title: Laminin

text: The laminin globular (G) domain, also known as the LNS (Laminin-alpha, Neurexin and Sex hormone-binding globulin) domain, is on average 177 amino acids in length and can be found in one to six copies in various laminin family members as well as in a large number of other extracellular proteins. For example, all laminin alpha-chains have five laminin G domains, all collagen family proteins have one laminin G domain, the CNTNAP proteins have four laminin G domains, while neurexin 1 and 2 each hold six laminin G domains. On average, approximately one quarter of the proteins that hold laminin G domains is taken up by these laminin G domains themselves. The smallest laminin G domain can be found in one of the collagen proteins (COL24A1; 77 AA) and the largest domain in TSPEAR (219 AA).


title: Laminin

text: The exact function of the Laminin G domains has remained elusive, and a variety of binding functions has been ascribed to different Laminin G modules. For example, the laminin alpha1 and alpha2 chains each have five C-terminal laminin G domains, where only domains LG4 and LG5 contain binding sites for heparin, sulphatides and the cell surface receptor dystroglycan. Laminin G-containing proteins appear to have a wide variety of roles in cell adhesion, signalling, migration, assembly and differentiation.


title: Laminin

text: Basement membrane assembly is a cooperative process in which laminins polymerise through their N-terminal domain (LN or domain VI) and anchor to the cell surface through their G domains. Netrins may also associate with this network through heterotypic LN domain interactions. This leads to cell signalling through integrins and dystroglycan (and possibly other receptors) recruited to the adherent laminin. This LN domain-dependent self-assembly is considered to be crucial for the integrity of basement membranes, as highlighted by genetic forms of muscular dystrophy containing the deletion of the LN module from the alpha 2 laminin chain. The laminin N-terminal domain is found in all laminin and netrin subunits except laminin alpha 3A, alpha 4 and gamma 2.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Mississippi State Penitentiary (MSP), also known as Parchman Farm, is a maximum-security prison farm located in unincorporated Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region. Occupying about of land, Parchman is the only maximum security prison for men in the state of Mississippi, and is the state's oldest prison.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Begun with four stockades in 1901, the Mississippi Department of Corrections facility was constructed largely by state prisoners. It has beds for 4,840 inmates. Inmates work on the prison farm and in manufacturing workshops. It holds male offenders classified at all custody levels—A and B custody (minimum and medium security) and C and D custody (maximum security). It also houses the male death row—all male offenders sentenced to death in Mississippi are held in MSP's Unit 29—and the state execution chamber. The superintendent of Mississippi State Penitentiary is Marshall Turner. There are two wardens, three deputy wardens, and two associate wardens.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Female prisoners are not usually assigned to MSP; Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, also the location of the female death row, is the only state prison in Mississippi designated as a place for female prisoners.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: For much of the 19th century after the American Civil War, the state of Mississippi used a convict lease system for its prisoners; lessees paid fees to the state and were responsible for feeding, clothing and housing prisoners who worked for them as laborers.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 1900 the Mississippi State Legislature appropriated US$80,000 for the purchase of the Parchman Plantation, a property in Sunflower County. What is now the prison property was located at a railroad spur called "Gordon Station".


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The state of Mississippi purchased land in Sunflower County in January 1901 to establish a state prison. In 1901 four stockades were constructed, and the state moved prisoners to begin clearing land for crop cultivation. The land was undeveloped Mississippi Delta bottomland and forest, fertile but dense with undergrowth and trees.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Around the time the Mississippi State Penitentiary (MSP) opened, Sunflower County residents objected to having executions performed at the prison. They feared that the county would be stigmatized as a "death county". Mississippi originally performed executions of condemned criminals in their counties of conviction.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The Mississippi Department of Archives and History says that MSP "was in many ways reminiscent of a gigantic antebellum plantation and operated on the basis of a plan proposed by Governor John M. Stone in 1896". Prisoners worked as laborers in its operations. In the fiscal year 1905, Parchman's first year of operations, the State of Mississippi earned $185,000 (more than $4.6 million in 2009 dollars) from Parchman's operations.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Originally Parchman was one of two prisons designated for black men, with the other prisons housing other racial and gender groups.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 1909 the State of Mississippi acquired adjacent to the MSP territory, resulting in MDOC having in the Mississippi Delta. As time passed, the state began to consolidate most penal operations in Parchman, making other camps hold minor support roles. In 1916 MDOC bought the O'Keefs Plantation in Quitman County, near Lambert. Originally this plantation was a separate institution, the Lambert Farm. The facility later became Camp B.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: By 1917 the Parchman property had been fully cleared. The administration divided the facility into a series of camps, housing black and white prisoners of both genders. By 1917 12 male camps and one female camp were established, with racial segregation maintained throughout. The institution became the main hub of activity for Mississippi's prison system. In 1937, during the Great Depression, the prison had 1,989 inmates.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Around the 1950s, residents of Sunflower County were still opposed to the concept of housing an execution chamber at MSP. In September 1954, Governor Hugh L. White called for a special session of the Mississippi Legislature to discuss the application of the death penalty. During that year, the prison installed a gas chamber for on-site executions. It replaced a mobile electric chair, which, between 1940 and February 5, 1952, had been transported to various counties for executions at prisoner's native grounds. In 1942, the prison saw the end of convict leasing. The first person to be executed in the gas chamber was Gearald A. Gallego, on March 3, 1955.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In the spring of 1961, Freedom Riders went to the American South to work for desegregation of public facilities serving interstate transportation, as segregation of such facilities and buses had been declared unconstitutional. The federal government had done nothing to enforce the Supreme Court decisions and southern states ignored the rulings.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Violence engulfed the Riders in Alabama, and the federal government intervened. Finally the governors of Alabama and Mississippi agreed to protect the riders, in exchange for being allowed to arrest them. The Governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, did not permit violence against the protesters, but arrested the riders when they reached Jackson, Mississippi. By the end of June, 163 Freedom Riders had been convicted in Jackson and many were jailed in Parchman. On June 15, 1961 the state government sent the first set of Freedom Riders from Hinds County Prison to Parchman; to make the protesters as uncomfortable as possible, they were put to work on chain gangs. The first group sent to the farm were 45 male Freedom Riders, 29 blacks and 16 whites. A call went out across the country to keep the Freedom Rides going and "fill the jails" of Mississippi. At one time, 300 Freedom Riders were imprisoned at Parchman Farm.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The prison authorities forced the freedom riders to remove their clothing and undergo strip searches. After the strip searches, Deputy Tyson met the freedom riders and began intimidating them. He began by mocking the Freedom Riders, telling them since they wanted to march all the time, they could march right to their cells, and he would lead them. The guards at Parchman Farm were relentless even after all of this mockery.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: "When they arrived from Jackson, they were stripped of their clothing, and given a tee shirt and loose-fitting boxer shorts ... no more. It was the beginning of many steps to try to intimidate and humiliate the Freedom Riders. They were denied most basic items, such as pencils and paper or books." David Fankhauser, a Freedom Rider at Parchman Farm, said,


