[1] Sir
Bulstrode Whitelock describes how he slighted the works at Phillis
Court, "causing the bulwarks and lines to be digged down, the grafts
[i.e. moats] filled, the drawbridge to be pulled up, and all levelled.
I sent away the great guns, the granadoes, fireworks, and ammunition,
whereof there was good store in the fort. I procured pay for my
soldiers, and many of them undertook the service in Ireland." This is
doubtless typical of what went on in many other houses. The famous
royal manor-house of Woodstock was left battered and deserted, and
"haunted," as the readers of _Woodstock_ will remember, by an "adroit
and humorous royalist named Joe Collins," who frightened the
commissioners away by his ghostly pranks. In 1651 the old house was
gutted and almost destroyed. The war wrought havoc with the old
houses, as it did with the lives and other possessions of the
conquered.
[1] _History of Oxfordshire_, by J. Meade Falkner.
[Illustration: Seventeenth-century Trophy]
But we are concerned with times less remote, with the vanishing of
historic monuments, of noble specimens of architecture, and of the
humble dwellings of the poor, the picturesque cottages by the wayside,
which form such attractive features of the English landscape. We have
only to look at the west end of St.
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