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The engine of Salisbury’s prosperity had been the wool trade, which flourished from the early fourteenth century as the Flemish textile industry went into decline. Salisbury’s speciality was a striped cloth known as a ray, but when changing fashion prompted a demand for undyed broadcloth, local merchants failed to rise to the challenge until centres of production and markets had been established elsewhere. The ancient trade guilds, reconstituted under the new corporation as trade companies, guarded their monopolies jealously, and thus had no incentive to respond to the challenge of fashion, and the clothiers were again wrong footed in the mid-seventeenth century, as medleys and Spanish cloths came into fashion. Far more serious, however, were the threats posed by the run of poor harvests in the 1620s, the arrival of the plague in 1627, and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642. The skill and bravery of the Mayor, John Ivie, in managing the outbreak of plague when all his fellow-members’ energies were devoted to escaping the city, can be deduced from the fact that the plague of 1604 killed an estimated one-sixth of the people, whereas the proportion in 1627 was probably less than one-tenth. Salisbury was spared the worst effects of the Civil War, not being fortified, and thus of no great military significance. Occasionally Salisbury featured in the chronicle of national events, as when, after a skirmish in December 1644 Sir Edmund Ludlow escaped the Royalist clutches, or in March 1655, when Colonel Penruddock’s rebels kidnapped the Assize judges and the High Sheriff of the county, and freed the inmates of the gaol.

But it was not until after the Restoration that Salisbury’s fortunes took a turn for the better, and it was as a result of a social, rather than an industrial revolution. At the heart of this social revolution in Restoration Salisbury was Seth Ward, Bishop of Salisbury from 1662 to 1689, and his circle of friends and visitors. These ranged from Sir Christopher Wren, who reported on the Cathedral fabric, and the pioneering eye surgeon Dr Daubeney Turberville, to the physicist Robert Boyle, and Samuel Pepys. Ward was personally responsible for repairs to his palace to the tune of £2,000 and the founding of the College of Matrons, almshouses for clergy widows. He was a major subscriber to the Britford Navigation Scheme, the success of which was marked, in1684, when two 25-ton wherries docked by Ayleswade Bridge.

The Cathedral Close had for centuries been home to well-to-do secular society as well as the clergy, and with improvements and rebuildings in the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, this process of gentrification became far more obvious. It is to this period that great houses like Malmesbury House and Arundells, Mompesson House and Myles Place belong. The process was paralleled in the city, notably with The Hall in New Street, the home of William Hussey, Alderman and MP for the city from 1774 to 1813, and The College (now Bourne Hill), until 1871 the Salisbury home of the Wyndham family.