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In our cells, we were given a Bible, an aluminum cup and a tooth brush. The cell measured 6 × 8 feet with a toilet and sink on the back wall, and a bunk bed. We were permitted one shower per week, and no mail was allowed. The policy in the maximum security block was to keep lights on 24 hours a day.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Breakfast every morning was black coffee strongly flavored with chicory, grits, biscuits and blackstrap molasses. Lunch was generally some form of beans or black-eyed peas boiled with pork gristle, served with cornbread. In the evening, it was the same as lunch except it was cold.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The Governor of Mississippi, Ross Barnett, visited the farm a few times to check on the activists. He reportedly told the guards to, "break their spirit, not their bones". The governor ordered the activists to be kept away from all other inmates and in maximum security cells. With that order given, the Freedom Riders were stuck in the cell for the most part with not a lot to do.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: As in many previous jailings of Civil Rights prisoners, they enthusiastically sang Freedom Songs, mostly direct descendants of slave spirituals. They made up songs to fit their new place. The prisoners sang these songs almost non-stop. They tell us that this singing nourished their sense of unity, purpose and spirits. Guard Tyson and the other white guards found the singing irritating, and tried to stop it. He said that it was bothering the cooks. Considering that the cooks were all black, it was clear that the effect on the cooks would be to make them "uppity ..." He ordered the removal of the mattresses and bug screens to force the prisoners to stop singing. Next, the guards tried to barter with the activists. The superintendent finally apologized to the riders, and returned their belongings, as well as the mattresses and screens. It was notable that this negotiation occurred just hours before an inspection tour by a delegation of officials from Minnesota who were examining the treatment of the Freedom Riders. It was a welcome victory for the Freedom Riders.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: As the 45 Riders struggled in prison, many others were heading South to join the Freedom Rides. Winonah Myers was one of the women who went South and was eventually jailed for her activism. She witnessed the treatment first hand. She was treated just as the men were, with bad living quarters and worse clothing and meals. Although most of the Freedom Riders were bailed out after a month, Myers was the last to leave. She was visited as an activist. Their experience at Parchman gave the Freedom Riders credibility in the Civil Rights Movement.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 1970 the civil rights lawyer Roy Haber began taking statements from inmates, which eventually ran to 50 pages detailing murders, rapes, beatings and other abuses they had suffered in Parchman from 1969 to 1971. Four Parchman inmates brought a suit against the prison superintendent in federal district court in 1972, alleging their civil rights under the United States Constitution were being violated by the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In the case, "Gates v. Collier" (1972), the federal judge William C. Keady found that Parchman Farm violated the Constitution and was an affront to 'modern standards of decency'. Among other reforms, the accommodation was made fit for human habitation, and the trusty system, (where lifers were armed with rifles and set to guard other inmates), was abolished. The state was required to integrate the prison facilities, hire African-American staff members, and construct new prison facilities.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In the 1970s the Governor of Mississippi William L. Waller organized a blue-ribbon committee to study MSP. The committee decided that the state should abandon MSP's for-profit farming system and hire a professional penologist to head the prison.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: On July 1, 1984 the Legislature of Mississippi amended §§ 99-19-51 of the Mississippi Code; the new amendment stated that prisoners who committed capital crimes after July 1, 1984 would be executed by lethal injection.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In the mid-1980s, several state law enforcement officials and postal inspectors went to Parchman to end a widespread scam involving forged money orders.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 1985 area farmers still referred to the facility as being the "Parchman Penal Farm", even though the facility was officially named the "Mississippi State Penitentiary". During that year MSP had over 4,000 prisoners, including 200 women in a few of the camps. When the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility (CMCF) opened in January 1986, all women who were incarcerated at MSP were moved to the new facility.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The BBC filmed "Fourteen Days in May" (1987) at Parchman. The documentary followed the last two weeks of the life of Edward Earl Johnson, who was executed in the prison's gas chamber.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 1997 several prison guards were arrested, accused of illegally interfering with prisoner mail. On March 18, 1998, the legislature made another amendment: removing the gas chamber as a method of execution.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: On November 17, 2003, Larry Hentz escaped from Unit 24B of MSP; he was believed to have been traveling with his wife. The escapee and his wife were captured in San Diego, California on December 11, 2003. Hentz was returned to prison.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 2005 Tim Climer, the executive director of the Sunflower County Economic Development District, stated that he wanted to develop MSP as a tourist attraction by establishing an interpretive center.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 2010, the Mississippi State Penitentiary became the first correctional facility in the United States to install a system to prevent contraband cell phone usage by inmates. The managed access system was to prevent the authentication and operation of contraband wireless devices within the prison grounds. Other prisoners, visitors and guards had been smuggling in cellphones as whole units or in pieces for later re-assembly and use. Federal Communications Commission regulations do not allow for devices which interfere with communications on licensed frequencies; The Communications Act only allows a federal agency jam frequencies.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The managed access system renders unauthorized devices useless within the prison; it relieves the administration of having to locate or confiscate the devices. It permits authorized devices to operate unimpeded. The technology avoids the legal impediments associated with competing technologies for cell detection and cell-jamming. It ensures that all emergency 911 calls are permitted to complete. Christopher Epps, Commissioner of MDOC, announced the system on September 8, 2010, and suggested that it provided a model for other prisons to use to reduce contraband cell phones. Due to the installation of the system, between August 6, 2010 and September 9, 2010, more than 216,320 texts and calls were blocked.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Between 2014 and 2020, $215 million was cut from the Mississippi Corrections budget, resulting in increasing pressure on all Mississippi prisons. The 2019 annual inspection report for the prison includes numerous health and safety concerns including broken toilets, sinks and showers, unsanitary kitchens, cells with dangerous electrical fittings and inmates sleeping without mattresses. Photographs illustrating the concerns were included. The 2020 Department of Health report indicates that some progress has been made, but still includes a list of sanitary concerns running to 14 pages which include the same concerns, with the exception of missing mattresses. Photographs are provided. During 2019 and 2020 there were a series of inmate deaths. The Commissioner of the Department of Corrections resigned at this time. Eight prisoners died in January 2020 through suicide or violence.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Later in January 2020, it was reported in the press that the prison had closed Unit 29 due to infrastructure issues, and was arranging for prisoners to be housed in prison facilities outside of Parchman. However, Unit 29 has remained open. The 2021 Department of Health Report contains a three page list of health, safety and hygiene deficiencies identified in the Unit 29 accommodation for prisoners.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In February, 2020, a federal lawsuit was filed on behalf of over 150 inmates by rappers Jay-Z and Yo Gotti regarding "inhumane and dangerous conditions" at the prison. A Federal Department of Justice Civil Rights investigation was commenced in February 2020, to examine whether prisoners were adequately protected from violence in Parchman and three other Mississippi state prisons, whether Parchman failed in its responsibility for suicide prevention and mental-health care, and whether there were excessive use of solitary confinement in Parchman.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In April 2022, the Justice Department reported that conditions at the facility were inhumane due to years of neglect by the state.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The prison which occupies of land, has 53 buildings with a total of of space. As of 2010 the institution can house 4,536 inmates. 1,109 people, as of 2010, work at MSP. Most of MDOC's agricultural enterprise farming activity occurs at MSP. Mississippi Prison Industries has a work program at MSP, with about 190 inmates participating. The road from the front entrance to the back entrance stretches . Donald Cabana, who served as the superintendent and executioner of MSP, said, "the sheer magnitude of the place was difficult to comprehend on first viewing."


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: "Parchman" appears as a place on highway maps. The "Parchman" dot represents the MSP main entrance and several MSP buildings, with the prison territory located to the west of the main entrance. The main entrance, a metal gate with "Mississippi State Penitentiary" in large letters, is located at the intersection of U.S. Route 49W and Mississippi Highway 32, on the west side of 49W.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The Mississippi Blues Trail marker is located at the Parchman main entrance. Passersby are not permitted to stop to photograph buildings at the Parchman main entrance. The rear entrance is about east of Shelby, at MS 32. A private portion of Highway 32 extends from the main entrance of MSP to the rear entrance of MSP. U.S. 49W is a major highway used to travel to MSP.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The prison facility is located near the northern border of Sunflower County. The City of Drew is south of MSP, and Ruleville is about from MSP. Parchman is south of Tutwiler, about south of Memphis, Tennessee, and about north of Jackson.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Throughout MSP's history, it was referred to as "the prison without walls" due to the dispersed camps within its property. Hugh Ferguson, the director of public affairs of MSP, said that the prison is not like Alcatraz, because it is not centralized in one or several main buildings. Instead MSP consists of several prison camps spread out over a large area, called "units". Each unit serves a specific segment of the prison population, and each unit is surrounded by walls with barbed tape.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The perimeter of the overall Parchman property has no fencing. The prison property, located on flat farmland of the Mississippi Delta, has almost no trees. Ferguson said that a potential escapee would have no place to hide. Richard Rubin, author of "Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South", said that MSP's environment is so inhospitable for escape that prisoners working in the fields are not chained to one another, and one overseer supervises each gang. A potential escapee could wander for days without leaving the MSP property.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: As of 1971 guards patrol MSP on horseback instead of on foot. The rear entrance is protected by a steel barricade and a guard tower. In 1985 Robert Cross of the "Chicago Tribune" said "The physical surroundings--cotton and bean fields, the 21 scattered camps, the barbed wire enclosures--suggest that nothing much has changed since the days, early in this century, when outsiders could visit Parchman State Penal Farm only on the fifth Sunday of those rare months containing more than four."


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: MSP has two main areas, Area I and Area II. Area I includes Unit 29 and the Front Vocational School. Area II includes Units 25-26, Units 30-32, and Unit 42. Seven units house prisoners. As of the 1970s and 1980s the prison grounds had small red houses that were used for conjugal visits. The prison offered conjugal visits until February 1, 2014.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 2010 MDOC classified 13 units as "closed housing units". All of the units in the prison that formerly housed prisoners and no longer function as inmate housing include:


