Welcome to Peartree
With a wealth of accommodation choices in Salisbury Peartree Serviced Apartments stand out as being unique. They are furnished apartments to rent but we offer hotel service as well, all for one inclusive rate.
They can be rented for city short breaks or longer term extended stays when you are working away from home. Each apartment is furnished to a high standard and all are the perfect choice for your holiday accommodation in Salisbury Wiltshire. Salisbury has a wealth of history on our doorstep we are situated just 5 minutes from the city centre with Salisbury Cathedral and the magnificent Cathedral Close including Mompesson House and Salisbury Museum.
If you are planning a short or long extended stay then Peartree Apartments can cater for all your needs. We are a great and cost effective alternative to hotels or bed and breakfast in Salisbury; come and stay you will not be disappointed.
Helpful information - Salisbury History
Salisbury, the quintessential English cathedral city, is in historical terms a recent creation, being a new town of the thirteenth century. Its name was derived from the latinization of that of a nearby hill fort, Sorviodunum. The hill fort, now known as Old Sarum, was both a natural strongpoint a salient between the Avon and Bourne valleys and the junction of several ancient trade routes. The site was developed sometime between 600 and 300 BC, and the hill fort served both as a market in times of peace, and a stronghold for its surrounding communities in times of strife.
For the Romans, too, Sorviodunum was an important market centre, with roads converging on the hill fort from Cirencester, Silchester and Winchester to the north and east, and Dorchester and the Mendip hills to the west, and with a trade route to Downton and the New Forest. The size of the identified settlements along the Portway, to Dorchester, and at Bishopdown distinguish Sorviodunum as an oppidum, one of the ‘small towns’ of Roman Britain. With the departure of the Romans, and the incoming Saxon settlers’ preference for lowland settlements, Sorviodunum was more or less abandoned until, under the impact of the Viking invasions, Alfred refortified it. By now known as Searoburh, it served as the stronghold for Wilton, its status enhanced when Wilton’s moneyers moved there in 1003.
At the Norman Conquest, Salisbury again attracted the attention of the authorities, and the hill fort became a typical motte-and-bailey castle by 1070: in 1086, the major landowners paid homage to the king there, and it is likely that the results of the Domesday survey were presented in the same year. By then, also, Salisbury had become the seat of the combined sees of Sherborne and Ramsbury, held plurally by Bishop Herman. Salisbury was the central point in the new diocese, and it was adjacent to lands in the Avon valley held by the bishop. The cathedral precincts accounted for about half of the 30 acres within the castle walls.
Although it struck contemporaries, among them William of Malmesbury, as odd that a cathedral should be built within a castle, there were in fact two cathedrals built there, and for a time Bishop Roger of Caen was castellan, thus combining secular and religious authority. Had he not, during the course of the civil war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda, fallen so spectacularly from grace, it is entirely possible that the Cathedral might have remained where it was, enjoying a commanding position similar to Durham’s or Lincoln’s. As it was, although the second cathedral continued to be developed after Roger’s death in 1139, the civilian authorities were markedly unsympathetic to the clergy, who determined the only way to survive, let alone to develop, was to relocate the Cathedral.
Responsibility for the decision to move from the Castle to the confluence of the Avon and the Nadder has to be apportioned between the two Poore brothers, Herbert and Richard, who were bishops from 1194 to 1217, and from 1217 to 1228 respectively. In the years following the Norman Conquest dozens of new towns had been founded: the master-stroke in the case of Salisbury had been to follow the example of Lichfield, where a century earlier a new town had been created around a refounded Saxon cathedral. Not only would the city provide revenues for the maintenance of the cathedral: the cathedral, in turn, would prove to be a magnet for pilgrims. Travel, latterly in the guise of tourism, has been a mainstay for Salisbury’s economy since its earliest years.
The site for the new cathedral, although the subject of legends, can be seen with hindsight to be almost a foregone conclusion. The bishop’s estates ran in a great block of land from the castle south to the confluence of the Avon and the Nadder, and from the Avon eastwards to the hillslope of Milford. A north-south route ran from the castle to the Salisbury Way running along Harnham Ridge: it was crossed by the road from Winchester via Clarendon running westwards through Fisherton Anger towards Wilton. South of that road was to be the Close, with the first phase of houses for the canons backing onto the Avon, facing the west front of the Cathedral with the ancient north-south route running between them. To the north, the city was planned around a new street New Street today running east-west between the original settlement around St Martin’s Church, and a river crossing which is the present Crane Bridge. North of that, a great open space would be the site of a weekly market and an annual fair.
