Sarum: The Novel of England

Spanning nearly ten thousand years of history at the site of present-day Salisbury, England, the novel traces several fictional families whose intertwined fortunes reflect the broader story of the English people, from the hunters of the post-Ice Age tundra to the modern era.

The narrative begins around 7,500 B.C. when Hwll, a skilled hunter, leads his woman Akun and their two children south from the barren tundra in search of warmer lands. When a catastrophic flood severs Britain from the European continent, Hwll presses westward and discovers the bowl of land where five rivers meet, a natural crossroads surrounded by protective ridges. This is Sarum, and Hwll's settlement establishes the first community in the region. Before he dies, Hwll composes an oral history of his journey and carves a small stone fertility figure of Akun, an object that resurfaces throughout the centuries.

Around 4,000 B.C., Neolithic farmers from Brittany arrive under the warrior chief Krona, bringing livestock, crops, and the worship of the sun god. They negotiate an uneasy peace with the local hunters, and when Krona dies, his successor Gwilloc honors him with the first of the great earthen barrow tombs. Two thousand years later, the construction of Stonehenge's mighty sarsen circle, built from enormous sandstone blocks, dominates the narrative. The High Priest Dluc, confronting a dynastic crisis over the chief Krona's need for an heir, decrees that the gods demand a new stone temple. The stonemason Nooma, a squat craftsman with stubby hands, serves as master builder, devising ingenious methods for shaping and raising the stones. Domestic tragedy unfolds alongside the monumental construction: Nooma's wife Katesh has an affair with the riverman Tark, and when Nooma discovers the truth, he engineers Tark's death by sabotaging scaffolding. At the temple's midsummer dedication, 19 victims are sacrificed, including Katesh.

The Roman period introduces the Porteus family. In A.D. 42, the ambitious Celtic chief Tosutigus surrenders the hillfort to Vespasian's advancing legion, hoping to become a client king; instead, he is manipulated into signing away most of his land. A generation later, the young Roman Caius Porteus Maximus is exiled to the backwater of Sorviodunum, the Roman name for Sarum, after challenging Governor Suetonius's brutal policies toward the native population. Porteus marries Tosutigus's red-haired daughter Maeve and transforms the estate with Roman improvements, including cross-bred sheep, beehives, and a modest villa above the river at Avonsford. By A.D. 427, Roman Britain is collapsing. The last Porteus generation is torn between Constantius Porteus, a Christian landowner with an alcohol addiction, and his pagan son Petrus, who converts to Christianity just as Saxon raiders arrive. Constantius redeems himself with a suicidal cavalry charge, and Petrus remains to defend what is left.

The Saxon era centers on the household of Thane Aelfwald, the local lord, during King Alfred's desperate struggle against the Vikings in 877-878. The sheep farmer Port, descended from the ancient Porteus line, fights at the Battle of Edington and loses both hands defending Aelfwald. Alfred rewards Port with thanehood and 20 hides of land. A Norman chapter follows in 1139, when the knight Richard de Godefroi navigates the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda. Unable to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Godefroi constructs a miz-maze, a circular labyrinth path, on a hilltop above Avonsford, walking it on his knees each dawn as penance.

The founding of New Salisbury in the 13th century is the novel's architectural centerpiece. Bishop Poore moves the cathedral from its windswept hilltop to the meadows below, and the young Osmund Mason, a villein, or unfree peasant bound to a lord's estate, devotes his life to carving stone for the rising church. His greatest works are the 60 biblical reliefs in the chapter house. He models Adam on his own squat body and Eve on Cristina, his mentor's daughter, whose public humiliation of Osmund paradoxically frees him as an artist. Meanwhile, Jocelin de Godefroi, a Norman knight descended from the Godefroi family of Avonsford, and Edward Shockley, a cloth merchant, build a fulling mill, a water-powered facility for finishing broadcloth, financed by Aaron of Wilton, a Jewish moneylender. When Edward I expels the Jews in 1290, Aaron drowns after a ship's captain abandons his passengers on a sandbank. In old age, Osmund secretly climbs the newly completed spire and places Hwll's ancient stone figure of Akun in a niche near the top.

The Black Death of 1348 devastates Sarum and reshapes the social order. Agnes Mason, a fierce widow, leads her family to an isolated sheep house and enforces a quarantine perimeter, even turning her stepson Nicholas away at arrow-point. Walter Wilson, a cunning villein who survives the plague, exploits the labor shortage to acquire the Shockley farm, beginning his family's long rise. A later descendant, Robert, changes the family name to Forest and rebuilds Avonsford Manor as a gentleman's residence.

The Reformation tears apart the Shockley household. Edward Shockley, a secret Protestant, has lied about his faith to marry the Catholic Katherine Moody. When their friend Peter Mason, inspired by the public burning of three Wiltshire Protestants, publicly denies the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation, the belief that bread and wine become Christ's body and blood, the gentle craftsman is burned at the stake. His wife Abigail Mason watches with stern composure. The Civil War of the 1640s divides the family further. At the Battle of Naseby, the Parliamentary soldier Edmund Shockley unknowingly kills his Royalist brother Nathaniel. Their sister Margaret arms the farmworkers and leads a band of Clubmen, neutral local defense groups that resist plunder by both armies, to protect the family property. When their zealous Presbyterian brother Obadiah attempts to frame Margaret as a witch, 13-year-old Samuel, their younger half-brother, saves her by testifying that he witnessed Obadiah poisoning a neighbor's sheep.

The Georgian era brings the South Sea Bubble of 1720, which ruins Doctor Samuel Shockley's fortune. His great-grandson Adam Shockley obtains a military commission and serves at Plassey in India and Saratoga in America, where a captured rebel articulates ideas of natural rights that gradually convert Adam to sympathy with the colonial cause. Returning to a Salisbury he no longer fits, Adam marries the practical Mary Mason and emigrates to Pennsylvania. During the Napoleonic Wars, the rigid Canon Porteus persecutes his radical brother-in-law Ralph Shockley into exile, while the kindly Doctor Thaddeus Barnikel silently loves Ralph's wife Agnes for decades without acting on his feelings.

In the Victorian era, Jane Shockley seeks purpose beyond the cathedral close, the genteel precinct surrounding Salisbury Cathedral. She invests in the failing farm of Jethro Wilson, a proud, solitary figure with an alcohol addiction, and they share a single passionate afternoon that can never be repeated. Jethro departs without a word when he inherits a distant farm, and Jane's overnight disappearance on the rain-swept plain scandalizes the close for years.

In 1944, the American pilot Adam Shockley and his English cousin Patricia Shockley have a brief, intense wartime affair as Salisbury Plain becomes a vast military staging area before D-Day. After the war, Patricia marries Brigadier Archibald Forest-Wilson, a career officer descended from both the Forest and Wilson families. In the novel's final chapter, set in 1985, an elderly Patricia hosts the now-retired Adam during a royal visit to launch an appeal to save the cathedral's crumbling spire. Adam remarks that Sarum is "like a museum," but Patricia silently rejects the comparison, recognizing that the cathedral's ongoing restoration demonstrates continuous renewal rather than mere preservation. The story closes with a young thief named John Wilson stealing Patricia's handbag during the ceremony, supposing that life at Sarum, at the place where the five rivers met, will go on as it always has.