When Tamworth became the chief residence of Offa, ruler of the expanding Mercian kingdom, he built a palace there from which various charters were issued sedens in palatio regali in Tamoworthige, the first dating from 781.

[3] Over the following centuries there is no more mention of Tamworth as a royal residence, although a mint there struck coins for later Anglo-Saxon kings and eventually for the new Norman monarch, William the Conqueror.

[4] The place was then granted to William's steward, Robert Despenser, who built a wooden castle during the 1080s in the typical Norman motte and bailey fashion.

[6] The male line then came to an end with Baldwin de Freville, whose son died a minor, and the castle passed to the eldest daughter, Elizabeth, and her husband, Thomas Ferrers of Groby.

[1] A notable exterior feature surviving from early times is the herring-bone pattern of masonry laid diagonally at the base of the causeway up to the gate tower.

In his itinerary of Britain (1539/43), John Leland found the outworks “cleane decayed and the Wall fallen downe”, although on the mound there remained “a great round Tower of Stone, wherein Mr [Humphrey] Ferrers dwelleth, and now repaireth it.”[9] However adapted as a residence, the castle's defences had been built with the conditions of mediaeval warfare in mind.

[12] During their period of ownership, the castle again fell into disrepair but after the Ferrers grandniece, Charlotte Compton, had married George Townshend of Raynham, it was again refurbished.

Set in Tudor times, its anachronistic anti-hero is proclaimed at the banquet in the first canto as “Lord of Fontenaye…Of Tamworth tower and town”, although the barony of Marmion had by then been extinct for more than two centuries.