History of Portchester

Reference

Portchester has one of the longest and richest histories of any settlement in southern England, spanning nearly two thousand years of continuous occupation on the same site. Few places in Britain can match the depth and visibility of its past.

The story begins with the Romans, who built the massive stone fort of Portus Adurni on the northern shore of Portsmouth Harbour in the late third century AD, probably around 285. The fort was part of the Saxon Shore, a chain of coastal defences stretching from the Wash to the Solent, designed to guard against raids by Germanic and Saxon pirates. The walls, built of local flint rubble with distinctive bonding courses of red Roman tile, enclosed roughly nine acres and were reinforced at intervals by D-shaped bastions. They survive almost to their full original height on all four sides, making Portchester the best-preserved Roman fort anywhere in northern Europe.

After the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the early fifth century, the fort was not abandoned. Saxon settlers moved in, and archaeological excavations within the walls have revealed evidence of timber halls, workshops, hearths and domestic life spanning several centuries. The name Portchester derives from the Old English 'Portceaster', meaning the Roman fort by the port. The site was important enough to be recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

The Normans recognised the fort's continuing strategic value and built a stone keep in the north-west corner under Henry I around 1120 to 1130. An inner bailey was created by walling off the corner of the Roman enclosure. An Augustinian priory was founded within the walls in 1133, but the canons found the site too cramped and noisy, with the royal garrison and visiting soldiers making monastic life difficult, and they moved to Southwick around 1145. Their church, St Mary's, remained as the parish church and is still in use today.

The castle served as a royal residence, military base and administrative centre throughout the medieval period. Henry II, King John, Edward I, Edward II and Edward III all visited or invested in the castle. Richard II carried out the most ambitious building work, constructing a palace complex within the inner bailey in the 1390s with a great hall, kitchens, lodgings and improved gatehouses. Henry V mustered his army and fleet at Portchester in 1415 before sailing to France and the Battle of Agincourt.

During the English Civil War, the castle was held by Royalists and besieged by Parliamentary forces in 1644. This was its last military action as a fortress. In the Napoleonic Wars (1794 to 1814), the castle found a grim new purpose as a prisoner of war camp, holding up to 7,000 French, Dutch and Spanish prisoners in wooden buildings within the outer bailey. The graffiti they carved into the castle walls survives and is visible today.

The village around the castle remained a small, quiet place until the twentieth century. The railway arrived in 1848 but did not trigger immediate growth. The real transformation came after the Second World War, when housing estates were built on farmland in every direction. Portchester grew from a few hundred people to around 18,000. Today it is a suburb within the Borough of Fareham, but the castle and the harbour give it a character and a sense of continuity that is quite unlike any other suburb on the south coast.