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: "Guard Row" is the area where employees of MSP and their dependents live. As of the 1970s "Guard Row", a nickname for the main road that bisects the prison, has identical wood frame houses, most of which had been built in the 1930s by the Work Projects Administration. Around 1971 the state charged employees a rent of 10 to 20 dollars (about $- adjusted for inflation) per month, a rate described by Donald Cabana, a former superintendent of MSP, as "nominal". The state provided housing for employees due to the isolation of MSP, and therefore the staff can quickly respond to emergencies such as inmate disturbances or escapes. As of the 1970s multiple generations of families lived and worked at MSP.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The Sunflower County Consolidated School District serves children of employees residing on the grounds of Parchman. Students are zoned to A. W. James Elementary School in Drew for elementary, Drew Hunter Middle School in Drew, and Thomas E. Edwards Sr. High School (formerly Ruleville Central High School) in Ruleville. Residents were previously zoned to the Drew School District, and children who lived on the grounds of MSP attended A.W. James Elementary School and Drew Hunter High School in Drew. Prior to the 2010–2011 school year the Drew School District secondary schools were Hunter Middle School and Drew High School. On July 1, 2012, the Drew School District consolidated into the Sunflower district, and the high school division of Drew Hunter closed as of that date, with high school students rezoned to Ruleville Central.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 1969 the State of Mississippi passed a law written by Ruleville-based state senator Robert L. Crook that allowed Parchman employees to use up to $60 ($ when adjusted for inflation) every month to pay for educational costs for their children. As a result some Parchman employees sent their children to North Sunflower Academy, and the State of Mississippi used general support funds to pay for some of North Sunflower Academy's transportation costs, including school buses, bus drivers, and gasoline. According to a circa November 1974 "Delta Democrat Times" article, the State of Mississippi spent over $250,000 ($ when adjusted for inflation) in tuition costs and thousands of dollars in transportation costs for North Sunflower. By that time nobody had legally challenged that law in court. Constance Curry, author of "Silver Rights", stated that it was legal under Mississippi law but may have been unconstitutional under U.S. federal law.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Parchman, along with other areas in Sunflower County, is within the service area of the Mississippi Delta Community College (MDCC). MDCC has the Drew Center in Drew, while its main campus is in Moorhead. Sunflower County Library System operates the Drew Public Library in Drew.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Parchman also has three cemeteries; prisoners are buried on-site. A dead prisoner may be buried in one of two of the cemeteries. Hundreds of prisoners had been buried at two of the cemeteries.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The prison has a Visitation Center, which serves as a point of entry and as a security checkpoint for visitors to MSP. After security screening, visitors depart the visitation center in buses bound for the specific units.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The Mississippi State Penitentiary Training Academy and the Thomas O. "Pete" Wilson Adult Basic Education (ABE) facility are located on the MSP grounds. "The Place", a restaurant, is also on the prison property. Parchman has the Rodeo Arena, a venue for a prison rodeo. The Mississippi State Penitentiary POTW (Publicly owned treatment works) numbers one and two are the institution's sewage treatment plants.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The United States Postal Service operates the Parchman Post Office along Parchman Road 12/Mississippi Highway 32 inside the prison property. Mississippi State Penitentiary has a dedicated fire department, (MSP Fire Department) a wastewater treatment plant, road crews, utility crews, a grocery store, and a hospital. The fire department, which utilizes prisoners as firefighters, responds outside of the prison boundaries.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Parchman contains the superintendent's guest house, used to accommodate guests. As part of a longstanding agreement, the Governor of Mississippi stayed in the house once annually before conducting an inspection of the prison.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: When the prison farm was first established, forests were cleared and land was put into cultivation. Prisoners "deadened" or circled the trees. A sawmill opened, and the wood was converted into planks used to build the housing in the prison. In 1911 what was then "Parchman Place" had ten camps, with each camp holding over 100 prisoners and working on . The central buildings, including the superintendent's residence, the offices, a hospital with a capacity for 70 patients, the general store, the sawmill, and the brick and tile works, were placed in a location referred to as "Parchman". The post office was located along a railroad. Each camp had a telephone system that was headquartered in the "Parchman" location.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: By 1906 the state sent the healthy, young black males incarcerated in the Mississippi penal system to MSP and to the Belmont Farm. Other population groups in the Mississippi penal system went to other farms; White men went to the Rankin Farm in Rankin County, and all women went to the Oakley Farm in Hinds County. By the early 1900s the majority of incarcerated felons in the State of Mississippi were sent to Parchman. Around 1911 prisoners who developed chronic illnesses were sent from MSP to the Oakley prison. In 1917 the Parchman property had been fully cleared, and the administration divided the facility into a series of camps, housing black and white prisoners of both genders. By that year MSP had 12 male prison camps and one female prison camp. Throughout much of the prison's history, the prison authorities decided not to build fences and walls because the MSP property had a large size and a remote location.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: David Oshinsky, author of "Worse Than Slavery", said that in the early 20th century Parchman, from the outside, "looked like a typical Delta plantation, with cattle barns, vegetable gardens, mules dotting the landscape, and cotton rows stretching for miles." Alan Lomax, a folklorist, wrote in "The Land Where Blues Began" that "Only a few strands of barbed wire marked the boundary between the Parchman State Penitentiary and the so-called free world. Yet every Delta black knew he could easily find himself on the wrong side of that fence." Camp One became the administrative and commercial center of Parchman. It was located near the main gate, the railroad depot, and the main road. William B. Taylor and Tyler H. Fletcher, authors of "Profits from convict labor: Reality or myth observations in Mississippi: 1907–1934", said that Camp One, by 1917, appeared like "a little city." Camp One housed the residences of the superintendent and the superintendent's staff, the residences of the camp sergeant and the two assistants of the sergeant, a hospital, a gin, a church, a post office, and a visitor's building. The facility, known as the "front camp", also housed an administration building and an infirmary described by Oshinsky as "crude." Newly arriving prisoners were processed at the administration building, and they received their prison uniforms there. Taylor and Fletcher said that the other camps "amounted to little more than wooden barracks surrounded by cultivated land." Within Parchman, the camps other than Camp One shared of land.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In the 1930s the female camp, mostly African-American, was isolated from the male camps. An enclave within the camp was reserved for white inmates.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Around 1968, Camp B was one of the largest African-American camps of MSP. Camp B was located in unincorporated Quitman County, near Lambert, away from the main Parchman complex. Camp B's buildings have been demolished. Until the post-lawsuit units opened in the 1970s, Parchman's newest unit was the first offender camp, a red brick building that opened in the 1960s. The building had a fence, two guard towers at opposite corners, and a gateshack. Donald Cabana, who became the prison's superintendent and executioner, said that the building was "not physically impressive."


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Around 1971, most areas of the prison had no guard towers, no cell blocks, no tiers, and no high walls. Cabana said that the prison was "a throwback to another time and place". Cabana described the employee housing as "by and large drab and in various states of disrepair." During that time Camp 16 served as the Maximum Security Unit (MSU); the building was surrounded by double fences with concertina wire, and gun towers were located at the four corners of the building. MSU housed death row inmates and inmates put under maximum security, and the camp housed the gas chamber. MSP staff called the building "Little Alcatraz". Cabana, a native of Massachusetts, said that Camp 16 was the only building that resembled the northern U.S. penitentiary that he was familiar with. Around that year MSP had around 2,000 men and less than 100 women in its camps. Most camps were "work camps", which had a quota of acreage to maintain. Some had special functions; for instance the "disability" camp did the laundry, and the "front camp" housed prisoners who worked in the administration building; those inmates worked as clerks, janitors, and maintenance personnel. Each camp usually had no more than 100-200 prisoners. Because the prison population was spread across many units, the population would have difficulty engineering major disturbances. Cabana cited this example to say "In some respects, Parchman was a penologist's dream."


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: After the 1972 Gates v. Collier federal judge ruling, the State of Mississippi replaced its previous inmate housing units, called "cages", with barracks buildings surrounded by barbed wire-topped fences. John Buntin of "Governing Magazine" said that the new units were "hastily built." Several MSP units were built in the 1970s; 3,080 beds were added for a total cost of $25,345,000. In the 1980s Mississippi State Penitentiary had 21 scattered camps. In 1983 Camp 25 served as the female unit, and the unit had no parking facilities. After Central Mississippi Correctional Facility opened, the women were moved out of Camp 25. In the 1990s MSP had 6,800 prisoners; in 1990 Mississippi had a population of 2,573,216, so about .026% of Mississippi's population was incarcerated in MSP at that time. The prison population had been increasing rapidly over the decade leading to 1995, and the prison officials converted a gymnasium into inmate housing and still faced overcrowding. Many construction projects occurred during that time.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In the early 2000s MSP had five areas. Area I had Unit 29. Area II had units 12, 15-B, 20-, 25-26, and 30. Area III had units 4, 10, 17, 20, 22-24, 27-28, 31, and 42. Area IV had Unit 32. Area V had Central Security. At that time 18 units housed prisoners, with the 1,488-bed Unit 29 being the largest unit in terms of prisoner capacity and the 60-bed Unit 17 being the smallest. At that time the prison's capacity was 5,631. The Internal Audit building, located along Guard Row, was destroyed in a fire in 2002. In the mid-2000s MSP had three areas. Area I had Units 15 and 29 and the Front Vocational School. Area II had units 25-26, 28, 30-31, and 42. Area III had units 4 and 32. At the time 10 units housed the 4,700 prisoners in the facility, with the 1,568 bed Unit 29 being the largest unit and the 54-bed Unit 42 (the hospital unit) being the smallest. At that time the prison's capacity was 4,840.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Karen Feldscher of the "Northeastern University Alumni Magazine" said that in the region around MSP routinely had humid summers of 90 or more degrees Fahrenheit with mosquitoes present, while the winters "are brown and stark."


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: As of September 1, 2008, Mississippi State Penitentiary, with a capacity of 4,527, had 4,181 prisoners, comprising a total of 29.04% of people within the Mississippi Department of Corrections-operated prisons, county jails, and community work centers. Of the male inmates at MSP, 3,024 were black, 1,119 were white, 30 Hispanic, six were Asian, and one was Native American. As of 2008, there was one African-American woman confined at MSP. As of November 8, 2010 Parchman has about 998 free world employees.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 1917, 90% of Parchman's prisoners were black. Most of the black prisoners were serving long sentences for violent crimes against other blacks and were illiterate laborers and farm workers. Of the black prisoners who committed crimes against other blacks, 58% had sentences of ten years or more and 38% had life sentences. Of the black prisoners who committed crimes against other blacks, 35% had committed murder, 17% had committed manslaughter, 8% had committed assault and battery, and 5% had committed rape or attempted rape.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 1937, the Parchman community had 250 residents, while the prison held 1,989 inmates. In 1971, the prison employed fewer than 75 free world employees because trusties performed many tasks at Parchman. The free world employees included administrative, medical, and support employees.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Located on fertile Mississippi Delta land, Parchman served as a working farm. Inmate labor was used for many tasks from raising cotton and other farm food products, to building railroads and extracting turpentine gum from pine trees. Parchman, then as now, was in prime cotton-growing country. Inmates labored there in the fields raising cotton, soybeans and other cash crops, and produced livestock, swine, poultry and milk. Inmates spent much of their time working with crops except the period from mid-November to mid-February, because the weather was too cold for farm work. Donald Cabana, who previously served as a superintendent and an executioner at Parchman, said that the labor situation was an advantage to the prison because inmates were occupied with it. Cabana added that "idleness" was an issue facing many other prisons.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Throughout MSP's history, most prisoners have worked in the fields. Historically, prisoners worked for ten hours per day, six days per week. In previous eras prisoners lived in long, single-story buildings made of bricks and lumber produced on-site; the inmate housing units were often called "cages". Prison officials selected prisoners they deemed trustworthy and made them into armed guards; the prisoners were named "trustee guards" and "trustee shooters". Most male inmates did farm labor; others worked in the brickyard, cotton gin, prison hospital, and sawmill. Women worked in the sewing room, making clothes, bed sheets, and mattresses. They also canned vegetables and ran the laundry. On Sundays prisoners attended religious services and participated in baseball games, with teams formed on the basis of the camps.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Throughout its history, Parchman Farm had a reputation of being one of the toughest prisons in the United States. This reputation antedated the 1960s arrival of the Freedom Riders. Cabana said "A life sentence in Parchman is an eternity."


