Bodiam Castle

Edward Dalyngrigge was a younger son, and primogeniture left him none of his father's estates. He went to France in 1367 with Lionel, Duke of Clarence, fought under Richard Fitzalan, 3rd Earl of Arundel, and then joined the company of Sir Robert Knolles, a commander reputed to have taken 100,000 gold crowns in plunder. It was in the free companies that Dalyngrigge raised the money that built Bodiam. He returned to England in 1377, held the manor of Bodiam by 1378 through marriage into a land-owning family, and sat as Knight of the Shire for Sussex from 1379 to 1388.

When the Treaty of Bruges expired, England and France resumed their struggle for the Channel with raids on both coasts, and Parliament voted money for fortifying the south coast. In 1385 a fleet of 1,200 ships gathered across the Channel at Sluys in Flanders, and the population of southern England was in a state of panic. Later that year Dalyngrigge was granted his licence.

The licence, given by the king at Westminster on 20 October, let him "strengthen with a wall of stone and lime, and crenellate" his manor house of Bodiam "for the defence of the adjacent country, and the resistance to our enemies". What Richard II had permitted was the refortification of an existing manor house; Dalyngrigge instead chose a fresh site and built from nothing. The work was completed in a single phase and almost all of it is in one architectural style, from which the archaeologist David Thackray deduces that it went up quickly, probably because of the threat from the French. Dalyngrigge was Captain of the port of Brest from 1386 to 1387 and so was probably absent for the first years of building. No completion date is recorded — Thackray suggests before 1392 — and he was dead by 1395.

For a castle licensed against invasion it stands unusually far from the medieval coastline, as a Royal Commission landscape survey observed, and the military logic reads oddly elsewhere too: the gatehouse is the only part of the castle with gun-loops, and the curtain wall and towers are studded with windows for domestic use. The embankment holding the moat was thin enough that a besieger could have drained it in a day. In the 1990s Bodiam sat at the centre of a debate in castle studies over how far such places were built for war and how far for display.

Bodiam left the Dalyngrigge family in 1470, when Richard Dalyngrigge died without issue and the estates went to his nephew Sir Roger Lewknor. Roger's son Sir Thomas supported the House of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses, and when Richard III of the House of York took the throne in 1483, Lewknor was accused of treason and of raising men-at-arms in south-east England. In November his own uncle and Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, were given permission to levy men and besiege Bodiam Castle, where Lewknor was based. Whether the siege went ahead is not recorded; Thackray suggests that Lewknor surrendered without much resistance. His property was confiscated and Nicholas Rigby made constable of the castle, but the attainder was revoked on Henry VII's accession and Bodiam returned to Lewknor, though not all the surrounding land came back to the family until 1542.

Castle and manor had been split when Sir Roger Lewknor's estates were divided among his descendants after 1543, and John Tufton, 2nd Earl of Thanet, reunited them when he bought Bodiam in 1639. Tufton took the Royalist side in the Civil War, led an attack on Lewes and was caught in the Royalist defeat at Haywards Heath. Parliament confiscated some of his lands in 1643 and more in 1644, and fined him £9,000; to help pay it he sold Bodiam Castle in March 1644 for £6,000 to Nathaniel Powell, a Parliamentarian. When the castle was dismantled is unrecorded, but probably after Powell bought it — and the slighting was not thorough: taking down the barbican, the bridges and the buildings inside the walls was deemed sufficient.

Sir Thomas Webster bought the castle in 1722 and it descended in his family for over a century, drawing sightseers and antiquarian draughtsmen; the first drawings, from the mid-18th century, show a ruin overgrown with ivy. Sir Godfrey Webster, 5th Baronet, began looking for a buyer in 1815 and in 1829 sold the castle and 24 acres to John 'Mad Jack' Fuller for £3,000; Fuller is said to have bought it to stop the Websters dismantling it for its stone. Fuller repaired one of the towers, added new gates and removed a cottage built inside the castle in the 18th century.

George Cubitt, later Baron Ashcombe, bought it from Fuller's heir in 1849 for over £5,000 and repaired the south-west tower, which had almost entirely collapsed; the ivy was left where it was, in the fashion of the day, despite its effect on the masonry. Lord Curzon, who held that "so rare a treasure should neither be lost to our country nor desecrated by irreverent hands", bought Bodiam in 1916 and restored parts of it with the architect William Weir. The moat was drained and three feet of mud and silt removed, uncovering the original footings of the bridges. On his death in 1925 the castle passed to the National Trust.