Bodiam Castle rises from its moat in East Sussex like a postcard of medieval England, all crenellated towers and arrow slits. But beneath the 14th-century stonework, archaeologists have pulled something far older from the ground: a small bronze charm shaped like a penis, dating to the Roman occupation of Britain roughly 1,800 years ago.
The object, recovered during a joint excavation by University College London and the National Trust, is what Roman scholars call a fascinus. These phallic amulets were carried, worn, or hung from horse harnesses across the Roman world as protection against the evil eye and bad luck. They show up at military forts, roadside settlements, and domestic sites throughout Britain. Finding one at Bodiam suggests that people were moving through or living in this stretch of the Sussex Weald centuries before anyone dreamed of building a castle there.
A discovery buried beneath a medieval icon
The excavation is a formal partnership between the UCL Institute of Archaeology, its Archaeology South-East division, and the National Trust. The project’s goal extends well beyond the medieval castle itself. Researchers are investigating the broader landscape around Bodiam to understand how the site was used across different periods, and the Roman charm is the most striking evidence so far that the story here stretches back much further than the 1380s.
The find was significant enough to earn a place in the “Roman Britain in 2023” roundup published in Britannia, the peer-reviewed journal produced by Cambridge University Press for The Roman Society. That annual survey is the standard scholarly record of Roman-period discoveries across the country, compiled region by region. Inclusion in it confirms the charm as a professionally recovered artifact, not a metal-detectorist’s unverified social media post.
Why Romans carried penis-shaped charms
To modern eyes, a bronze penis on a necklace might seem like a joke. To the Romans, it was deadly serious. The phallus was one of the most potent protective symbols in their culture, associated with the god Fascinus and believed to deflect envy, curses, and malevolent spirits. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder described phallic charms as a guardian “not only of infants but of generals,” noting that one hung beneath the chariot of a triumphing commander.
Fascini were manufactured in bronze, bone, and occasionally precious metals. Some were tiny pendants small enough to thread onto a cord; others were large enough to mount on walls or doorways. They have been found across the Roman Empire, from North Africa to Hadrian’s Wall, and their presence at a site typically signals ordinary human activity rather than grand military campaigns or imperial administration. Someone at Bodiam, whether a traveler, a trader, or a local resident, carried this charm as part of daily life.
What the landscape tells us
Bodiam sits near the River Rother in a part of Sussex that was known during the Roman period for ironworking. Smelting sites dotted the Weald, connected by trackways and waterways to coastal ports that shipped goods across the English Channel. A 140-page landscape assessment by Archaeology South-East, catalogued by the Archaeology Data Service, documented the earthworks, water features, and earlier archaeological interventions around the castle well before the current dig began.
That baseline work raises an intriguing possibility. If Bodiam’s location later capitalized on an older crossing point or route along the Rother, a Roman amulet turning up nearby would fit neatly into a pattern of movement and trade. The Weald’s iron industry required networks of paths and river transport, and a charm lost or deposited along one of those corridors would be entirely consistent with what archaeologists know about the region.
But that connection remains a hypothesis as of June 2026. No full excavation report has been released describing the charm’s exact findspot within the Bodiam grounds, the soil layer it came from, or what other artifacts were recovered alongside it. Without that stratigraphic detail, it is impossible to say whether the object was dropped by a passing traveler or placed deliberately, perhaps as a ritual offering near a shrine or water source.
What archaeologists still need to confirm
The 1,800-year age estimate is consistent with the general date range of comparable fascini found elsewhere in Roman Britain, most of which fall between the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. But the figure is based on typology, not laboratory measurement. No published metallurgical analysis has confirmed whether the bronze alloy matches known Roman-era production methods, and no radiometric dating of associated materials has been released.
The Britannia entry, while authoritative as a discovery notice, functions more as a catalog listing than a detailed analytical study. It does not include laboratory data, stratigraphic diagrams, or photographs of the findspot. A full excavation report, expected in a future volume of Britannia or a standalone publication, would be needed to move the charm from “interesting find” to “fully analyzed artifact with a confirmed date and depositional history.”
One question that report could answer: was the charm deposited intentionally? Roman fascini have turned up in both ritual and accidental contexts at other British sites. Some cluster in pits or near shrines in what appear to be votive deposits. Others show up singly along roads or in domestic refuse, looking more like something that slipped from a pocket. The distinction matters. Intentional deposition would suggest a more sustained, emotionally invested Roman presence at Bodiam. A stray loss would point to incidental passage rather than long-term occupation.
A deeper history beneath the moat
Bodiam Castle draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year as one of the National Trust’s most photographed properties. Nearly all of them come for the medieval spectacle: the moat, the gatehouse, the ruined great hall. The bronze fascinus adds a chapter most of those visitors would never have guessed at.
Long before Sir Edward Dallingridge laid the castle’s first stones in 1385, someone walked this ground carrying a small bronze charm shaped like a penis, trusting it to keep misfortune at bay. The moat and battlements came more than a thousand years later. The little amulet is a reminder that the landscape beneath them had already seen centuries of movement, belief, and ordinary human life by the time the castle rose above the Sussex marshes.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
