Was Old Sarum in ‘TKAM’ named after an ancient city in England?

A couple of weeks ago in this space, I wrote about the likelihood that the fictional swimming hole “Barker’s Eddie” in Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” was likely based on the real-life swimming hole known as “Parker’s Eddy,” which is located on Limestone Creek near Clausell.

I think it’s generally accepted that Harper Lee’s Maycomb County was loosely based on Monroe County. Making connections between places like Barker’s Eddy and Parker’s Eddy only shore up this idea. Another example of this is the fictional community of “Old Sarum” and the real-life community of “Old Salem,” although Lee may have seeded Old Sarum with a meaning deeper other than just swapping a few letters around.

Old Sarum is mentioned in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and in Lee’s second novel, “Go Set a Watchman.” In both books, it mentions that Old Sarum is “populated by two families, separate but apart in the beginning, but unfortunately bearing the same name. The Cunninghams and the Coninghams married each other until the spelling of the names was academic – academic unless a Cunningham wished to jape with a Coningham over land titles and took to the law.”

In Chapter One, Lee also connects the mysterious Boo Radley with the “Old Sarum Bunch.” Lee wrote that, “according to neighborhood legend, when the younger Radley boy (Boo) was in his teens, he became acquainted with some of the Cunninghams from Old Sarum, an enormous and confusing tribe domiciled in the northern part of the county, and they formed the nearest thing to a gang ever seen in Maycomb.”

This paragraph denotes a significant difference between the fictional Old Sarum and real-life Old Salem. In the novels, Old Sarum is located in the northern part of the county. However, in real life Old Salem is located almost due west of Monroeville, aka Maycomb.

In Chapter 15 of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Old Sarum gets another mention when, on a summer night in 1935, a mob from Old Sarum appears on Maycomb’s downtown square with the intent to do harm to Tom Robinson. Robinson is behind bars in the county jail, and his lawyer, Atticus Finch, is reading beneath a lamp outside. Fortunately, young Scout Finch intervenes and unwittingly saves Robinson from the mob.

With all of that in mind, I’m left to wonder if Lee did not have a double meaning in the mind when she came up with Old Sarum. As chance would have it the other day, I happened to be flipping through an old book called the “Atlas of Magical Britain” by Janet and Colin Bord. On Page 56, there is an entry for a place called Old Sarum, which is located just outside Salisbury in England.

This old city was the location of a cathedral from 1092 to 1220, and only the church’s foundations remain today. There was also once an old hill fort located there, and it was used by King William I after his famous victory at Hastings in 1066. Only the fort’s earthworks remain today.

In the end, it would be interesting to know if this ancient city in England was the inspiration for Lee’s Old Sarum. In the novels, Old Sarum may have been nothing more than a thinly-veiled reference to Old Salem, but then again, she may have had a deeper meaning in mind.