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Historically most male prisoners wore "ring arounds", consisting of trousers and shirts with horizontal black and white stripes. Female prisoners wore "up and downs", which were baggy dresses with vertical stripes. "Trustee shooters" wore vertical stripes.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In the 1930s, most of the crops planted at Parchman were cotton. The facility's brickyard, factories, gin, and machine shop gained the State of Mississippi profits. For most of the day, the female prisoners sewed utilitarian cloth goods, including bedding, curtains, and uniforms for the institution. When sewing labor was not available, women chopped cotton.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: For a period in Parchman's history, women lived in Camp 13. Male sergeants and male trusties guarded the women. As a result, sexual intercourse and rape occurred in the women's unit. Women lived in large dormitories. White women usually numbered between zero and five, black women usually numbered 25 to 65. White female prisoners lived in a small brick building, while African-American prisoners lived in what David Oshinsky, author of "Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice" called a "large shed-like building", with a fence separating the two buildings.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Cabana said that in 1971 the prison environment was "relatively tranquil" because many prisoners worked outside instead of being confined in their cells for long periods of time. The prison was still segregated in the 1970s. Around that time a black leather strap named "Black Annie" was used to punish prisoners who broke rules. Other prisoners who broke rules were forced to stand for hours at a time on up-ended soda crates. During the era, stronger prisoners attacked and raped weaker prisoners, and prison staff provided little to no intervention in these incidents. Some inmates worked as "houseboys", maintaining the residences of prison officials. Some prisoners were allowed to leave the prison grounds to pick up supplies and transport them back to MSP. Karen Feldscher of "Northeastern Alumni Magazine" stated that the trustee guard system often produced "disastrous results." Cabana said that the trustee system "apparently worked quite well, as there were seldom any disciplinary problems among the shooters". Because trustees performed many tasks, the prison employed relatively few free world employees. Because of the scenario, Cabana said that the prisoners were the people who carried guns and enforced rules, while in Massachusetts the prison guards carried the guns and enforced rules.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In the 1960s, shortly after inmates arrived at Parchman, they received nicknames that reflected personality traits and physical characteristics. For instance, a man named Johnny Lee Thomas was nicknamed "Have Mercy" when he protested a beating of a fellow inmate. Thomas stated that Parchman was, in the words of William Ferris, author of "Give My Poor Heart Ease", "a world of fear in which only the strong and intelligent survive". Ferris added that "Like the trickster rabbit, the black prisoner had to move quicker and think faster than his white boss."


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: After the Gates decision, the number of murders of prisoners dropped overall. When integration came, prisoners formed gangs based on race to protect one another. In addition, the prison gangs gained the power that trustee shooters had held. In 1990, the prison emergency room treated 1,136 incidents of prisoner on employee assaults and 1,169 prisoner on prisoner assaults.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Prisoners may receive a Bachelor of Arts degree in Christian Ministry from the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. The Parchman Animal Care & Training (PACT) program, which was established in April 2008, organizes inmate care of livestock.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: While living at MSP, many African-American inmates sang work chants, a tradition traced to West Africa. Work chants were used by farm laborers to pace their work. While inmates worked, a leader called the chant, with other inmates following him. One song includes a story of an inmate swimming through the Sunflower River to confuse bloodhounds, verses showcasing prisoners who return hoes to their commanding captain and refuse to continue working, and a story of a beautiful woman named Rosie who waits outside the prison boundary. William Ferris, author of "Give My Poor Heart Ease", said that "for all of these inmates, music was a means to survive within the prison's grim world." The Mississippi Blues Trail added Parchman to its list of sites at 10 AM on Tuesday September 28, 2010; Parchman received the trail's 113th historical marker.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The folk song collectors John and Alan Lomax visited Parchman Farm in 1933, during a recording trip across the Southern states of the US. Lomax wrote that they recorded a prisoner singing:


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: I had to face that here were the people that everyone else regarded as the dregs of society, dangerous human beings, brutalized and from them came the music which I thought was the finest thing I'd ever hear coming out of my country. They made Walt Whitman look like a child. They made Carl Sandburg, who sang these songs, look like a bloody amateur. These people were poetic and musical and they had something terribly important to say.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Historically Mississippi State Penitentiary permitted imprisoned men to engage in conjugal visits with wives; conjugal visits had to be with married, opposite-sex couples. The Mississippi Department of Corrections (MDOC) did not include couples of common law marriages in its definition of marriage that makes a couple eligible for conjugal visits. MSP prisoners of "A" and "B" custody levels were permitted to engage in conjugal visits if they had no rule violation reports in the previous six months leading to each conjugal visit. According to the decision of Chris Epps, the MDOC commissioner, the entire Mississippi state prison system ended conjugal visits in February 2014. Epps stated that the possibility of creating single parents and the expenses were the reasons why conjugal visits ended.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Formal records stating when conjugal visits began at MSP do not exist; Mississippi was the first state to allow conjugal visits to take place in its prisons. Columbus B. Hopper, author of "The Evolution of Conjugal Visiting in Mississippi" (1989), said "In all probability, conjugal visiting began as soon as Parchman Plantation was made into a prison in 1900" and "I traced it back definitely as early as 1918." There was no state control or legal status for conjugal visits. Originally only African-American men were allowed to participate, as society believed that the sexual drives of black men were stronger than those of white men. Prison authorities believed that if black men were allowed to have sexual intercourse, they would be more productive in the farming industries of the prison. By the 1930s, the authorities had permitted white men to receive conjugal visits. Because the officials did not want pregnancies to occur in prison, at that time they did not permit female prisoners to have conjugal visits. In the 1930s, on Sunday afternoons, prostitutes visited Parchman and the prison camps. Hopper said that a prisoner's song referred to a prostitute charging 50 cents for her services, "not a small amount during the Great Depression when many people worked a 12-hour day for a dollar."


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Originally there were no facilities designated for conjugal visits. Some prisoners used tool sheds and storage areas in the camp areas, and others took their wives and girlfriends into the prisoner barracks and placed blankets over beds to allow for privacy. In 1940 prisoners began building special houses to be used by prisoners and their families during conjugal visits.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 1962, Hopper, in "The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science", said that the Mississippi State Penitentiary had the most liberal visitation program in the United States. Rules of visitation and leave, adopted in 1944, allowed inmates to make home visits for reasons other than emergency. According to a 1956 survey, it was the only correctional facility in the country to do so. Inmates were allowed to be visited every Sunday for two hours by their wives. In 1962, each Parchman camp, with the exception of the maximum-security camps, housed a five to ten-room structure called a red house; each house is near the main gate of the main camp building. In the house, the inmate and his wife may engage in sexual intercourse. Children are encouraged by the prison authorities to visit; as of 1962 one camp houses a play area for children. The Parchman conjugal visit program is designed so that all members of the family may interact with a particular prisoner. In 1962, the prison officials said that the conjugal visits were an important factor in preserving marriages of inmates and reducing prison homosexuality. During that year, most inmates reported favorable opinions about the conjugal program.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: David Oshinsky, author of "Worse than Slavery", said that the statements regarding the preservation of marriages were "likely" to be correct and the statements regarding the prison sexuality were "probably" not true. Penologists stated that factors that may have contributed to the development of the system were the strength of family ties in rural areas. Parchman was "primarily an agricultural plantation that is a self-contained, sociocultural system functioning much as a culture in and of itself", the emphasis placed on agricultural production, and the small sizes of the camps. The guards in the camps knew the prisoners personally. Because of the lack of records, it was not possible to tell if the conjugal visit program reduced prison sexuality or recidivism.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In the 1970s, Parchman still did not maintain records on the conjugal visits that took place at the facility. In 1972 women at Parchman became eligible for conjugal visits. In 1974, prisoners of both sexes were permitted to have three-day, two-night family visits. In the 1980s guards reported that inmates were more docile if they had periodic sexual access to their wives. Robert Cross of the "Chicago Tribune" reported in 1985 that the MSP program received relatively little attention compared to newer and more limited conjugal visit policies in California, Connecticut, New Mexico, New York, South Carolina, and Washington. Cross added that "The difference, perhaps, is that in Mississippi, where Parchman serves as the only penitentiary, nobody issued proclamations or opened up the matter for debate." As of 1996, a newly established Parchman unit used conjugal visits as a reward in a behavioral modification program and a typical married prisoner at Parchman had one conjugal visit every two weeks, and periodically used the family visits.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: "Parchman", a book by R. Kim Cushing, was published by the University Press of Mississippi. It includes stories written by 18 prisoners and multiple photographs. Reverend William Barnwell wrote in "The Clarion-Ledger" that the book was "beautifully laid out" and portrays the prisoners "as fellow human beings, with their own strengths and weaknesses, like the rest of us. They — and we — deserve such a book."


