Henry Myddelton, Henry Neville, and the Salisbury Close waterworks, 1610–1613

Source-Control Summary

Three Royal Berkshire Archives documents reveal a sustained Salisbury waterworks project involving Sir Henry Neville and an adult Henry Myddelton. They should be separated decisively from the New River receipts with which they were later bundled.

The sequence is unusually concrete:

The 1610 receipt and 1613 letter have been inspected directly at original resolution. The later parent catalogue supplies public archival identity but compresses all five documents into a New River description. The content of these three Salisbury items requires a separate evidentiary lane.

• Royal Berkshire Archives, D/EN/O24

Quoted Source Passages: Neville's 1610 “adventure”

The project begins in the surviving record with a receipt signed by Henry Myddelton:

Receaued of S[i]r Henry Nevell Knight

vpon his aduenture of the rate of

the charges of bringing the water

from the conditt wall vnto

the North gate of the Cittie of

Sarum. witnes my hand this 26 of No: 1610

Henrie: Myddelton

Adventure is significant. The receipt describes Neville not simply as a householder paying an ordinary plumbing bill but as bearing a share or rated portion of the charges of a water-bringing enterprise. The exact financial structure is not stated: the receipt does not give the sum in its body, although its docket calls it Myddelton's acquittance for £200.

The destination is equally specific: the North gate of the Cittie of Sarum. The project therefore had a civic or precinct-scale route before the 1613 works inside the Close are considered.

Quoted Source Passages: the July 1613 progress report

Myddelton opens with active construction and an explicit standard of economical execution:

I haue sett men a worke to make the banckes in

the close, the w[hi]ch I hope shalbe don to yo[u]r mind

& in good husbandry.

Neville is being treated as someone whose approval of both result and expenditure matters.

Myddelton then introduces ecclesiastical authority:

The b[isho]p mean while hath made

provision of some warrant to drawe a wa-

ter course through the close

The bishop in July 1613 was Henry Cotton, whose Salisbury episcopate ran from 1598 to 1615. The letter does not preserve the warrant itself, but it indicates that lawful authority to cross the Close was being prepared or obtained. The Clergy of the Church of England Database confirms Cotton's tenure.

Route engineering: Close, Postern Gate or highway

The letter compares at least two routes:

vnlesse yow will

haue yt carried by the Posterne gate, w[hi]ch I fynde

will be a worke of more charge and difficultie

by reason of the walles w[hi]ch must be broken

through.

Myddelton continues:

But if yow please to haue yt carried by

the highe way, I hope there wilbe little opposition

This is not abstract hydraulic language. It is a route decision balancing:

• construction cost;
• physical difficulty;
• wall penetration;
• authority to cross the ecclesiastical precinct;
• anticipated resistance;
• Neville's preference.

The Cathedral Close was enclosed by walls and controlled gates. The High Street Gate was the principal northern entrance and included a lock-up for offences within the Liberty of the Close. That institutional geography helps explain why breaking through walls or choosing a highway was not merely a technical alteration. See the Salisbury Cathedral Close Preservation Society's histories of the High Street Gate and the development of the Close.

The “Close men” and local opposition

One of the letter's most revealing phrases is:

The close men already mutiny

The surrounding compressed syntax is not fully resolved, but Myddelton says that he hopes by his letters to quiet the trouble and opposition. Mutiny need not mean armed revolt. In this administrative context it records collective resistance by people associated with the Close to the proposed works or route.

The phrase opens several distinct archival searches:

1. Chapter acts may record formal objection, consent or conditions.
2. Fabric and property accounts may identify damaged walls, trenches and

reinstatement costs.

3. Liberty or gate records may identify officers responsible for access and

enforcement.

4. Episcopal registers may preserve the proposed warrant.
5. City minutes may record disputes where the route touched the highway or

North Gate.

Salisbury Cathedral's public archive description confirms that its holdings include Chapter meeting records from 1329 onward, repair and maintenance records, and medieval deeds and leases relating to Salisbury property: Salisbury Cathedral Archive.

Why the 1612 charter matters as context

The Victoria County History describes more than three centuries of conflict between Salisbury's citizens and its episcopal overlord. Under Bishop Cotton, the citizens complained of divided jurisdiction and sought fuller powers of administration. After negotiations involving bishop, dean and chapter, the city finally obtained its charter in 1612.

• “Salisbury: Relations with the bishops, to 1612,” *Victoria County History of Wiltshire*, vol. 6

The waterworks letter was written the next year. That proximity does not prove that the mutiny was a charter dispute. It does, however, prevent the route problem from being treated as a purely private plumbing matter. In 1613, episcopal authority, city highway space and the separately governed Cathedral Close belonged to a recently renegotiated jurisdictional landscape.

The construction programme

The controlled lower portion of the letter names or securely preserves:

• a projected interval of xiii or xiiii dayes;
• making the water course through the Close;
• building the fountayne;
• the pypes and cesterne;
• a promised full declaracion of the whole business.

