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Salisbury, the quintessential English cathedral city, is in historical terms a recent creation, being a new town of the thirteenth century. Its name was derived from the latinization of that of a nearby hill fort, Sorviodunum. The hill fort, now known as Old Sarum, was both a natural strongpoint a salient between the Avon and Bourne valleys and the junction of several ancient trade routes. The site was developed sometime between 600 and 300 BC, and the hill fort served both as a market in times of peace, and a stronghold.

For the Romans, too, Sorviodunum was an important market centre, with roads converging on the hill fort from Cirencester, Silchester and Winchester to the north and east, and Dorchester and the Mendip hills to the west, and with a trade route to Downton and the New Forest. The size of the identified settlements along the Portway, to Dorchester, and at Bishopdown distinguish Sorviodunum as an oppidum, one of the ‘small towns’ of Roman Britain. With the departure of the Romans, and the incoming Saxon settlers’ preference for lowland settlements, Sorviodunum was more or less abandoned until, under the impact of the Viking invasions, Alfred refortified it. By now known as Searoburh, it served as the stronghold for Wilton, its status enhanced when Wilton’s moneyers moved there in 1003.

At the Norman Conquest, Salisbury again attracted the attention of the authorities, and the hill fort became a typical motte-and-bailey castle by 1070: in 1086, the major landowners paid homage to the king there, and it is likely that the results of the Domesday survey were presented in the same year. By then, also, Salisbury had become the seat of the combined sees of Sherborne and Ramsbury, held plurally by Bishop Herman. Salisbury was the central point in the new diocese, and it was adjacent to lands in the Avon valley held by the bishop. The cathedral precincts accounted for about half of the 30 acres within the castle walls. Although it struck contemporaries, among them William of Malmesbury, as odd that a cathedral should be built within a castle, there were in fact two cathedrals built there, and for a time Bishop Roger of Caen was castellan, thus combining secular and religious authority. Had he not, during the course of the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda, fallen so spectacularly from grace, it is entirely possible that the Cathedral might have remained where it was, enjoying a commanding position similar to Durham’s or Lincoln’s. As it was, although the second cathedral continued to be developed after Roger’s death in 1139, the civilian authorities were markedly unsympathetic to the clergy, who determined the only way to survive, let alone to develop, was to relocate the Cathedral.

Responsibility for the decision to move from the Castle to the confluence of the Avon and the Nadder has to be apportioned between the two Poore brothers, Herbert and Richard, who were bishops from 1194 to 1217, and from 1217 to 1228 respectively. In the years following the Norman Conquest dozens of new towns had been founded: the master-stroke in the case of Salisbury had been to follow the example of Lichfield, where a century earlier a new town had been created around a refounded Saxon cathedral. Not only would the city provide revenues for the maintenance of the cathedral: the cathedral, in turn, would prove to be a magnet for pilgrims. Travel, latterly in the guise of tourism, has been a mainstay for Salisbury’s economy since its earliest years.

The site for the new cathedral, although the subject of legends, can be seen with hindsight to be almost a foregone conclusion. The bishop’s estates ran in a great block of land from the castle south to the confluence of the Avon and the Nadder, and from the Avon eastwards to the hillslope of Milford.