Myrrfield Road, Salisbury

Myrrfield Road is on the Bishopdown Farm estate, on the north east side of Salisbury.

Myrrfield is the name of the meadow in which Salisbury Cathedral was built.

It is sometime spelt Merry-field, as in a poem by a Doctor Walter Pope in 1713:

One day as the prelate on his down bed
Recruiting his spirits to rest
There appeared as ’tis said, a beautiful maid,
With her own dear babe at her breast.

To him thus she spoke (the day was scarce broke)
And his eyes yet to slumber did yield)
Go build be a church without any delay,
Go build it in Merry-field ¹

It has also sometimes spelt ‘Maryfield’. ²

This, though, was a revision of an older name. The Victoria County History says that:

The site was later called Maryfield on account of the dedication of the cathedral.³

Possibly the best explanation of the name is in a book called ‘Bell’s Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum’. The book is long out of copyright and it explains the derivation of the name better than I ever could:

During his [the bishop's] period of indecision the Virgin appeared to him in a vision, and commanded him to build his new church in a place called Myr-field, or, as some accounts have it, Maer-field. He searched vainly for a piece of ground by that name, that he might obey the supernatural edict, until by chance he overheard a labourer (or a soldier, the legends vary,) talking of the Maer-field, and then having, as he thought, identified the place, which appears to have been within his own demesne, he commenced to plan the present building. Another tradition ignores the dream, and says the site of the cathedral was determined by an arrow shot from the ramparts of Old Sarum.

Misled by the similarity of sound, the name Maer-field has been, naturally enough, interpreted to mean Mary-field. The apparently obvious form “Miry-field,”–as, according to Leland, it appears on an old inscription,–in spite of the marshy nature of the site, is probably a mere coincidence. Nor is Thomas Fuller’s “Merry-field, for the pleasant situation thereof,” better worth attention. The generally accepted theory at present is that _maer_, the Anglo-Saxon word for a boundary, supplies the clue. A hamlet, Marton, near Bedwin, another of the same name now corrupted to Martin, near Damerham, might each be truly described as boundary-towns. In Wiltshire to-day ‘mere-stone’ is the local idiom for a boundary-stone. Mere is alike the name of a hundred and of a parish in Wilts, both near its borders. The site of the present cathedral is at the junction of three ancient hundreds–Underditch, Alderbury, and Cawdon–the south-east wall of the close being the boundary line which divides the cathedral precincts from Cawdon.⁴

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Footnotes

1. A Salisbury Assortment, p13, ed John Chandler, Ex Libris Press, 1996 [↩]
2. I can’t find a reference for this at the minute [↩]
3. New Salisbury – Introduction | British History Online [↩]
4. Bell’s Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum [↩]