One of the reasons most frequently alleged for the abandonment of Old Sarum was its lack of water; but if it was deemed unadvisable to acknowledge the political and administrative reasons which really decided the change, it is just possible that the superfluity of water was found useful as a plausible explanation of the removal on hygienic grounds; or it may even be that the whole story of the scarcity of water at Old Sarum was a later invention to excuse its unwelcome abundance in the new locality. Bishop Douglas is credited with the saying, "Salisbury is the sink of Wiltshire plain, the close is the sink of Salisbury, and the bishop's palace the sink of the close." Certainly the site lacks the natural dignity of position such an edifice demands, and which Lincoln, Durham, Ely, and many another English cathedral, show was frequently deemed essential. Thomas Fuller, who occupied a stall at Salisbury, has written, "The most curious and cavilling eye can desire nothing in this edifice except an ascent, seeing such as address themselves hither can hardly say with David, 'I will go up to the house of the Lord.'" The temporary chapel of wood, commenced on the Monday after Easter in 1219, must have been a modest structure, since on the next Trinity Sunday the Bishop celebrated mass, and the same day consecrated a cemetery there. In the MS. by William de Wanda, precentor and afterwards dean of Sarum, preserved in the Cathedral Library, we have a record of the very first ceremonies connected with the Cathedral, which being probably trustworthy in the main is so curiously interesting in itself, that it deserves quoting freely, from the version given by Francis Price, clerk of the works to the Cathedral, and author of a very interesting monograph upon it, published in the latter part of the last century. We find that in the year A.D. 1220, on the day of St. Vitalis the Martyr, being the fourth of the calends of May (which was the twenty-eighth of April), the foundations were laid by Bishop Richard Poore. "On the day appointed for the purpose the bishop came with great devotion, few earls or barons of the county, but a great multitude of the common people coming in from all parts; and when divine service had been performed, and the Holy Spirit invoked, the said bishop, putting off his shoes, went in procession with the clergy of the church to the place of foundation singing the litany; then the litany being ended and a sermon first made to the people, the bishop laid the first stone for our Lord the Pope Honorius, and the second for the Lord Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, at that time with our Lord the King in the Marches of Wales; then he added to the new fabric a third stone for himself; William Longespee, Earl of Sarum, who was then present, laid the fourth stone, and Elaide[3] Vitri, Countess of Sarum, the wife of the said earl, a woman truly pious and worthy because she was