Bloody British History: Salisbury E-Book

David J Vaughan

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Bloody British History
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 167

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Saxons of Old Sarum buried alive! The plague pits of Salisbury! Cathedral organist intent on murder! The book bound in human skin! Locked in a cage with criminal lunatics! A monocled killer! Salisbury has one of the most gruesome histories on record. Human remains filled its barrows, its nobles were tortured, its witches hanged and a deadly disease once lurked in its murky waters. There was no safety in its inns either, for one was plagued with suicides and another hid a severed hand. Even the introduction of the railways led to death and destruction. With more than sixty illustrations, hundreds of years of terrible true history are waiting for you inside this book!

Leseprobe

To Claire, my wife, who makes all things possible

CONTENTS

Title

Dedication

Introduction

Acknowledgements

4000–1450 BC Bring in Your Dead

3000 BC–AD 700 Life and Death at Stonehenge

AD 552–1003 Death, Punishment and War

AD 961–1538 Mischievous Monks and Wanton Nuns

AD 1092 The Bishop is in the Cowshed!

AD 1096 The Defeat and Mutilation of William d’Eu

AD 1219 Spires of Doom!

AD 1226 The Warlord, the Skull and the Rat

AD 1483 Buckingham Loses His Head!

AD 1556 When Men Fall Out, Blood Will Spill

AD 1627 Death from Unnatural Causes

AD 1653–1692 Terrible News from Salisbury

AD 1655 A Right Royal Rumpus

AD 1768 The Peddler and the Sailor

AD 1810–1865 In God We Trust

AD 1813–1954 The Dead and the Mad

AD 1830 If Only There was Cake to Eat

AD 1849 Filth and Filthability

AD 1879 The Curse of the Elephant and Castle

AD 1880–1906 ‘For God’s Sake, Come and Help Us!’

AD 1888 Jack the Ripper Comes to Salisbury!

AD 1910–1911 The Card Cheat with a Bad Hand

AD 1912 Death in Service

AD 1913 You Can’t Choose Your Family

AD 1914–1918 Bloody War

AD 1920 The Murderous, Monocled Mutineer

Bibliography

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

SALISBURY HAS KNOWN two incarnations. First it was at Old Sarum, a fortified settlement complete with castle and cathedral on the former Iron Age hill fort known in Saxon times as Searobyrg. Then, from 1220 and with the church breaking away from the royal garrison, New Salisbury rose up on land at Myrifield, its present site, with its majestic cathedral one of the most iconic in the world. So Salisbury, with its record-breaking spire and its status as the only city in Wiltshire, soon became one of the largest provincial centres in England.

Yet with its growth came grief – illness, war, accident, murder – and so much death. Travel now through the madness, mayhem and sin in the history of this remarkable place, from prehistory to the twentieth century – some eight millennia! Specific venues appear more than once, such was their import in Salisbury’s past; others emerge out of the old neighbourhood: Fisherton, Wilton and Milford; while there will always be the Plain to the north. Along the way we will even reach the New World … for a time only. But what a time!

David J. Vaughan, 2014

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

HUGE THANKS ARE due to Cate Ludlow at The History Press for her help, support and guidance during the writing of this book. Thanks also to my friends whom I still miss at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre – a world-class resource – in particular Claire Skinner, Michael Marshman and Steve Hobbs. To Adrian Green at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, Richard Osgood, Senior Archaeologist at Defence Infrastructure Organisation (MOD), Martin Brown of WYSG (formerly of DIO) and last but not least, to the number of excellent resources on the history of Salisbury and its people, including salisburyinquests.wordpress.com and the work of John Chandler. Thank you all.

Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders of the images used in the book. All queries should be addressed to the author c/o The History Press.

4000–1450 BC

BRING IN YOUR DEAD

Salisbury’s Prehistory

IN THE EARLY to middle Neolithic, around 4000–3000 BC, there was no such thing as social order. Everyone was equal, in death as in life. There were no individual graves to visit, instead the dead were laid out on platforms or biers where the birds and dogs picked over the skin, tearing muscle from sinew and leaving clean, brilliant white bones. This excarnation was just the beginning. Particular bones, such as the skull, arms and legs, were carried ceremoniously into the long barrows we still see today and there set within the stone chambers inside. Now they joined others bone with bone, so that no one individual remained whole. These public tombs were not just for memory, they were a link to the ancestors.

