Welcome to the oldest building in the city of Salisbury. When the city, with its cathedral and castle, was still up on its ancient earthwork site at Old Sarum, the greater part of the lowlands to the south constituted the parish of St Martin Milford. As in many other places with Roman military connections, it was a "St Martin in the fields", where soldiers might pause to invoke the aid of their patron saint on leaving and returning from various excursions. After all, Martin had himself been a Roman soldier, conscripted at the age of 15.
The parish church of St Martin, a contemporary of the Romanesque Cathedral of Old Sarum, if not earlier, was a cruciform church, almost certainly with a central tower. Remains of the south transept of that building are known to lie underneath the grass in the churchyard. Although the central tower has long since gone, there is still something of the feel of a crossing between the two chancel arches.
Shortly before the new city of Salisbury was begun down in the valley with its new Cathedral in 1220, the old Chancel at St Martin’s was rebuilt in the early English style, and that is the Chancel which remains to this day. The lower part of the present tower also appears to belong to this date, though it is unclear why the axis is so different, or how the tower related to the rest of the building.
There are many unanswered questions about the sequence of the rest of the building as we see it today. The western Chancel arch probably dates from about 1415. In certain respects its details are so similar to the strainer arches in the cathedral, that it may even be by the same mason, Robert Wayte. The tall slender columns and high arches of the nave are of 15th century date, as are the windows and the waggon roofs. However, the overall outline of the nave and its aisles, the roof pitches and buttresses all suggest a 14th century structure. The spire and the upper tower clearly belong to the 14th century. So it looks as if the nave was not so much rebuilt, as radically modernised 100 years later.
