Last weekend, 3 pikemen, a water carrier and a drummer made their way south to the pretty village of Old Basing to take part in the yearly opening event for Basing House.
Now managed by Hampshire County Council, the ruins of Basing House stand on some of the best Civil War earthworks in the country and, alongside the 17th Century Barn and pretty house gardens, make up and interesting and exciting attraction.
Owned by the Royalist Paulet family, in it’s heyday Basing House was a grand Tudor brick manor house. Bigger than Hampton Court Palace, it was one of the finest private houses in the country.
Unfortunately, it was turned to ruin at the hands of the Parliamentarian army after being besieged 3 times in under 3 years. It was finally taken in October 1645 and a fire that took place just after the final storming destroyed the building. Many other houses in the surrounding area contain bricks from the house and the nearby 17th Century barn is built almost entirely from the materials of the house.
Every year, as an opening weekend event over the Easter Bank Holidays, the Sealed Knot brings to life what it would have been like at the time with battles and a living history camp around the ruins of the house.
This year, a handful of Newcastles went down for the weekend and were joined by a couple of others from the regiment who day-tripped for the Sunday battle. We had a really fun and relaxed weekend and teamed up with other regiments in our Tercio to turn out a good number of musket and pikemen each day.
The two battles were good fun and although we weren’t really in camera range, as you can see from the other regiments in the photos below, it was a good and exciting battle with an opportunity to storm the defences that had been made for the weekend. Due to the smaller numbers at this event, Newcastle’s Tercio took on a Parliamentarian persona (someone’s got to!) and got to storm into the defences and had a lot of fun doing so!
The pike block had two fantastic battles and worked well together as a unit, repeatedly winning the pushes and coming off the field with big grins on their faces. The musket block had some issues with the space available on the battlefield limiting their firing opportunities but overall seemed to have a lot of fun and get stuck in to a lot of hand to hand combat during the latter half of the battles.
As well as the battles, on the way to the field we also got to storm the prevoiusly mentioned barn. Although the barn itself wasn’t there at the time, it’s space and location allow a great opportunity to show the different fighting style of storming/defending a building, something that can’t be shown as well at the old house itself. As well as providing something a bit different both to re-enactors and the public, our drummer particularly liked the wonderful acoustics and increased volume the barn provided as the troops marched through.
Overall it was a great weekend with good weather and lots of fun both on and off the field. As always, the social side was just as bigger part of the weekend as the fighting and we took plenty of opportunity to head to the local pub and sit round some great campfires with friends in other regiments.
Once again, we will be back there next year for more of the same!
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Images courtesy of Jo Isaacs, John Beardsworth and Ellie Cooper.