This picture does not feature Portchester Castle. Unfortunately, I don’t have one that does. This isn’t a piece about the castle, it about books that talk of the English Civil War.
I have a bit of a dilemma, I bought a book a while back by Diane Purkiss it draws upon the personal experiences of the people who lived in those times through letters, memoirs and other resources and is almost a diary type book in its own right. I had decided that if I were to read this book, I would need to commit to doing so, and thus it became the next book on my list.
But then, I was doing a search on the internet of episodes from that time that were happening in Hampshire, and I came across the story of. Basing house. And before you ask, the ruins of Basing house are about one mile from the centre of Basingstoke.
Although not a castle, it was nonetheless it was a grand house and it was pivotal in Hampshire’s involvement in the civil war. Ending as it did after being besieged for several months.
It is the main feature of a book called, unsurprisingly, The Civil War in Hampshire. Even Gosport receives several mentions in the book, written in 1904 by the Reverend G. N. Godwin, which surprisingly, is freely available on the Internet. I confess that I am inclined to read that first, not least because it refers to Gosport, and the clubmen which I thought was a Dorset phenomenon.
I don’t think it is a dilemma really, I know which one I am going to read first.
The picture? Oh, that’s the remains of the Palace of Knossos of Crete. Which I think guarded the labyrinth in which wandered the mythical beast the Minotaur, half man half bull. But that, as they say, is an entirely separate story.
Bills Posts 