Porchester, where I found myself late in the afternoon, is a very interesting and curious place.  What we really have that is ancient there is a great walled green about six hundred feet square.  We enter this area to-day on the west, the outer gate being thus opposite to us in the eastern wall, the castle keep and bailey on our left in the north-west corner, and the church to the south-east.  All this is mediaeval work, but the origins of Porchester are far older than that; the place was a fortress of the Romans.

It is certain that a Roman road ran, as I have said, from Southampton to Chichester, which it entered by the West Gate, and met the Roman military highway, the Stane Street which entered Chichester by the East Gate, whither it had come from London’ Bridge.  This Roman road doubtless served many a little port upon these creeks and harbours that lie between Southampton Water and Chichester Harbour, but undoubtedly the most important port upon that road, apart from the two cities which it joined, was the Roman Porchester.

It has been suggested, and not without reason, that the Stane Street itself dates only from the latter part of the Roman occupation of Britain, that it was, in fact, a purely military way built for the passage of troops, which until the fourth century were certainly not needed in any quantity in southern Britain.  That they were needed then was due to the Saxon pirates.  The same pagan robbers, who, when the Legions left us never to return in the first years of the fifth century, might seem to have overrun the whole country.  Now it seems fairly certain that Roman Porchester was a military and perhaps a naval fortress, built not earlier than the fourth century here at the western extremity of what the Romans called the Litus Saxonicum, and for the purpose of defending southern Britain from the raids of these barbarous and pagan rogues.  If so, it might seem to be of one piece with that presumably purely military Way the Stane Street, and to give it its meaning.

At any rate, the mediaeval builder of Porchester Castle used, with the help of rebuildings and patchings, the Roman fortifications, which did not perhaps differ very much, and not at all in form, from those we see.  Roman Porchester was just what mediaeval Porchester was, a great fortress, not a “city,” nor a village, but a port similar to the others that lined the Saxon shore from the Wash to Beachey Head.

Of what became of the place in Saxon times we are entirely ignorant.  The Domesday Survey speaks of it as a “halla,” but in the first half of the twelfth century the Normans built a castle in the north-west corner of the Roman enclosure, which in 1153 Henry II. granted to Henry Manduit, and from that time it appears as the military port, as it were, of the capital, Winchester; Henry II.  Richard I. John and Henry III. not only frequently taking up their residence at Porchester, and there as in a strong place, transacting the most important business, but they all of them most frequently set out thence for the Continent in days when a king of England was as often abroad as at home.  Except Edward I. there is scarcely an English king from Henry II. to Henry VIII. who did not use Porchester, and Elizabeth, the last royal visitor, held her court in the Castle.