Stafford Castle

Stafford Castle is a rather romantic old ruin. Although the steep motte on which it sits is Norman, the masonry is late Georgian, for the former was fortress destroyed in the civil wars. Held by royalist and Roman Catholic Lady Stafford, the local parliamentary committee ordered that “it shall be forthwith demolished”. The new occupants discovered that the fleeing garrison had left behind large quantities of beer and ‘popish books’, the former delighting the soldiers and the latter horrifying their puritan commanders.

Razing the old fortress seems like a terrible waste, but those who had endured its dominion while it housed the enemy rightly feared the possibility of renewed conflict and saw fit to remove it from any future calculations. The current ruins offer a focal point and hint at the site’s former strength, but the real fortress is long gone.

Would that we were as thorough with wicked bastions in our lives as the old Parliamentarians were with their opponents’ citadels:

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh:  (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. 2 Cor 10:3-5

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