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: "In Our Own Words: Writing from Parchman Prison – Unit 30" and "Unit 30 New Writings from Parchman Farm" include stories written by inmates participating in a writing program at Unit 30. A total of 12 prisoners wrote content in the "New Writings" book, and four wrote content appearing in both books. The Mississippi Humanities Council gave a grant to the writing program, and the sales from the books also fund the writing program.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: David Oshinsky, a historian, said in 1996 "Throughout the American South, Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality ..." A character in William Faulkner's "The Mansion" referred to MSP as "destination doom." John Buntin of "Governing" magazine said that MSP "has long cast its shadow over the Mississippi Delta, including my hometown of Greenville, Mississippi."


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The prison is the subject of a number of blues songs, most notably "Parchman Farm Blues" by Bukka White, and Mose Allison's "Parchman Farm", which was later covered by a number of other artists including Bobbie Gentry, John Mayall, Johnny Winter, Georgie Fame, Blue Cheer, and Blues Image.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In 1963, the Republican gubernatorial nominee Rubel Phillips made the penitentiary an issue in his unsuccessful campaign against the Democrat Paul B. Johnson Jr. Phillips called the institution at Parchman "a disgrace" and urged the establishment of a constitutional board "free of politics to exercise responsible leadership". Phillips recounted the case of inmate Kimble Berry, who served time for manslaughter who was granted leave in 1961 by acting Governor Johnson (while Governor Ross Barnett was out of state) but showed up in a Cadillac in Massachusetts claiming that he had been authorized to recover burglary loot.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The prison also served as a major source of material for folklorists such as Alan and John Lomax, who visited numerous times to record work songs, field hollers, blues, and interviews with prisoners. The Lomaxes in part focused on Parchman at that time because it offered a particular closed society shut off from the outside world. John Lomax, accompanied by his wife Ruby, toured through the southern states recording blues work songs and other folk songs for the Library of Congress as part of a WPA project in 1939. They recorded work songs and chants while inmates were performing a group task, such as hoeing the fields at Parchman Farm as well as blues songs sung by inmate musicians.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The Coen brothers' film, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", makes reference to Parchman, both directly and by including a song on the soundtrack that was recorded at Parchman in 1959 by Alan Lomax.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In William Faulkner's book "Old Man", which was also published as part of the book "The Wild Palms", the Tall and Fat Convicts were sent from Parchman to rescue folks from the 1927 Mississippi flood. In Faulkner's "The Mansion", Mink Snopes was imprisoned in Parchman.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In August Wilson's play "The Piano Lesson", the characters Boy Willie, Lymon, Doaker, and Wining Boy all served time at Parchman.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The stage play "The Parchman Hour", by playwright Mike Wiley, is based on the following quote by a Freedom Rider imprisoned there in 1961:


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The play premiered professionally at PlayMakers Repertory Company in 2011. In 2013 it was produced for the second time at the Cape Fear Regional Theatre in Fayetteville, North Carolina, once again directed by Mike Wiley.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: "The Chamber" (1993), a best-selling novel by John Grisham, is set at Parchman's Death Row. Many of Grisham's other novels make reference to the prison and in his book, "Ford County", the short story "Fetching Raymond" takes place in large part at Parchman. "The Chamber", the movie based on the novel, starring Gene Hackman and Chris O'Donnell, was filmed at the penitentiary.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: The 1999 film "Life", portraying a group of bootleggers from New York who are falsely convicted of murder and are given life sentences, takes place at Parchman. While it is set in Mississippi, filming occurred in California.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: In Jesmyn Ward's "Sing, Unburied, Sing", a young boy killed at Parchman Prison comes back to haunt the narrator, Jojo, and his family; nevertheless, they drive upstate to pick-up Michael, the father, who is just freed from the same prison.


title: Mississippi State Penitentiary

text: Parchman is mentioned and shown several times in "In the Heat of the Night". Parchman appears as a plot element in "A Trip Upstate", where Sparta's police chief, Bill Gillespie, visits a death row inmate and witnesses the inmate's execution.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: "Galway Girl" is a song by English singer and songwriter Ed Sheeran. The song is a collaboration between Sheeran and Irish folk band Beoga, and is heavily influenced by Irish traditional music. On Saint Patrick's Day, 17 March 2017, Sheeran announced the song as the third single from his 2017 album "÷", accompanied by a lyric video.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: The song entered the charts of 31 countries around the world. It topped the charts in Ireland, Iceland, Slovenia, and Slovakia; reached number two in the UK, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, and Poland; and reached the top five on the charts of Germany, Hungary, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: "Galway Girl" was included on the year-end top singles charts of 17 countries, including the top five of Belgium, Denmark, Slovenia, and the UK; the top 10 of Australia, Austria, Germany, New Zealand, and Sweden; and the top 20 of Hungary, Italy, Poland, and Switzerland.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: Sheeran wrote and recorded "Galway Girl" together with Irish band Beoga. The song incorporates parts of the tune "Minute 5" from their 2011 album "How to Tune a Fish". They decided to write the song after they had finished another song together at his house, and had some free time.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: In an interview with "The Irish Times", Sheeran said that the opening line of the song, "She played the fiddle in an Irish band", was inspired by Niamh Dunne of Beoga. However, the rest of the song was made up and not about anyone in particular (Dunne is from County Limerick and married an Irishman and Sheeran, although English, is of paternal Irish descent).


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: Sheeran was aware that American singer and songwriter Steve Earle had recorded a song with the same title in 2000; however, in a BBC interview, Sheeran said that his version is an original, and not a cover of Earle's song. He also stated, "I actually tried to find another [title]. I did Wexford Girl and [Clonakilty] Girl and Cork Girl... none of them worked. But the whole point of folk songs is taking inspiration from the past and making something new – so people will just have to deal with it." In a 2017 Dublin concert Sheeran played first verse and chorus of Steve Earle's song together with Beoga, followed by his own.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: Sheeran's record label did not believe in the commercial viability of the song, but Sheeran countered, "the Corrs sold 20 million records ... who’s tried it since the Corrs? There’s a huge gap in the market."


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: "Galway Girl" is written in the key of F# minor in cut time with a tempo of 100 beats per minute. Sheeran's vocals span from E to F#.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: Sheeran was introduced to Beoga's music through Foy Vance; Sheeran, who had written several Irish-styled songs for the album, invited Beoga to collaborate with him to help ensure an authentic sound. Eamon Murray of Beoga described the collaboration as being very productive, noting Sheeran's ability to create a pop hook that "gets into people's heads", and recalling his own astonishment at how quickly the songs were written. Of the approximately half-dozen songs resulting from the session, two of them, "Galway Girl" and "Nancy Mulligan", were included on the album. Murray said that for "Galway Girl", the melody taken from Beoga's "Minute 5" was used to link the bridge and the chorus in the manner of a modern pop song, resulting in a pop song with an Irish flavor rather than a wholly traditional-sounding folk song.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: The song was announced as the third single from the album on Saint Patrick's Day, 17 March 2017, and was added to BBC Radio 2's playlist on 18 March 2017.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: According to Sheeran, he had to fight his record label to keep the song on his album: "They were really, really against 'Galway Girl', because apparently folk music isn't cool." However, he was able to convince them to include the song by telling them that it would be a "“f***ing massive” [hit] because there are 400 million people in the world who will say they are Irish even if they aren’t".


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: The song entered the UK chart at number two behind "Shape of You" when it became available for download on the album release. , the song has sold 1.2 million combined units in the United Kingdom, with 246,000 in actual sales and 0.95 million in streams.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: In Ireland, it debuted at number one on the singles chart. It also reached the number one chart position in Scotland and Slovenia. In the United States, the song peaked at number 53, and has sold 210,813 copies .


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: On 11 April 2017, Sheeran shot the POV music video for "Galway Girl" in Galway, Ireland, and filmed it himself on a Sony α7S on body-mounted Ikan EC-1 gimbal rigged to a Steadicam vest. The video was directed by Jason Koenig, who also directed the music video for "Shape of You", and director of photography Johnny Valencia. It was uploaded to Sheeran's official YouTube channel on 3 May 2017. The video has over 520 million views as of June 2021.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: The video begins with Sheeran leaving a concert (at the 3 Arena in Dublin) he has just finished playing. He goes to a bar where he finds Saoirse Ronan, who is dancing on a table and drinking Guinness beer. The two drink beer, dance together, and play darts. Sheeran enrages another man at the bar by accidentally hitting him in the back with a dart, and Sheeran and Ronan quickly leave. Out in the street, they encounter Irish dancers, stop to listen to a busker, and ride bikes to a tattoo parlor where Sheeran gets a tattoo. They return to the bar for more dancing and drinking. Sheeran spills beer on the same man he hit with a dart earlier, and gets knocked out, but wakes up at Ronan's apartment. The video concludes with both Sheeran and Ronan on the apartment's rooftop balcony together, looking out over The Long Walk and Galway Bay.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: The video for "Galway Girl" features Irish actress Saoirse Ronan. Sheeran was impressed by Ronan's performance in the video, commenting, "She, off-screen, is normal and just like a cool person and as soon as the camera goes on her she just turns...It was a really phenomenal thing to watch. I've never really seen a young actor or actress that good. She's really talented." The video also features cameos by several local celebrities, including Irish comedian and presenter Tommy Tiernan, host of "The Tommy Tiernan Show".


