What is Old Sarum in To Kill a Mockingbird?

Old Sarum
refers to a rather rugged rural area in the northern part of Maycomb County where "an
enormous and confusing tribe domiciled." 

In ,recounts the history of
Macomb County and her family. Interestingly, Old Sarum is the name of one of the oldest
settlements of Salisbury, England; in fact, William the Conqueror (Norman Conquest of 1066)
established a fort there. While many places in Alabama have the names of locations in the
British Isles [Alabama History: An Annotated Bibliography lists
seventy-one], theof this name as a bellicose area can certainly not be missed. Most likely, the
Old Sarum bunch are probably not far removed from their ancestral clan. (The vast majority of
Southerners, especially in the 1930's, before industry came to the South, were of Scot-Irish or
English descent.)

At any rate, the Old Sarum "tribe" is a rather
unruly group of "country folk" [sic]; Scout describes them as "the nearest thing
to a gang" in Maycomb. She adds that some of the male members came to town and loafed
around the barbershop, rode the bus to the town where there was a "picture show,"
attended dances at the county's "riverside gambling hell," and brewed moonshine
whiskey. Scout adds that whenas a teenager went around with some of the members of this
clan,

[N]obody in Maycomb had nerve enough to tell Mr.
Radley that his boy was in with the wrong crowd.

As a
result of his association with this group of wild young men, Arthur "Boo" Radley was
arrested with them for disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, assault and battery, and other
charges. Thus began his cloister inside the Radley house under the supervision of his rigid
father, about whom Miss Maudie remarks, 

Sometimes the
Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of another.

Prior to Tom Robinson's trial, the sheriff and some of the
businessmen come to , asking if he can get a change of venue, as they are concerned about the
Old Sarum bunch. Their fears are warranted, as these men later show up at the jailhouse as the
stereotypical "liquored-up lynch mob." 

After Tom's trial is over,
Atticus perceives a glimmer of change in Maycomb County. The attitude of one of the Sarum bunch,
Mr. Cunningham, changed enough for him to vote "Not guilty" initially, which kept the
jury deliberating for a while.