Image Description (Alt text): A view of Corfe Common and the Rings, looking from the sallyport inside the castle.
Audio track transcript:
"My name? Call me a soldier of parliament. We were here because old Bankes – Chief Justice to the King – refused to give the place up, though the rest of Dorset was ours.
We’d tried to take it before, in 1643, but none of us got over the walls. By October ’45 we were back. We set up our cannons out of bowshot range, just past that farm.
Come February, it was freezing, and those defenders were dejected. A Lieutenant-Colonel, Pitman, saw the writing on the wall and switched sides.
He got 50 of us musketeers in, pretending to be royalist reinforcements. The garrison held out in the Keep for a while, there was some shooting, but we came to parley. Agreed local people could return to the town, all lives spared. I don’t blame Pitman. As Colonel Fitzjames wrote, when he was against us, he behaved gallantly, and when he was for us, he behaved faithfully…
A moment from me if you please… Sir Thomas, Rector of Corfe, great-grandson of John Bankes.Walk with me to the West Bailey, mind your step. I lived here in the late 1760s. This North Tower, my bedroom, the South Tower opposite, my living room. Cleared the demolition materials, got a local builder to help with the floorboards, created a rockery.
Oh, I suppose you’ve heard the rumours. That I ran here to escape. That Mary Ozard had become pregnant, out of wedlock. That she’d named me the father, and I was ordered to pay maintenance money of two shillings and sixpence a week. That I’d fallen out with my churchwardens, and sold pews from the church! That they doubted my sanity… But who do you believe? Her of low status, or me, trained in law and theology at Oxford? Me, related to the Bankes family, married into the local family, the Hayters of Creech? Hmm?"