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: Sheeran's new tattoo filmed in the video is misspelled "Galway Grill", which Sheeran said was the result of a prank by Ronan.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: On 6 July 2017, Sheeran performed the song along with other songs from "÷", live at Rockefeller Center in New York City for the "Today" show. About 12,000 fans attended the performance, with some lining up before sunrise to secure their place in line.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: On 8 December 2017, Sheeran performed "Galway Girl" live at the Z100 Jingle Ball at Madison Square Garden in New York City.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: On 10 December 2017, Sheeran performed the song live at the Jingle Bell Ball at London's O2 arena, hosted by Capital FM.


title: Galway Girl (Ed Sheeran song)

text: Sheeran, accompanied by Beoga, performed "Galway Girl" at the 2018 "Billboard" Music Awards on 20 May 2018. Although he was on world tour in support of his album "÷" at the time, his performance at Phoenix Park in Dublin, Ireland was broadcast at the award ceremony in Las Vegas.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: The Foursquare Church is an Evangelical Pentecostal Christian denomination founded in 1923 by preacher Aimee Semple McPherson. The headquarters are in Los Angeles, California, United States.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: The church has its origins in a vision of "Foursquare Gospel" (or "Full Gospel") during a sermon in October 1922 in Oakland, California by the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. According to chapter 1 of Book of Ezekiel, Ezekiel had a vision of God as revealed to be four different aspects: a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle. It also represents the four aspects of Christ: "Savior, Baptizer with the Holy Spirit, Healer and Soon and Coming King." This was the vision and name she gave at Foursquare Church, founded in 1923 in Los Angeles. Despite some affinities with Pentecostals, her beliefs are interdenominational. She opened the Angelus Temple in Echo Park in 1923, seating 5,300 people. The attendance has become a megachurch with 10,000 people. McPherson was a flamboyant celebrity in her day, participating in publicity events, such as weekly Sunday parades through the streets of Los Angeles, along with the mayor and movie stars, directly to Angelus Temple. She built the temple, as well as what is now known as Life Pacific University adjacent to it, on the northwest corner of land that she owned in the middle of the city.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: McPherson's celebrity status continued after her death, with biopics such as the 1976 Hallmark Hall of Fame drama "The Disappearance of Aimee" depicting her life, as well as the 2006 independent film "Aimee Semple McPherson", which particularly focused on her month-long disappearance in May–June 1926 and the legal controversy that followed.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: After Aimee Semple McPherson's death in 1944, her son Rolf K. McPherson became president and leader of the church, a position he held for 44 years. The Foursquare Church formed the "Pentecostal Fellowship of North America" in 1948 in Des Moines, Iowa, in an alliance with the Assemblies of God, the Church of God, the Open Bible Standard Churches, the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and others. In 1994, 46 years after the founding of the Pentecostal Fellowship, it was reorganized as the Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches of North America after combining with African-American organizations, most significantly the Church of God in Christ.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: In 1968, the Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa congregation of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (under pastor Chuck Smith) broke from the denomination and later formed an association of autonomous Charismatic Evangelical churches, today making up the Charismatic but non-Pentecostal denomination, Calvary Chapel.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: On May 31, 1988, John R. Holland became the Church's third President, a position he held until July 1997.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: Harold Helms served as interim president from July 1997 until July 1998; he was followed by Paul C. Risser, who became the president on April 16, 1998, at the church's 75th annual convention.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: In October 2003, under Risser's tenure, the church sold Los Angeles radio station KFSG-FM to the Spanish Broadcasting System for $250 million. Risser's leadership led to another high-profile controversy for the church, when, without the involvement of the denomination's board of directors and finance council, church funds were invested in firms that targeted the "close-knit evangelical community" but turned out to be Ponzi schemes. Risser resigned his leadership position under fire in March 2004.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: Jack W. Hayford, founder of The Church On The Way in Van Nuys, California served as the president of the Foursquare Church from 2004 to 2009. Hayford along with Pastors Roy Hicks Jr. in Eugene, Oregon, Jerry Cook in Gresham, Oregon, Ronald D. Mehl of the Beaverton Foursquare Church in Beaverton, Oregon, and John Holland in Vancouver, British Columbia, have been credited by the church with setting a plan for the denomination's continued survival despite its staggering financial losses estimated at $15 million under the failed leadership of Paul Risser.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: The Foursquare denomination, under Hayford's leadership, is in "Missional Conversation" with the emerging church movement, claimed to be part of a "Church Multiplication" effort. "Church Multiplication" also supports the house church movement through resources that support the expansion of "Foursquare Simple Church Networks."


title: The Foursquare Church

text: On the denomination's website, they claim that in 2022, it had 67,500 churches, with 8.8 million members in 150 countries.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: The beliefs of the Foursquare Church are expressed in its Declaration of Faith, compiled by its founder Aimee Semple McPherson. McPherson also authored a shorter, more concise creedal statement.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: The church believes in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the deity of Jesus Christ. It believes that human beings were created in the image of God but, because of the Fall, are naturally depraved and sinful. It believes in the substitutionary atonement accomplished by the death of Christ. The church teaches that salvation is by grace through faith and not by good works. Believers are justified by faith and born again upon repentance and acceptance of Christ as Lord and king. Consistent with its belief in human free will, the Foursquare Church also teaches that it is possible for a believer to backslide or commit apostasy.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: The Foursquare Church is a Finished Work Pentecostal denomination, teaching that sanctification is a continual process of spiritual growth. Christian perfection and holiness can be attained through surrender and consecration to God. This spiritual growth is believed to be promoted by Bible study and prayer. The Foursquare Church believes in the baptism with the Holy Spirit as an event separate from conversion that empowers the individual and the wider church to fulfill the church's mission of evangelization. The Foursquare Church expects Spirit baptism to be received in the same manner as recorded in the Book of Acts, namely that the believer will receive spiritual gifts, including speaking in tongues. The church believes that spiritual gifts continue in operation for the edification of the church.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: The Foursquare Church believes that divine healing is a part of Christ's atonement. It teaches that the sick can be healed in response to prayer. The Foursquare Church anticipates a premillennial return of Christ to earth. It believes that there will be a future final judgment where the righteous will receive everlasting life and the wicked everlasting punishment. The Foursquare Church observes believer's baptism by immersion and the Lord's Supper or Holy Communion as ordinances. Open communion is practiced. Anointing of the sick and tithing are practiced as well.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: The denomination's church government has an "episcopal character" that dates back to its founder. McPherson had veto power over church decisions, appointed all officers, and hired all employees.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: The Foursquare Convention is the chief decision making body of the Foursquare Church. Meeting regularly every year, the convention's voting membership includes international officers and licensed ministers. Each Foursquare church located in the United States has the right to send one voting delegate per every 50 church members. National Foursquare Churches outside of the United States may send one official delegate to the convention.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: A board of 12 to 20 directors manages the Foursquare Church. In addition to overseeing the Church's activities, the board of directors appoints officers and is responsible for licensing and ordaining ministers. Members of the board include the president, vice presidents, and at least nine ministers representing geographic regions. Church members in good standing may also be appointed to the board.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: Local Foursquare churches are subordinate parts of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel and are operated according to the bylaws of the international church. There are two categories of Foursquare churches. A "charter member church" is a member church that has no legal existence apart from the international church and whose property is owned by the international church. The second category is "covenant member church", which include "pioneer churches" and previously non-member churches. Pioneer churches are recently established church plants that have not been upgraded to charter member status. Covenant member churches might also be previously non-member churches that join the Foursquare Church but choose not to transfer their real property to the international church. Non-member churches may choose to affiliate with the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel without becoming a full member of the international church. These "community member churches" retain their separate legal identities and autonomy.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: Three colleges are affiliated with the Foursquare Church: Life Pacific University, formerly "L. I. F. E. Bible College," in San Dimas, California, Life Pacific College Virginia in Christiansburg, Virginia, and Pacific Life Bible College in Surrey, British Columbia.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: In 2006, membership in the United States was 353,995 in 1,875 churches. While congregations are concentrated along the West Coast, the denomination is well distributed across the United States. The states with the highest membership rates are Oregon, Hawaii, Montana, Washington, and California.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: The Foursquare Church arrived in Ecuador in 1956 with the arrival of a couple by the name of Gadberry. Acting as missionaries under the auspices of the Los Angeles congregation, they began by founding churches in Guayaquil. They remained in Ecuador until 1960, but returned a year later to found the first Foursquare church in Quito. As of 2012, there were 200 Foursquare churches in Ecuador, with 32 in Guayaquil alone.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: In 2004, the denomination's president and treasurer resigned after losing US$14 million of the denomination for approving two financial investment projects that were in fact a scam.


