Old Sarum is also the name of a modern settlement north-east of the monument, where there is a grass strip airfield and a small business park, and large 21st-century housing developments.įor the further etymology of Salisbury, see Salisbury.
Old Sarum served as a pocket borough of the Pitt family. Edward Rutherfurd's 1987 novel Sarum traces the history of the town.Īlthough the settlement was effectively uninhabited, its landowners continued to have parliamentary representation into the 19th century, making it one of the most notorious of the rotten boroughs that existed before the Reform Act of 1832.
Its long-neglected castle was abandoned by Edward II in 1322 and sold by Henry VIII in 1514. As New Salisbury grew up around the construction site for the new cathedral in the early 13th century, the buildings of Old Sarum were dismantled for stone and the old town dwindled. This heyday of the settlement lasted for around 300 years until disputes between the Sheriff of Wiltshire and the Bishop of Salisbury finally led to the removal of the church into the nearby plain. A royal palace was built within Old Sarum Castle for King Henry I and was subsequently used by Plantagenet monarchs. The Normans constructed a motte and bailey castle, a stone curtain wall, and a great cathedral. The Saxons took the British fort in the 6th century and later used it as a stronghold against marauding Vikings. The site continued to be occupied during the Roman period, when the paths were made into roads. An Iron Age hillfort was erected around 400 BC, controlling the intersection of two trade paths and the Hampshire Avon. The great stone circles of Stonehenge and Avebury were erected nearby and indications of prehistoric settlement have been discovered from as early as 3000 BC.
It is an English Heritage property and is open to the public. Situated on a hill about two miles (three kilometres) north of modern Salisbury near the A345 road, the settlement appears in some of the earliest records in the country. Old Sarum, in Wiltshire, South West England, is the now ruined and deserted site of the earliest settlement of Salisbury. A reconstruction of Old Sarum in the 12th century, housed at Salisbury Cathedral
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