About four miles below the ancient Priory of Robertsbridge, and fourteen, by its own sinuous course, above its junction with the sea below the old Cinque Port of Rye, the Rother, a considerable Sussex river, receives from the north an important tributary known as the Kent Ditch, and, time out of mind, the boundary of the two counties. The waters meet obliquely, and between them intervenes a tongue or cape of high land tapering and falling gradually towards the junction, and occupied by the church, village, and castle of Bodiham. Who was Bodi, or Bode, whose home was here established, is unknown. He was evidently a Saxon, and from the position of his estate, probably an early one, giving name it may be to a tract won in arms from the Britons. Ham is here a very common termination to the proper names of places, varied with Hurst and Den and Ley, and other less frequent but equally Saxon denominations. The church stands on the high ground, a little north of the centre of the cape, the castle about 600 yards to the south of it, and about half the distance from the Rother, at some thirty feet or so above its level. The Rother, here and lower down, traverses broad patches of lowland, now fertile meadow, but in former days evidently inaccessible morass. The position, therefore, between the two streams with their marshy banks was defended by nature towards the south and east, the quarter from which, after the complete expulsion of the Britons and during the early Saxon period, danger was mainly to be apprehended. The earlier lords, both Saxon and Norman, who gave name to, and derived their names from, Bodiham, pitched their homestead on the north side of the high ground, some way from the church, and upon the right bank of the Kent Ditch, where the site is still indicated by some earthworks and a moat. Nearer to, but south of the church, on the brow of the hill, above the present castle, are the remains of another earthwork, rectangular and oblong in form, the site probably either of an early residence or a still earlier encampment. Below this brow, on the southern verge of and just within the slope, it pleased a Lord of Bodiham, having become so by marriage with its heiress, to establish a new residence. Sir Edward Dalingruge, a successful soldier in the rough school of the Black Prince and his captains, of whom his immediate chief, Sir William Knollys, was one of the roughest, having held offices of trust under Richard II., decided here to build a castle suitable to his rank, wealth, and military fame; and having, in the 9th of Richard, 1385-6, obtained the royal licence, he constructed at a vast cost, both in earthwork and masonry, the castle here described.