title: The Foursquare Church

text: In 2013, under Burris' leadership, the Church lost $2 million in a failed investment of a Broadway play based on the life of Aimee Semple McPherson.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Sudeley Castle is a Grade I listed castle in the parish of Sudeley, in the Cotswolds, near to the medieval market town of Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, England. The castle has 10 notable gardens covering some 15 acres within a 1,200-acre estate nestled within the Cotswold hills.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Building of the castle began in 1443 for Ralph Boteler; the Lord High Treasurer of England, on the site of a previous 12th-century fortified manor house. It was later seized by the crown and became the property of King Edward IV and King Richard III, who built its famous banqueting hall.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: King Henry VIII and his then wife Anne Boleyn visited the castle in 1535; and it later became the home and final resting place of his sixth wife, Catherine Parr who remarried after the king's death. Parr is buried in the castle's church, making Sudeley the only privately owned castle in the world to have a Queen of England buried in its grounds. Sudeley soon became the home of the Chandos family, and the castle was visited on three occasions by Queen Elizabeth I, who held a three-day party there to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: During the First English Civil War the castle was used as a military base, by King Charles I and Prince Rupert, and it was later besieged and slighted by parliament, remaining largely in ruins for the following few centuries until its purchase in 1837 by the Dent family, who restored the castle and turned it into a family home.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Although the origins of Sudeley are lost to time, its name, a corruption of its Anglo-Saxon name "Sudeleagh", meaning ‘south lying pasture or clearing in forest' gives us an idea of what it was like. Sudeley most likely owes its early rise as a royal estate to its close proximity to Winchcombe, which, during the reign of King Offa, was the capital of the Kingdom of Mercia. Under royal patronage, Winchcombe prospered, becoming a walled town with its own monastery, where a king and a saint are now buried.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: By the turn of the 11th century, Sudeley had grown into a manor house set in a Royal deer park, given as an extravagant gift from King Æthelred the Unready to his daughter Goda on her wedding day.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Despite William the Conqueror's policy of depriving Saxon nobles of their estates after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the family managed to retain Sudeley, and Goda's descedants would hold Sudeley for another four centuries.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: During The Anarchy, John de Sudeley supported the Empress Matilda in her fight against her cousin, Stephan of Blois.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: It is believed that the first castle at Sudeley was built during this time, otherwise known as an adulterine castle. Nothing is known as to what this castle looked like; it may well have simply been the fortification of the existing manor house, or an altogether new structure.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: However, after the sacking of Worcester in 1139 by the forces of the Empress Matilda, under her brother Robert of Gloucester, Waleran de Beaumont, 1st Earl of Worcester retaliated, attacking and capturing both Sudeley and Tewkesbury.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Although little is known of what happened to Sudeley during this attack, it seems likely that its fortifications were pulled down by the vengeful Earl of Worcester, as soon after Roger, Earl of Hereford built a replacement motte and bailey castle in Winchcombe.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: A few decades after the Anarchy, the Sudeley family were to step once more onto the world stage with John's younger son, William de Tracy, participating in the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. William was subsequently excommunicated by Pope Alexander III. He went on pilgrimage to Rome in 1171 and gained an audience with the pope, who exiled him and his fellow conspirators to Jerusalem.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: By the start of the 15th century, the Sudeley name was believed to have gone extinct and the Boteler family had inherited the castle through the marriage of Joan, the sister of the last de Sudeley.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Ralph Boteler is believed to have started the construction of the castle in 1443, around the same time he became Lord High Treasurer of England. Ralph rose to prominence during the Hundred Years' War; serving in France under John of Lancaster, 1st Duke of Bedford in 1419, and was later appointed to the Regency Council of King Henry VI in 1423.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Sudeley was not Ralph's first great project, having extensively renovated the Manor on the More, the house he used when attending court, and was later described by a French Ambassador, Jean du Bellay, as more magnificent than Hampton Court. Unfortunately, Ralph failed to gain royal permission to crenellate the castle, and had to seek King Henry VI's pardon.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Ralph built Sudeley Castle on a double courtyard plan; with the outer courtyard being used by servants and by men-at-arms, and the inner court and its buildings reserved for the use of Ralph and his family.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: In 1449, Ralph's son, Thomas Boteler, married Lady Eleanor Talbot, famed as "England's Secret Queen" for her relationship with King Edward IV after the death of her husband. It was this relationship that King Richard III used to illegitimize his brother's children and heirs, clearing the way for himself to take the crown.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Ralph, now out of favour as a supporter of the Lancastrian cause, was in 1469 compelled to sell Sudeley and six other manors to the crown. King Edward IV bestowed Sudeley upon his brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who used it as a military base before the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: In 1478, Richard swapped Sudeley for Richmond Castle, before re-inheriting it when he acceded to the throne in 1483, when he seems to have visited both Sudeley and Kenilworth Castle on a Royal Progress.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Richard is credited with having built the large banqueting hall at Sudeley. This "Great Hall" was built in the latest fashions of its time, with a ground floor hall being used for meeting guests and feasting, and the upper great hall being kept specially for the king and his special guest's use, with his own bedchambers being connected to this room. When approached from the outside, the edges of the hall's oriel windows are decorated with what is presumed to be the White Rose of York.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: The banqueting hall now lies in partial ruins, and has been redesigned as a garden, with roses and ivy climbing the walls. In 2018, conservators were working to stabilize the ruin.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: After the death of Richard at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, Sudeley, as property of the crown, transferred to King Henry VII, who in turn gifted it to his uncle Jasper Tudor.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: During his reign, King Henry VIII only stayed at Sudeley once, on his 1535 Royal Progress with Queen Anne Boleyn. In the months leading up to Henry's visit to Sudeley, he started to enact the Dissolution of the Monasteries, executing Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More. Moreover, it was while he was at Sudeley that Pope Paul III and Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I started discussing his excommunication and removal.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: The death of Henry and the accession of King Edward VI led way for the rise of Edward and Thomas Seymour. Henry's will had an "unfulfilled gifts" clause that allowed for his executors to gift themselves new lands and titles, which led to Edward being declared Lord Protector of the Realm, and making his brother "Baron Seymour of Sudeley".


title: Sudeley Castle

text: A few months after this, Thomas secretly married Henry's widow and final wife, Queen Catherine Parr without the permission of the king, causing a small scandal.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: In 1548, Catherine, now pregnant, moved with her husband to Sudeley Castle, taking a considerable retinue: 120 Yeomen of the Guard and Gentlemen of the Household, plus her ladies-in-waiting. Prior to her arrival, Seymour had spent "vast amounts of money on the Castle, to fit it for a Queen". The castle was specially prepared for this move, and descriptions still exist of what Catherine's bedchamber looked like. During Parr's tenure, one of her attendants was Lady Jane Grey, Thomas Seymour's ward, who would be queen for nine days in 1553.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Catherine died at Sudeley on 5 September 1548 from what was described as "childbed fever", five days after giving birth to her daughter Mary Seymour. At the funeral, Lady Jane Grey was the chief mourner, and ecclesiastical reformer Myles Coverdale preached his first Protestant sermon.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Catherine was buried two days later at St. Mary's Church, within the grounds of Sudeley, in what was the first Protestant funeral in English. Over the next two centuries, her original tomb was "mutilated and defaced" and the location of her burial place was lost. In 1782, a coffin was discovered, with a lead plate that read "Here lyeth Quene Kateryne wife to Kyng Henry the VIII and Last the wife of Thomas Lord of Sudeley... dyed 5 September...". In 1792, vandals dug up the coffin. In 1817, the remains were placed in a stone vault near the remains of the 6th Lord Chandos.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: After the chapel restoration was completed in 1863, Parr's remains were placed in a new neo-Gothic canopied tomb designed by George Gilbert Scott and created by sculptor John Birnie Philip.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Today, her tomb with its life-sized effigy lying under a canopy of ornately carved marble, is considered a place of pilgrimage.(why?)