Entrance to West Kennet long barrow. (David J. Vaughan)

One such, to the north-east of Salisbury, Fussell’s Lodge is the long barrow par excellence. The entire structure, including the massive earthen mound which today often remains the only visible element, was built between 3800 and 3600 BC. Here, disarticulated bones of up to fifty-seven individuals were left within the barrow, a huge number. But what makes this particular example even more impressive is that it contained a mortuary house: a timber structure where the bodies were defleshed and other funeral rites carried out. This was where the dead and living – the body and the soul – were separated: the flesh stripped from the bones and the spirit free to leave as a result. The once ‘polluting’ corpse had been made into a revered – and not to be feared – ancestor.

WHY ONE DEAD BODY IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS

Although articulated bodies were often interred in Neolithic long barrows, it was the round barrows of the Bronze Age that focused attention on the dead individual, rather than the assembled body parts of the many.

This was the age of hierarchy. Beneath each barrow, an individual, important for some political or cultural reason long since lost, was laid in the grave in a crouched position, with goods to accompany them into the afterlife, rich with symbolic meaning. The barrow or mound was cast upwards as a monumental covering; but it was not the last time the barrow would be used.

Arguably the most important near Salisbury is Bush Barrow, still standing proudly topped by the singular shrub that explains its name. Inside lay some of the earliest metalwork known in Britain, including two gold lozenge plates, bronze daggers, one studded with 140,000 gold pins, each thinner than a human hair; bone pins, the highly polished head of a stone or fossil mace and a bronze axe. For the first time, the collection can now be seen in the Wiltshire Heritage Museum, Devizes.

In most round-barrow burials, the body itself is unharmed, bearing no sign of trauma, injury, sacrifice or ritual murder. These were the revered dead, those members of society who led and inspired many. Unlike many of their Neolithic counterparts, they travelled into the next life whole and intact, their decaying physical form now as sacred as their soul had always been.

A similar yet different type of long barrow once stood north of Old Sarum, east of Castle Hill. In a tantalising twist on the timber mortuary enclosure at Fussell’s Lodge, there are signs here of one having been built in stone. The thoughts behind this choice of material have been lost in time, yet such things were no accident.

Travelling farther north, along the road to Airman’s Cross, you reach the modern A303. Here lies Long Barrow – an example so special it needed no other name, which it shares with the nearby modern roundabout.

In many cases, these communal tombs were used again in the Bronze Age (see text box). But now the bodies were of individual people, no longer stripped of their flesh but buried whole. Discovered within the gigantic mound of Long Barrow were the remains of some seven complete skeletons, all male, crouched and intact. These secondary burials almost certainly date to between 1800 and 1450 BC.

At Normanton Down, on the other side of the present road, yet another long mound contained later, articulated inhumations. These four were strangely placed though, huddled together on the very floor of the barrow, a new family of the dead when the mound was raised.

A short distance further east is Ende Burgh (Saxon for ‘Hands Barrow’). This is a special monument, confusingly interpreted as either a single Neolithic long barrow or two, possibly even three, round barrows from the Bronze Age. When superficially investigated in antiquity, human bones were discovered scattered across the mound(s), evidence of an even earlier investigation or perhaps, more likely, the now familiar Neolithic selection process of burying just the long bones and the skulls. Yet this was not the end of Ende Burgh. A further excavation in 1941 revealed two Saxon inhumations, whole as in the Bronze Age but now given a much later date. Hence, its Saxon name has stuck. Whatever its true age, this place on earth was, for such a long time, somewhere the dead could rest …

A long barrow with its earth and stone mound removed in antiquity. (David J. Vaughan)

In 1976, archaeologists working in the main ditch at Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument to top them all, unexpectedly unearthed a male skeleton buried in around 2300 BC. He was immediately dubbed the Stonehenge Archer due to the wrist guard and arrowheads found lying against his body. To their astonishment, the investigators realised the latter had lost their tips, which they found soon after embedded deep within the man’s ribcage. No ordinary burial, then. A murdered enemy? This archer had suffered a violent death, shot at close range and buried in the ditch. But why here, at this site of such sanctity? Could he have been a sacrifice?

Whether in honour of the ancestors, to appease the gods or cleanse the world of the polluting dead, the dear departed in prehistory were revered, as important to those left behind as they are to us today when we visit their graves. There is nothing new in the world, only the old ways, rediscovered.

