During his term of office the register was kept in a very careful
manner
and excellent handwriting, a contrast to later efforts by his
successors.

[Illustration:  OLD SARUM:  THE MAIN GATE OF THE CASTLE FROM WITHIN.]

The evening was now coming on, and we had yet to walk eight miles into Salisbury by what was called the “Upper Road,” which crossed a tract of bleak and rather uninteresting downs; but the road was well defined and the daylight, such as it was, remained with us longer than if we had gone by the more picturesque road along the tree-lined banks of the River Avon.  Amesbury was but a small place, and the only industry that we could hear of that ever existed there was the manufacture of tobacco pipes branded with a gauntlet, the name of the maker.  We had a lonely walk, and about two miles from Salisbury saw to the right the outline of a small hill which turned out to be Old Sarum, a name that figured on the mileposts for many miles round Salisbury, being the ancient and Roman name for that city.  Old cities tend to be on hills, for defence, but modern equivalents occur in the valley below, representative of peace conditions and easy travelling for commercial purposes.  It was now, however, only a lofty grass mound, conical in shape and about a hundred feet high.  It was of great antiquity, for round about it stood at one time one of the most important cities in the south of England, after the prehistoric age the Sorbiodunum of the Romans, and the Sarisberie of the Domesday Book.  Cynric captured it by a victory over the Britons in 552, and in 960 Edgar held a Council there.  Sweyn and the Danes pillaged and burnt it in 1003, and afterwards Editha, the Queen of Edward the Confessor, established a convent of nuns there.  It was made an Episcopal See in 1072, and twenty years afterwards Bishop Osmond, a kinsman of William the Conqueror, completed the building of the cathedral.  It was in 1076 that William, as the closing act of his Conquest, reviewed his victorious army in the plain below; and in 1086, a year before his death, he assembled there all the chief landowners in the realm to swear that “whose men soever they were they would be faithful to him against all other men,” by which “England was ever afterwards an individual kingdom.”  In course of time the population increased to such an extent round the old mound that they were short of room, and the soldiers and the priests began to quarrel, or, as an old writer described it, “the souldiers of the Castell and chanons of Old Sarum fell at odds, inasmuch that often after brawles they fell at last to sadde blowes and the Cleargie feared any more to gang their boundes.  Hereupon the people missing their belly-chere, for they were wont to have banketing at every station, a thing practised by the religious in old tyme, they conceived forthwith a deadly hatred against the Castellans.”  The quarrel ended in the removal of the cathedral to the plain below, where Salisbury now stands, and the glory of Old Sarum departed.  As far back as the time of Henry VIII the place became utterly desolate, and it was interesting to read what visitors in after times had written about it.