have tried, insofar as is possible, to set them amongst people and events that either did exist, or might have done.

  In the prehistoric chapters I have felt free to choose dates and telescope developments somewhat, but under advice from those experts who have so kindly assisted me.

  However, the reader may care to note that the date of the separation of the island of Britain from the European mainland is usually set somewhere between 9,000 and 6,000 B.C.

  Of the religious, astronomical and building practices at Stonehenge nothing can be said with certainty and I have felt free to make my own selection from the many theories suggested.

  There and elsewhere I have also placed in the text, from time to time, items of historical information which may help to orientate the reader who is not intimately familiar with English history. These are not, and make no pretence to being a detailed historical account. They are merely signposts.

  Topography and Avonsford

  There are so many villages, hillforts, and other natural features around Sarum, that in order to avoid a bewildering confusion of settings, I have found it necessary to make one alteration to the landscape. The village of Avonsford does not exist. It is an amalgam of places and buildings drawn from all over the area and I have sited it – somewhere – in the valley of the river Avon that lies to the north of Salisbury and which I have chosen to call, for purposes of narrative convenience, the Avon valley. It may be of interest that the following features, in particular, which I have sited at Avonsford all exist
, or have existed, within a few miles radius of Salisbury: an iron age farm, a Roman villa, fields called Paradise and Purgatory, the miz-maze, earthwork enclosures, dewponds, fulling mills, dovecotes, manor houses as detailed, churches with box pews.

  Where other local places have had different names at different periods, I have chosen the most familiar – as in the case of Grovely Wood and Clarendon Forest. Longford appears a little closer to Clarendon than it is.

  Salisbury street names have also changed over time; but generally I have chosen not to confuse the reader with this information.

  Otherwise places in the text – Salisbury, Christchurch. Wilton, Old Sarum – are as described.

  Family names and origins

  Of the fictional families in the story – Wilson, Mason and Godfrey are all common names which may be found in almost any English town. The derivations given in the story for the first two are those normally given; the derivation for the Godfreys of Avonsford is invented, but typical of one way in which names were derived from Norman originals.

  There was, as it happens, a real Godfrey in Salisbury some centuries ago who became a mayor of the town and his family, with its different origin, makes a brief appearance in our story, and is clearly distinguished from the fictional family.

  Shockley is a rarer name and the derivation I have given is likely.

  As for the derivation of the much rarer name of Barnikel, this belongs to English folklore, but I like to believe it. The name Porteus is found more usually in the north – often Porteous. Its Roman derivation is invented. Names do not, unfortunately, go back so far.

  But families do. In recent decades, historians and archaeologists seem to have discovered increasing evidence of continuity of occupation in many areas of England. While it is generally true that the Saxon Settlement tended to push the British people westward, there is no reason to suppose that none remained where they were. The idea that there may be people in the Sarum area today whose bloodlines go back to the occupants of the region in Celtic or pre-Celtic times cannot be proved, but is not entirely fanciful.

  The Dune

  I have deliberately chosen to use the modern and familiar term dune for the hillfort of Old Sarum. Properly this should be written dün.

  Summary

  No place in England, I believe, has a longer visible history of building and occupation than the Sarum region. The wealth of archaeological information, let alone historical record is so overwhelming that even a novelist, wishing to convey anything near the full story of the place would have to write a book three or four times as long as I have done.

  Faced with such an embarrassment of riches, the author can only make a personal selection and hope that in doing so, he may have conveyed something of the wonder of the place.

  This book is dedicated to those who built and to those who are now trying to save Salisbury Spire

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Edward Rutherfurd

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Maps

  Family Trees

  Dedication

  Old Sarum

  Journey to Sarum

  The Barrow

  The Henge

  Sorviodunum

  Twilight

  The Two Rivers

  The Castle

  New Sarum

  The Founding

  The Death

  The Rose

  A Journey From Sarum

  New World

  The Unrest

  The Calm

  Boney

  Empire

  The Henge II

  The Encampment

  The Spire

  Old Sarum

  JOURNEY TO SARUM

  First, before the beginning of Sarum, came a time when the world was a colder and darker place.

  Over a huge area of the northern hemisphere – perhaps a sixth of the whole globe – stretched a mighty covering of ice. It lay over all of northern Asia; it covered Canada, Scandinavia and about two thirds of the future land of Britain. Had it been possible to cross this gigantic continent of ice, the journey would have been some five thousand miles from whichever direction it was approached. The volume of the ice was stupendous; even at its outer edge it was thirty feet high.

  In a desolate, dark belt to the south of the ice lay a vast subarctic wasteland of empty tundra, several hundred miles across.