3000 BC–AD 700

LIFE AND DEATH AT STONEHENGE

Healing, Sacrifice and Ritual

IN THE YEAR of the new and long-awaited visitor centre at Airman’s Cross, no book about Salisbury’s dark history would be complete without a trip to Stonehenge. From healing to killing, festivals to murder, this stone circle has seen it all. But let’s begin with a more peaceful side: its declared ability to heal the sick.

In the twelfth century, Geoffrey of Monmouth recorded:

For in these stones is a mystery, and a healing virtue against many ailments … for they washed the stones and poured the water into baths, whereby those who were sick were cured. Moreover, they mixed confections of herbs with the water, whereby those who were wounded were healed, for not a stone is there that is wanting in virtue or leechcraft.

Stonehenge imagined – how it might once have looked. (Courtesy of the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre)

Five centuries later, John Aubrey, the king’s antiquarian, was more succinct, if not fanciful: ‘pieces (or powder) of these stones putt into their Wells doe drive away the Toades, with which their Wells are much infected …’

In more recent times, and with the aid of science, two eminent archaeologists, Wainwright and Darvill, proposed evidence that Stonehenge was a prehistoric hospice. They claimed the blue stones were considered to hold restorative properties, which might explain their use when the monument was first constructed. Yet where there is life, so there is death – and the diseased, sacrificed and dead are always more interesting to the 1 million visitors each year.

Even individual stones have names which evoke suffering and gore. The Slaughter Stone, now fallen into its recumbent position, is aged and pockmarked and the rain collects in the round hollows that pepper the surface. Iron within the stone turns the water blood red which those in antiquity (namely the Victorians) believed was sacrificed blood – hence its name. More gruesome still, the Altar Stone, lying at the heart of the monument, is flat and well suited to the idea of ritual killing. What horrors took place on this recumbent slab?

The Heel Stone, standing sentinel as the processional avenue enters the henge, has a companion bearing the same name. It too harbours a devilish legend. Merlin, the Arthurian magician, brought these stones from Ireland, incurring the wrath of the Devil. In a rage, the Devil threw the colossal stone which caught the wizard on the heel, the resulting indentation still visible today. A similar legend exists for the upright Heel Stone, but here Merlin is replaced by an unwitting friar who disturbs the Devil as he builds his Stonehenge.

Almost inevitably (though incorrectly), the ‘mystical’ druids were credited (or blamed) for constructing Stonehenge, as a temple where they could carry out their hideous customs. Aubrey and William Stukeley, both eminent antiquarians, independently concluded almost a century apart that the mysterious bards and priests were responsible for this Druidic shrine. As the priests laid their victims on the Altar Stone, their golden sickles silencing their screams, fresh blood gathered beneath the stone as the audience cried out to the gods.

Fanciful as these claims are, death and burial have indeed taken place at Stonehenge ever since it was first built. Often brutal, sometimes punishment, on occasion surely sacrifice, body after body made its final journey to this once isolated spot on Salisbury Plain. In 2600 BC, at least fifty-five cremations were interred in a circle of holes (known as the Aubrey Holes after their discoverer): loved ones, enemies, perhaps even shamans, burnt close by and placed here with reverence (or contempt).

A Victorian idea of what the druids may have looked like. (THP)

Yet it is the skeletons that attract the most attention. One in particular was found buried outside the outer bluestone circle. Dated as an Anglo-Saxon, his head had been removed with a single blow and dropped onto his chest before his humiliatingly small grave was backfilled with soil and chalk. Decapitation in Early Medieval (Saxon) England was an established practice. But did this make him a criminal: executed for some grave misdemeanour (no pun intended!), or a sacrifice, offered to the gods? Whatever the truth, in death he was as unfortunate as he had been in life.

When first discovered, his remains were sent to London for examination by the Royal College of Surgeons where, it was believed, he fell victim again, this time to the air raids of the Luftwaffe. Forgotten for over fifty years, he was rediscovered in 1999 – down the road, at the Natural History Museum.

THE BOSCOMBE BOWMEN

Were the Boscombe Bowmen – a collection of ‘warrior’ skeletons found near Amesbury – a peripatetic workforce from Europe who helped erect Stonehenge, or something else completely? One thing is certain: when they died in around 2300 BC, there was a gruesome oddity in the way they had been buried. For the Bowmen held special heirlooms, unlike any other, on their journey into the afterlife. These seven individuals were not all of one time – some were in fact far older, by many generations. It meant they were carrying the carefully selected bones of their ancestors; keepsakes, not of jewellery or precious metal, but body parts from their forebears.

