- This windswept hilltop
is Old Sarum in Wiltshire. It's an enormous Iron Age hillfort and... you know what?
Actually, the best way to see it is not from down here. This is one of the most important
historical sites in Southern England. An Iron Age fortification
from more than 2000 years ago. Then in the 11th century, a castle
was built for William the Conqueror and the Catholic church
built a cathedral here. You can see the foundations
of all those surviving centuries later. This was a thriving bit of England. But it fell from grace. There's a lot of complicated reasons why,
but one of the main ones is: a windswept hilltop
is a terrible place for a cathedral. - Much as that looks impressive and you can dominate a landscape that brings a number of problems with it. Supplies of water from wells
were just not adequate to support a large population. Even to the extent that they
actually needed to buy the water that they needed to drink. When the weather isn't good, the wind is blowing over,
the rain is coming at you, when thunderstorms are going,
it's a very, very bad place. - As well as that,
the local bishop, Roger, fell out with the new king Stephen, and that's in a period of history when "falling out with the king"
was very serious indeed. - Bishop Roger falls out with the king. He falls out with pretty much everyone. That is the price you pay for being active
within politics and within religion and he plays the game at very high levels. And he does come crashing down. There's also an institutional problem. The king's men in the castle and
the bishop's men around the cathedral, you get a few references to conflict there where, for example,
a procession of clergy was stopped by some of the king's
soldiers behaving churlishly. They would easily go, look,
we don't want anymore of this. Begging the pope to release
them from all of this, and the pope saying absolutely, you can have somewhere that will be
all your own, down at the bottom. And giving them licence for it. - So the clergy moved a couple of miles away
to a new cathedral, in a place that would eventually
become known as Salisbury. The buildings here started
to fall into disrepair and the once-busy town
declined and declined and declined. But despite that, for some reason,
the landowners of Old Sarum were invited to send two
representatives to Parliament. This was the 14th century, now, when the rules of Parliament
were still being written. And the reason why they were invited is... a bit of a mystery. - Historians still aren't sure. One of the things that modern archaeology
is starting to tell us quite a bit about is whether there was stuff going on
outside the hillfort on lower ground that we don't know about, that's nearer in to Old Sarum
than the new city of Salisbury. There's a fairly strong likelihood that while the hillfort itself
had been abandoned there was a bit more
settlement further down. And probably in the later middle ages it wouldn't have been regarded
as such a complete nonsense of two MPs being elected
for a place with no population at all. - So this hill had two
members of Parliament. And that didn't change for centuries. It didn't change as the
population dwindled, it didn't change when King Henry VIII signed over possession
of all the buildings to a local official who
ordered them dismantled and used for building material. By the 17th century, no one lived here. But you didn't have to live here to vote. Anyone who was nominated by the landowner as being one of the tenants in this area, that was enough. And of course they voted
for the person who'd nominated them. So this hill became a rotten borough. If you owned the land,
then you and a friend, or whichever two people you chose,
had seats in Parliament. Representing basically just yourself. And if you were particularly
rich and well connected you might own a couple
of other boroughs nearby which would elect your friends. Meanwhile, places like
the city of Manchester eventually growing to a
quarter of a million people had no one representing
them at all. For centuries. By the 19th century, it was clear
that something had to be done, but how do you change something like that? How do you convince people with
power to give up that power? Public outrage. Radicals. Protests,
including one where 60,000 people were attacked by the military which came to be known
as the Peterloo Massacre. In May 1832, riots broke out when the third attempt at a reform bill
was blocked in Parliament. And Britain likely came
close to revolution. After all, the French Revolution was still very much in, uh,
living memory then. In short, the reformers won. And historians can argue
about how much of that was political wrangling by
the people who gained power, and how much of that was the
very real threat of violent revolution. When the dust settled,
the law was changed, the rotten boroughs were abolished, and there were 130 new seats
in Parliament. Voting was still only for men
with land or money though. It took until 1918 for that to become
"all men and some women", and it was 1928 before it was "all adults". These days parliamentary boundaries are drawn by an independent group
based on population. This hill is managed by a charity
called English Heritage, and one Member of Parliament for Salisbury
represents this whole area and the roughly 70,000 people
who live in it. It's important to remember
that history is fractal. You could spend days
or years or a lifetime studying everything that happened
over those few days in 1832. Or you could sum up
centuries in a few minutes. But there's one thing that
Old Sarum shows very clearly, it is extremely difficult to
convince people with power to give it up willingly. Thanks to English Heritage for
letting me film at Old Sarum, you can find out more about them
and about visiting here on their website. The link is in the description.
Tom is too good for humanity