jail for Sarum plain decided to meet without him, voting on the location
of the jail without his knowledge or approval. On 2 January 1568 Jewel
wrote to the magistrates of Wiltshire who had decided to put the jail in
the village of East Harnham (which has now been consumed by West
Harnham). Jewel talks about how this incommodious arrangement
would imperil such a poor little village; which, should any of the
prisoners escape, lacked the force to defend itself. What is more, the
prisoners ‘beeinge utterly sequestred from al manner relife of the whole
Cittie, from whence thei have evermore hitherto had theire presente and
greatest aide’ could face deprivation. But these objections to the prison’s
proposed location all appear rather much a ruse, for East Harnham was
no remote village in the nether reaches of the plain, but within sight of
the cathedral, not more than 300 yards. At the end of the letter Jewel
gets to the last cause why the approved location for the building of the
jail would be such a detrimental thing: the jail would be situated
immediately outside of his study window in the episcopal palace. East
Harnham, just across the Avon from the Cathedral Close, was ‘within
one flighte-shoote [a stone’s throw] of my house’.^35 He signs, ‘yor poore
frend, John Sarum’. Lacking sources, the meager ones at hand say little,
it may be surmised that Jewel, at no loss for esteem in the rest of England
or on the continent, scarcely garnered the respect his office asked at
home. Yet if this is the case for Jewel it should be kept in mind that
cathedral chapters, vassal towns, clerical subordinates and the laity
employed by the cathedral (Smythe was a lay vicar, an office first used in
Salisbury in the 1530s) often had their own agendas and interests, which,
while not necessarily inimical to the concerns of a Protestant reforming
bishop, may not have been commensurate with how the bishop hoped to
effect reform. All of this may have been what Jewel expected, for even
with Elizabeth’s eventual confirmation of him in his status as lord of the
city, he had come to Salisbury having no allusions about his status as one
of England’s peers.
Jewel the penurious and abstemious Lord Bishop
In the first months and years of his tenure as bishop, in his
correspondence with the various Zurich reformers, Jewel complained
about his disconsolate existence as an English bishop and the tedium to
which this office relegated his life as a scholar. Others had not wanted
LIFE AS A BISHOP IN SALISBURY 213
(^35) The whole letter is reproduced from the original in Longleat by The Rev. Canon J.E.
Jackson, ‘Wiltshire County Gaols’, W.A.N.H.M.,9 (1866), pp. 82–87. Letter on pp.
83–84.