Salisbury Museum contains a significant collection of carved stone fragments from Old Sarum. Some of the stones came to the museum as a result of excavations that took place in the early 20th century while others arrived by a more circuitous route, being recovered from demolished buildings in and around Salisbury and Old Sarum. Most of the fragments originated from the former cathedral, though some items in the museum probably came from the castle and the bishop’s palace.
A smaller number of fragments from the other great lost building of South Wiltshire, Clarendon Palace, provide hints of the scale and quality of the building campaigns at this royal hunting lodge during the 12th and 13th centuries. When the finds from excavations at Clarendon were divided between the British Museum and Salisbury in 1957, all the excavated stonework was transferred to the Museum in Salisbury.
The collection also possesses carved stone fragments recovered from Ivychurch Priory.
The entries below are organised according to the provenance of the stones as follows:
- 1. Stones from Old Sarum
- 2. Stones from Toone’s Court, 14 Scot’s Lane, Salisbury
Toone’s Court was a group of 16th century houses on Scot’s Lane that were demolished in 1972. (RCHME 1980 142-3) The chimneybreast in no. 14 was found to include a large number of carved stones including three engaged columns, four engaged capitals, six sections of ‘kidney-section’, spiral shafts, nine voussoirs with chevron moulding, ten similar parallel-sided blocks, five blocks decorated with diaper pattern and one other fragment. The diversity, quality and date of the fragments suggests that they probably originated from Old Sarum. As there is considerable consistency in the type of fragments used in the chimney this suggests that they came directly from Old Sarum and specifically from one or two buildings. Therefore, although the first robbing of stone from the site took place as early as the 13th century, this suggests that significant buildings were still standing in the 16th century to be quarried. An alternative, though less likely, explanation is that the chimney breast was built from stone taken from a previous building in the town, which itself was built from stone robbed from Old Sarum.
- 3. Stones from the Courtyard House, Old Sarum
These form the remains of a chimney, found during excavation on the outside of the north side of the Courtyard House at Old Sarum.
- 4. Stones from Gibbs Mew Public House
These are a series of fragments recovered from excavations in Brown Street, Salisbury, conducted by the Trust for Wessex Archaeology. They consist of two blocks with engaged shafts at one corner, two sections of a shaft with a similar diameter and a piece of Purbeck marble. Although most fragments found in buildings in Salisbury were quarried from buildings at old Sarum, the piece of Purbeck marble is more likely to originate from the cathedral.
- 5. Stones from Clarendon Palace
- 6. Stones from Ivychurch Priory, Alderbury.
- 7. Capital from Glastonbury
The museum contains a fine capital from the cloister of Glastonbury Abbey. It was built while Henry of Blois was the abbot (1126-71). Henry, a nephew of Henry I, was the Bishop of Winchester from 1129 onwards, but he never relinquished control of the abbey. No documents record the dates of the construction of the cloister, but it is attributed to the middle of the 12th century. The cloister was destroyed by a devastating fire in 1184. The capital was presented to the museum by James Brown, a local antiquary, between 1864 and 1870, but where he found it is not recorded.
The description of the items is based on the catalogue entries for the stone sculpture in the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.