Reminders of the city’s old wealth ranged from the chantry chapels in St Thomas’s church, endowed by William Ludlow and William Swayne, to the elaborate processions staged by the city’s guilds on major feast days, or to welcome royalty. But the pageantry, the conspicuous wealth of individuals, and the ability of the city to meet royal demands, as when the city provided and manned the warship Trout during Henry VI’s reign, all mask a glaring paradox.
Throughout the middle ages, the city remained in a state of vassalage to the bishop. Attempts to appeal to royal authority, such as a major stand-off in 1305-6 between the city’s leaders and Bishop Simon of Ghent, came to nothing. Even after the Reformation, when the city fathers were quietly extending their powers by expanding their administrative and legal functions, the bishop still claimed ultimate authority, and not until 1612 was the city granted a charter confirming powers independent of episcopal authority.
However, once Salisbury gained its independence, it was not well placed to capitalise on its new status. The engine of Salisbury’s prosperity over the previous three centuries had been the wool trade, which flourished from the early fourteenth century as the Flemish textile industry went into decline. Salisbury’s speciality was a striped cloth known as a ray, but when changing fashion prompted a demand for undyed broadcloth, Salisbury’s merchants failed to rise to the challenge until centres of production and markets had been established elsewhere. The ancient trade guilds, reconstituted under the new corporation as trade companies, guarded their monopolies jealously, and thus had no incentive to respond to the challenge of fashion, and the clothiers were again wrong footed in the mid-seventeenth century, as medleys and Spanish cloths came into fashion.
Far more serious, however, were the threats posed by the run of poor harvests in the 1620s, the arrival of the plague in 1627, and the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642. The skill and bravery of the Mayor, John Ivie, in managing the outbreak of plague when all his fellow-members’ energies were devoted to escaping the city, can be deduced from the fact that the plague of 1604 killed an estimated one-sixth of the people, whereas the proportion in 1627 was probably less than one-tenth. Salisbury was spared the worst effects of the Civil War, not being fortified, and thus of no great military significance. Occasionally Salisbury featured in the chronicle of national events, as when, after a skirmish in December 1644 Sir Edmund Ludlow escaped the Royalist clutches, or in March 1655, when Colonel Penruddock’s rebels kidnapped the Assize judges and the High Sheriff of the county, and freed the inmates of the gaol.
But it was not until after the Restoration that Salisbury’s fortunes took a turn for the better, and it was as a result of a social, rather than an industrial revolution. At the heart of this social revolution in Restoration Salisbury was Seth Ward, Bishop of Salisbury from 1662 to 1689, and his circle of friends and visitors. These ranged from Sir Christopher Wren, who reported on the Cathedral fabric, and the pioneering eye surgeon Dr Daubeney Turberville, to the physicist Robert Boyle, and Samuel Pepys. Ward was personally responsible for repairs to his palace to the tune of £2,000 and the founding of the College of Matrons, almshouses for clergy widows. He was a major subscriber to the Britford Navigation Scheme, the success of which was marked, in1684, when two 25-ton wherries docked by Ayleswade Bridge.
The Cathedral Close had for centuries been home to well-to-do secular society as well as the clergy, and with improvements and rebuildings in the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, this process of gentrification became far more obvious. It is to this period that great houses like Malmesbury House and Arundells, Mompesson House and Myles Place belong. The process was paralleled in the city, notably with The Hall in New Street, the home of William Hussey, Alderman and MP for the city from 1774 to 1813, and The College (now Bourne Hill), until 1871 the Salisbury home of the Wyndham family.
Similarly, Ward’s almshouses were paralleled by a spate of charitable foundations in the city Blechynden’s almshouses (1683), Taylor’s (1698), Frowde’s (1750 and Hussey’s (1794). The greatest examples of private beneficence for the public good come both from the Radnor circle, with the Infirmary (1767) endowed by the bequest of Lord Feversham of Downton (the first Earl’s father-in-law), and the Guildhall (1795), the gift to the city of its sometime MP, the second Earl.