  This was the colder, darker world, some twenty thousand years before the birth of Christ.

  Since the huge casing of ice contained a considerable portion of the earth’s water, the seas were lower than those in later times – some did not exist at all – and so the lands to the south stood higher, their sheer cliffs frowning upon empty chasms that have long since vanished under the waters.

  The northern world was a quieter place too. Over the ice, and the tundra, there reigned a silence that seemed to have no end. True, there were terrible winds, huge blizzards that howled across the land of ice; true, in the arctic tundra there were sparse forms of life – a meagre vegetation, small groups of hardy animals – which eked out a bleak existence in the freezing wastes; but to all intents the land was empty: thousands upon thousands of miles of desert; and in the vast glacial cap itself, all forms of life and the seas which might have spawned them were locked up in the great stasis of the ice.

  Such was the last Ice Age. Before, there had been many like it; after it, there will be many more. And in the gaps between these ages, men have come and gone upon the northern lands.

  Centuries passed; thousands of years passed, and nothing changed, nor seemed likely to. Then, at some time around 10,000 B.C., a change began to occur: at the outer edge of the frozen wastes, the temperature began to rise. It was not enough to be noticed in a decade, hardly in a century, and it did not yet have any effect upon the ice; but it rose nonetheless. Centuries passed. It rose a little more. And then the ice cap began to melt. Still the process was gradual: a stream here, a small river there; blocks of ice a few yards across in one place, half a mile in another, breaking away from the edge of the ice cap, a process hardly noticeable against the thousands of miles of the vast continent of ice that remained. But slowly this melting gathered pace. New land, tundra, emerged from under the ice; new rivers were born; ice floes moved southwards into the seas, which began to rise. A new ferment was in progress upon the surface of the earth. Century after century, the face of the continents changed as new lands began to define themselves and new life began, cautiously, to spread across the earth.

  The last Ice Age was in retreat.

  For several thousand years this process continued.

  About seven thousand five hundred years before the birth of Christ, in the still bleak and uninviting season that was summer in those northern lands, a single hunter undertook a journey that was impossible. His name, as nearly as it can be written, was Hwll.

  When she heard the plan, his woman Akun first looked at him in disbelief and then protested.

  “No one will go with us,” she argued. “How shall we find food without help?”

  “I can hunt alone,” he replied. “We shall eat.”

  She shook her head vigorously in disbelief.

  “This place that you speak of; it does not exist.”

  “It does.” Hwll knew that it did. His father had told him, and his father’s father before that. Though he did not know it, the information was already several centuries old.

  “We shall die,” Akun said simply.

  They were standing on the ridge above their camp: a pitiful little cluster of wigwams made of reindeer skins and supported on long poles, which the five families that comprised their hunting group had set up when the winter snows departed. Across the ridge, as far as the eye could see, stretched the empty expanse of coarse grey-brown grass, dotted with the occasional bush, dwarf birch or clump of rocks, to which ragged lichen and stringy moss had at
tached themselves. Grey clouds scudded over the brown land, driven by a chill north east wind.

  This was the tundra. For when the ice of the last glacial age began to retreat, it laid bare a desolate region that extended uninterrupted across the entire northern Eurasian land mass. From Scotland to China, in these vast, empty spaces similar in climate to Siberia today, small bands of hunters known to archaeologists as Upper Paleolithic, followed by Mesolithic man, had followed the sparse game that roamed the barren wastes. Stocky bison, reindeer, wild horse and the stately elk would appear on the horizon, then disappear again, and the hunters would follow, often for many days, in order to make their kill and survive another season. It was a cold, precarious life that continued for hundreds of generations.

  It was in the extreme north west corner of this gigantic tundra region that Hwll and his woman found themselves.

  He was typical of these wanderers, who were of no single racial type. He was five foot seven, just above average height, with high cheekbones, coal black eyes, a deeply rutted and weatherbeaten face with skin that seemed to have been worn like the landscape into innumerable valleys, creeks and gullies; he had half his teeth, which were yellow, and a full black beard now flecked with grey. He was twenty-eight: ripe middle age in that region and at that time. The crude jerkin and leggings that he wore were made of reindeer skin and fox fur, held together with toggles made of bone; for the art of stitching clothes together had not yet reached his people. On his feet were soft moccasin boots. He wore no ornaments. Thus naturally camouflaged in the tundra, he resembled a shaggy brown plant of some indeterminate kind, from the top of which hung the thickly tangled mass of his hair. When he stood stock still, his spear raised ready to throw, he could be mistaken at twenty yards for a stunted tree. The broad-set eyes under his deeply scored forehead and bushy brows were cautious and intelligent.