title: Sudeley Castle

text: After Catherine's death, her husband Thomas retained Sudeley; he held it until he was executed for treason six months later. Catherine's brother William Parr, 1st Marquess of Northampton, then inherited the castle, he in turn held Sudeley until 1553, when he was also accused of treason, and Sudeley was seized by the crown.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: On 8 April 1554, John Brydges was elevated to Baron Chandos of Sudeley by Queen Mary. He had previously been Lieutenant of the Tower of London, befriending Lady Jane Grey. He was the one who led Jane to her execution while she was in his care.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: His son Edmund Brydges heavily remodelled the castle in the 1560s and 1570s, almost completely rebuilding the outer courtyard, the part of the castle that the current family occupy, into what we see now.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Queen Elizabeth I stayed at Sudeley on three occasions during her reign, first visiting her old friend, the recently widowed Dorothy Bray, Baroness Chandos at Sudeley in 1574. Staying again during the Royal Progress of 1575, that saw Robert Dudley throw a lavish party at Kenilworth Castle in a final attempt to convince her to marry him.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Elizabeth's most famous stay at Sudeley was in 1592, when Giles Brydges, 3rd Baron Chandos threw a three-day party for her. Giles extensively landscaped the grounds surrounding the castle in preparation for the visit, and held banquettes, plays, dances and gave extravagant gifts during her stay, even presenting his daughter, Elizabeth Brydges to the queen in the guise of Daphne. The visit reputedly almost bankrupting the Brydges family.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: The yearly excavations by archaeologists DigVentures since 2018 have been set on discovering more about this party, uncovering extensive Elizabethan Gardens and a possible banqueting house.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Under the Chandos family, Sudeley continued to prosper and thrive, with Grey Brydges, 5th Baron Chandos gaining the title "King of the Cotswolds" for his magnificent style of living and his generosity. Records show that he had been buying in expensive tapestries from abroad through William Trumbull, envoy to the Archdukes of Austria, to decorate Sudeley. Grey was an influential courtier and an avid traveller, extensively travelling Europe and taking part in the War of the Jülich Succession. He married Lady Ann Stanley, descendant of King Henry VIII's younger sister Princess Mary Tudor, and possible heir to the throne of England. He died in 1621.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Sudeley's final royal occupant was to be King Charles I during the English Civil War, a war that was fought between the king and parliament.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: The new lord, George Brydges, 6th Baron Chandos supported the royalist cause, and it was while he was supporting Prince Rupert in the siege of Cirencester in January 1643 that Sir Edward Massey, with some five hundred soldiers and two cannons attacked the castle. The small garrison soon fell and the castle was plundered; soon to be abandoned after the news that the royalist army had taken Cirencester and was turning its attention to the castle.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Later that year, after Royalist army failed in the Siege of Gloucester, King Charles set up camp at Sudeley, using it as his base of operations in Gloucestershire; and then set about trying to force Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex into an open pitch battle.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: The castle was to switch hands several times during the war, most famously holding out against cannon bombardment by Sir William Waller, until it was betrayed by one of its officers who let the attackers in.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: In 1649, after the end of the civil war, parliament ordered the slighting of the castle, to ensure that it could never again be used as a military post. The process took some five months to complete, largely dismantling the inner courtyard and royal apartment rooms, but strangely leaving much of the outer courtyard intact. In 1650, George Brydges, 6th Baron Chandos received some financial compensation for the loss of the castle.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Buried in debt, the lord was unable to rebuild Sudeley, and he died in 1655 after years of being imprisoned in the Tower of London. On his death, the semi derelict castle was inherited by his widow, Lady Jane Savage, separating from the title Baron Chandos for the first time in over a century. She did not have the means to restore it and the castle was a neglected ruin for almost 200 years.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: For almost two centuries, the castle was largely left in ruins, but seemingly never becoming full abandoned.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Sudeley was owned by the Pitt Family, descendants of Lady Jane Savage's second marriage, who were elevated to a peerage in 1776 as Baron Rivers.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: During the 18th century, they rented Sudeley out to tenants, most notably the Lucas family, members of the local gentry. Joseph Lucas entertained King George III on his visit to the castle in 1788, with Mrs Cox the housekeeper saving the king's life, catching him after he fell down the Octagon Tower. The Lucas family were also involved in the rediscovery of Queen Catherine Parr's tomb in 1782, her corpse was found to be "entire and uncorrupted".


title: Sudeley Castle

text: In 1837 Sudeley Castle was purchased by brothers John and William Dent of Worcester, wealthy glove manufacturers, whose father had founded Dents Gloves in 1777. At the time of the purchase, the castle was "ruinous, but partly occupied by tenants".


title: Sudeley Castle

text: One of the previous tenants, John Attwood, had turned the castle into a public house "The Castle Arms", and treated it as a quarry, breaking it up and selling off the stone, timber and lead.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: A 2020 report described the condition of the castle at the time of the purchase:the castle comprised the remains of two courtyards linked together to form a figure-of-eight plan. Three sides of the outer court were enclosed by two-storey ranges that had, over time, variously accommodated cottages, farm buildings and even a tavern. All the remainder of the building was ruinous, including a medieval barn to the west of the castle and the chapel.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: The Dents' restoration of the castle was quite sensitive, deciding to not entirely rebuild the castle; rather, leaving part of it as picturesque ruins, giving the castle much of its character still seen today. One reliable source states that the restoration was directed by George Gilbert Scott, "working on the western side of the inner court in the style of the existing Medieval and Elizabethan buildings"; Gilbert Scott subsequently began the restoration of the castle's free-standing St Mary's chapel.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: The chapel is a Grade I* listed property, as "Church of St Mary". The summary states "Circa 1460 for Ralph Boteler, late C15 or early C16 north aisle, restored 1859-'63 by Sir G.G. Scott for J.C. Dent". (Ralph Boteler, 1st Baron Sudeley was the owner during the first restoration of the castle and the chapel.) The summary goes on to state that the chapel exterior dates primarily to the 15th and 16th centuries and the "interior nearly all to 1859".


title: Sudeley Castle

text: When the Sudeley was habitable again, the brothers set about filling the castle with art and antiques, buying up a considerable part of Horace Walpole's collection during the Strawberry Hill House Sale of 1842, an auction that lasted 32 days. One report states that they furnished the home with "a remarkable antiquarian collection of furniture, glass and paintings that further fleshed out its history, including some very discerning purchases from the Strawberry Hill sale in 1842".


title: Sudeley Castle

text: By 1855, both brothers had died and the castle was inherited by the Dent Brothers' nephew, John Croucher Dent, and his wife, Emma, of the wealthy silk manufacturer family, the Brocklehursts of Macclesfield, who set about improving the castle and adding to its collections.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Emma entertained on a vast scale, throwing costume balls and soirees, often hosting more than 2,000 guests a year; she was also a voracious letter writer, a number of which survive in the castle collection, including ones from Florence Nightingale.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: In 1859, Emma decided to attempt a re-creation of a historic garden. In 1885, she began to "substantially enlarge the house and its services ... she remodelled the western side of the castle through the full length of both courtyards, overbuilding one section of the ruins, and beginning a new tower at its north-east corner". In 1892, she built a "north lodge" on the property. She also arranged for Winchcombe to get its "first piped water supply in 1887".


title: Sudeley Castle

text: After Henry Dent Brocklehurst and his wife Marion inherited the property in 1900, they redecorated. Thirty years later, their son, Jack, arranged to "reconfigure the eastern range of the building" and "the creation of a panelled library furnished with an Elizabethan fireplace". His wife Mary brought the "Walter Morrison fine picture collection" to the castle; the majority of pieces are still on site.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: By the start of the Second World War, Sudeley was in straitened circumstances, having suffered from the huge death duties that were levied on it upon the death of Henry Dent-Brocklehurst in 1932, forcing the family to sell off much of the land the castle relied upon for its upkeep.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: During the war the castle was used as storage by the Tate Gallery as they moved their art out of London in an attempt to keep it safe during the Blitz.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Camp 37 was located where the visitors' car park is today, a prisoner of war camp for captured Italian and German soldiers. The POWs worked on local farms throughout the duration of the war until it was closed down on 20 January 1948.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: The American-born Elizabeth first came to Sudeley after her marriage to Mark Dent-Brocklehurst in 1962, and in the subsequent years set about preparing to open the castle up to the public, which they did to great celebration in May 1970. The castle website timeline states that in 1969 the castle was inherited by Mark and his American-born wife Elizabeth"; the couple converted the property into a tourist attraction.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Mark died in 1972, leaving Elizabeth, Lady Ashcombe to manage Sudeley on her own, and the castle had to survive its third round of heavy death duties in under fifty years.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Elizabeth, Lady Ashcombe married Henry Cubitt, 4th Baron Ashcombe and uncle of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall in 1979. They decided to keep Sudeley open to the public as a historic attraction and set about a major restoration of castle. Lord Ashcombe passed away in 2013.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: The Sudely website confirms that in 1979, Elizabeth (Lady Ashcombe, by that time) and her children Henry and Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst "took over management of the visitor attraction".


title: Sudeley Castle

text: BBC Four featured an investigation into the castle on 27 June 2007 titled "Crisis at the Castle". This detailed the turmoil associated with managing the castle by the three members of the Dent-Brocklehurst family. Closing the castle to the general public on some weekdays meant that visitors were disheartened when embarking on their day trips, and resulted in a dramatic fall in visitor numbers in the three years leading up to the creation of the programme.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: News reports in April 2008 stated that the family was selling a painting by JMW Turner at auction because the attraction was "losing £100,000 a year" and required a restoration.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Sudeley held a re-enactment of the funeral of Catherine Parr in September 2012, with guidance from historian Dr David Starkey; the event received positive feedback from re-enactment societies.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Sudeley is operated by the family and remains the home of Elizabeth, Lady Ashcombe and "her son, daughter and their families" as of 2021. The family is committed to the continued preservation of the castle, its treasures and the ongoing restoration and regeneration of the gardens of Elizabeth, Lady Ashcombe, her children, Henry and Molly Dent-Brocklehurst, and grandchildren. As of September 2019, BBC News referred to Lady Ashcombe as "the castle's owner".


title: Sudeley Castle

text: The castle exhibitions were redesigned and relaunched in 2018 as "Royal Sudeley 1,000: Trials, Triumphs and Treasures", and is set in the 15th-century Service Wing, covering three floors. It takes visitors through the thousand years of Sudeley's history, highlighting important aspects of the castle's past, and showing off the historical artefacts and pieces of artwork in the collection.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: The castle opens to the public seasonally and sections are used as a hotel, but it also remains a family home, with Elizabeth, Lady Ashcombe often called the "chatelaine of Sudeley". As of 2019, one of the tours of the castle included a visit to the "family's private apartments available daily from Spring to the end of October.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Sudeley has also been used as a wedding venue for some years. Several celebrity weddings have taken place at the castle, from Elizabeth Hurley's wedding in 2007, to Felicity Jones's wedding to Charles Guard in 2018.


title: Sudeley Castle

text: In September 2019, thieves stole items from the castle's royal exhibition, including "rare keepsakes made from gold and precious stones and presented by King Edward VII to his last mistress".


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Because of restrictions necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the castle was closed for some months; certain parts re-opened for a time during 2020. As of early March 2021, the Sudeley Castle & Gardens website was indicating that "exhibitions are closed until 2021. Reopening dates and information will be announced as soon as possible".


title: Sudeley Castle

text: Sudeley Castle sits at the heart of a 1,200-acre estate that lies nestled among the Cotswold valleys.