Stonehenge now. (David J. Vaughan)

Finally, of the many dead associated with Stonehenge, none is perhaps more important than the Amesbury Archer, found close to the town bearing his name. This traveller from mainland Europe, probably Switzerland, had been greatly revered when he died in 2300 BC. His treasure trove of grave goods featured gold artefacts, copper daggers, tinder for starting fires, oyster shell, boars’ tusks, possibly a much-prized bow with arrows (their shafts long since eroded) and the list goes on. It remains the richest grave from the period ever found and suggests this was not a warrior then, more an artisan, a leader of people, perhaps directing others during the construction of Stonehenge.

AD 552–1003

DEATH, PUNISHMENT AND WAR

Grave Days for the Saxons

ONE OF THE largest Saxon burial grounds in Wiltshire lies in Harnham, south of Salisbury. It was discovered in 1853 by Mr Wallan the ‘Drowner’ – he who floods the water meadows – in Low Field (named after the Anglo-Saxon hlœw, meaning tumulus). His keen eye recognised a spear tip, the great boss of a wooden shield and the disturbed human skeletons rising through the earth. They could only be Saxon. Within days, archaeologists found sixty-two graves – men, women and children – and not all had died peacefully in their sleep.

In any pagan Saxon cemetery, the grave goods alone speak of great violence. Here at Harnham, knives, shields and swords joined spears – with at least one designed to rotate in the air and penetrate deeper into the flesh. They evoked war and aggression, even if some were ceremonial in this context of the dead. Meanwhile, the skeletons too evoked suffering. One, a female, had been buried with her infant placed deliberately between her knees, as though life had left both in unison.

Others had been cruelly weighted down, with flint and broken pottery pressing them to the floor. It is now believed to indicate death by felo de se (suicide), often while the victim was considered temporarily insane, and Christian Saxons insisted that such deaths be given the old-style pagan burial, devoid of any Christian respect. There was no place in heaven for those who died by their own hand.

At Roche Court Down, north-east along the modern A30 to Lopcombe Corner, another Saxon grave contained some eighteen skeletons. Four had their wrists tied behind their backs, while half had been decapitated. Common criminals? Enemies? Not all beheadings were punishments for misdemeanours and many of the cuts here had been made to the neck by swords swung from the front, intended to stop the spirit of the dead rising to haunt the living. However, the Saxon killing and burial of a criminal was equally brutal. Pre-mortem amputation removed the hand of a thief and a prone (face down) skeleton overlying one supine (face up) indicated that either the person on the top had been sacrificed or, more likely, had been convicted of causing the death of the person placed beneath. As punishment they were buried alive with their victim.

Decapitation sanctioned by Heaven. (British Library Board, Cotton Claudius B IV f 38r)

In contexts such as the burial at Stonehenge, Saxon decapitation may have had more to do with appeasing the gods than satisfying a demand for worldly justice. The sword was swift and, as seen in this detail taken from a Saxon manuscript, it was also endorsed by Heaven.

Salisbury has not yet given up much evidence for the Early Medieval period, in particular its wars between the Saxons, Celts and Danes. We can be sure, however, that their customs and attitudes to death were enacted here just as elsewhere. In AD 552, when Cyrnic conquered Old Sarum, the number and treatment of those who died in battle could be considered barbaric. As recorded in an Anglo-Saxon chronicle, this warrior leader of the West Saxons took Searobyrg by force, dealing with those who stood in his way with savagery and little remorse. The Saxons not only bound and executed their enemies but, in many cases, they buried them alive. Ten skeletons buried in a surviving Bronze Age round barrow had their hands tied behind their backs and had been inhumed face down. Gruesome indeed: the terror of those ten is palpable. Placed inside the fresh grave, soil and chalk heaped upon their backs, their mouths ingesting the earth as they were unable to move, speak or, eventually, to breathe. How they must have willed death to come …

Three hundred years later, in the reign of King Alfred, the Danes arrived. At a raised spot in Wilton, a violent struggle erupted. Alfred, as so often, was victorious. But a century and more later, they returned, this time under Sweyn’s command. By now, the Saxon leaders had no stomach for war and instead abandoned their people and fled to Old Sarum, the hill which their more lion-hearted ancestors had conquered five centuries before. Left alone, Sweyn burnt Wilton to the ground before his army made for Salisbury, pausing en route at the old hill fort. The Saxons, it seemed, would have to fight whether or not their hearts were in it.

A FASCINATION WITH THE DEAD