The fountain belongs to the construction programme that Myddelton expects to advance rapidly.

The works therefore combined open or banked channel engineering with pressurized or gravity-fed distribution through lead pipes and storage in a cistern. The exact hydraulic relationship among conduit wall, North Gate, Close watercourse, fountain and house remains to be reconstructed.

Salisbury's wider water environment

Running watercourses were a defining part of Salisbury's urban design. Wiltshire Community History explains that water was diverted from the Avon, carried through the town and returned to the river, influencing even the shape of the city's street blocks: Salisbury community history.

Wessex Archaeology likewise describes a medieval network serving both fresh water and drainage functions: “Salisbury Sites 2: Belle Vue House and United Kingdom House”.

The Neville–Myddelton project was therefore not the invention of water circulation in Salisbury. Its novelty lies more likely in the extension, rerouting, improvement or controlled distribution of an established urban water system into and through the Cathedral Close.

Neville's house in the Close

The 1614 receipt records £5 for half a year's rent for a house in the Close of Sarum, paid by John Aldworth of Billingbear. This creates a plausible private interest for Neville in the waterworks, but it should not be made exclusive. The 1610 destination at the North Gate, the 1613 fountain, the episcopal warrant and resistance by the Close men all indicate a project larger than an ordinary household pipe.

The next task is to identify the house:

• its landlord;
• exact Close location;
• whether Neville occupied it during royal visits or parliamentary travel;
• whether the proposed water route approached it;
• whether rent, repair or household accounts survive after 1614.

Henry Myddelton: identity not yet solved

The adult writer is securely named by his own signatures, but his pedigree is not. Several tempting identifications must be rejected:

• he is not automatically Hugh Myddelton merely because the papers were later

bundled with New River receipts;

• he is not Sir Henry Middleton, the East India commander, who died overseas

in May 1613, two months before the Sarum letter (Dictionary of National Biography);

• he cannot be Hugh Myddelton's young son Henry, born in 1607

(Dictionary of Welsh Biography);

• spelling variants Myddelton and Middleton do not establish kinship.

The same signature name appears in the 1610 Sarum receipt, the 1613 works letter and the 1614 Close rent receipt. That continuity suggests a manager, contractor, landlord, agent or financier with an enduring Salisbury role. A targeted search should compare his signature with:

• Salisbury civic and Chapter accounts;
• London livery-company and freeman records;
• Myddelton family wills;
• property deeds for the Close house;
• Hugh Myddelton's business correspondence and account books.

New River separation

The parent bundle also contains genuine New River evidence: receipts for Neville's payments toward bringing water from Chadwell and Amwell to London. Those documents belong in the New River topic.

The Salisbury papers do not. Their place names, gates, walls, institutional actors and structures are local to Sarum. Keeping the lanes separate makes both arguments stronger:

The connection is Neville's repeated participation in water infrastructure and his dealings with members or associates of the Myddelton network, not proof that the two works were one project.

Research priorities

1. Search Salisbury Cathedral Chapter acts for 1610–14 for water, conduit,

fountain, cistern, pipe, trench, wall, Postern, Myddelton, Neville and objections by inhabitants of the Close.

2. Search Bishop Henry Cotton's register for the warrant mentioned in July

1613.

3. Map all early seventeenth-century gates and highways around the Close to

identify the two proposed routes.

4. Locate the conduit wall and North Gate endpoint named in 1610.
5. Identify Neville's rented Close house from leases, rentals and Aldworth's

accounts.

6. Search Salisbury city records for the 1610 payment and any 1613 highway

consent or dispute.

7. Identify Henry Myddelton through signatures, property, livery-company

records and wills without assuming a relationship to Hugh.

8. Determine whether the fountain or cistern survived into later plans,

antiquarian descriptions or archaeological reports.

Sources

• Royal Berkshire Archives,

D/EN/O24.

• Elizabeth Crittall, ed.,

“Salisbury: Relations with the bishops, to 1612,” A History of the County of Wiltshire, vol. 6 (London, 1962).

• Clergy of the Church of England Database,

“List of the bishops of Salisbury”.

• Salisbury Cathedral,

“The Archive”.

• Salisbury Cathedral Close Preservation Society,

“High Street Gate” and “SCCPS History”.

• Wiltshire Council,

Salisbury Community History.

• Wessex Archaeology,

“Salisbury Sites 2: Belle Vue House and United Kingdom House”.

• Dictionary of National Biography,

“Middleton, Henry (d. 1613)”.

• Dictionary of Welsh Biography,

“Myddelton, Myddleton, Middleton”, for Hugh Myddelton's son Henry, born in 1607.

Notes on Access

The Royal Berkshire Archives public record is a file-level description, not a public page-image edition of each child document. The quoted manuscript text was checked against the complete photographed witnesses. The VCH page was available as public body text through British History Online. Cathedral, Close, Wiltshire and Wessex pages were publicly accessible.

The manuscript transcript remains deliberately partial where the handwriting is compressed.