Old Sarum

Old Sarum: once a powerful medieval city with royal palace, castle and cathedral, all surrounded by steep, defensive ditches. Now, it is an abandoned place: a car park, a toilet block and a couple of English Heritage functionaries hawking tickets from a cabin. It is the setting for much of Edward Rutherford’s Sarum which I read a few years back, for this site has been occupied long before the Normans planted their feet, with Celts, Romans and Saxons all espying its advantages. Up until the nineteenth century, despite having no resident voters, it enjoyed the representation of two MPs at Westminster, thus rendering it a ‘rotten borough’, and one which the Great Reform Act of 1832 disenfranchised.

Old Sarum is essentially 'Old Salisbury' in Wiltshire; the current, beautiful Salisbury is the replacement of Sarum. In the 1200s, a dispute between the sherriff, who controlled the royal castle, and the bishop whose cathedral was sited nearby, resulted in the latter building a new cathedral on the plain, and deconsecrating the other. New Salisbury grew around the gigantic building project and the town from which it departed began to decline; it shows how the Church really was central to medieval life. The castle and palace were eventually abandoned, and so, too, the shops and houses.

Today, the nation's church is weak and decaying; few would consider it at the centre of national life or even a significant force in the cultural arena. Be that as it may, Jesus Christ, the One whose church it is, remains the centre of everything, for He is the creator and sustainer of all things. One day, those who ignore Him now, will bow to Him; we who leave behind the old way of life with its values and deceits will find that our new identities outlast and outshine anything that went before.

For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. Hebrews 11:10

But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city. Hebrews 11:16

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