In our History the original castle of Shalott was destroyed during the War of the Roses. Bodiam Castle has been used to represent the ancestral home of Shalott as it is one of the few standing castles that fits Tennyson's description. Inveray Castle in Scotland also does but that is the home of the Campbell's, though the pictures of it well suit the design for the new Shalott home on the Isle of Standauffish.  The use of Bodiam Castle is for demonstrative purpose only as a representation of what our castle would have looked like. As an interesting note, there is a Medieval Re-creation club that currently meets at Bodiam Castle for demonstrations. More details on this group can be found in our Foreign Realm area.

There is something magical about Bodiam. The spell that the "fairy castle" cast over Grace Duggan, shown over the site one summer day in 1916 by her husband-to-be George Curzon, still has power today. It confounds one's critical faculties, so that at the sight of its high round towers rising from the clear waters of the moat, dry architectural and historical judgements are suspended, giving place to an attractively vague synthesis of Mallory and Walter Scott. Bodiam is the romantic ruin par excellence, conjuring up a hazy vision of a Merry England of colourful tournaments and desperate sieges in which noble lords did noble deeds, and knights in armour really did rescue damsels in distress. 

The truth, of course, is rather different. There was little either merry or noble about the castle's builder, Sir Edward Dalyngrigge. He was a mercenary and a freebooter, much of whose wealth was derived from a campaign of terror against the civilian population of France during the 1370's and 1380's. And his motives in fortifying Bodiam may well have been rooted not only in a desire to protect his country against imminent French invasion, the ostensible reason for his receiving a royal license to crenelate in October 1385, but also in need to protect himself from the local peasantry.