Lucy Hutchinson was the wife of Colonel Hutchinson, Parliamentary Governor of Nottingham Castle during the English Civil War (1642 - 1649). Lucy kept a diary in which she recorded life in the castle. By then the walls and buildings were in a very sad state of repair. Lucy wrote that the castle was: "very ruinous and uninhabitable, neither affording room to lodge soldiers or provisions" and that in the Middle Bailey "there had been several towers and many noble rooms, but most of them were down."