Her Majesty's Tower of London [antikvár]

The TOWER OF LONDONby Olwen HedleyAlthough the name 'Tower of London' has long been used to denote the whole of the great fortress and royal palace founded by King William I, 'the Conqueror', it belonged anciently to the central and most commanding feature, the keep. Jolin Stow, the sixteenth-century antiquary, born and bred in the City of London, says in his Survey of London first published in 1598 that William, for the defence of the city, 'built this tower, which was the great square tower, now called the White Tower'.William raised the tower to overawe as well as defend the city, tactics on which depended his sovereignty and the future of the realm. He himself was Duke of Normandy, cousin of the last Saxon king of England, Edward the Confessor, who died on 5 January 1066 and it was his landing on the Sussex shore and his victory at the Battle of Hastings on the following 14 October that brought him his new crown. Hastings was only the begin-ning of his triumph. The citizens of London showed disinclination to welcome him and not until December, when he had warily circled west and north of the capital, did their repre-sentatives meet him and 'from necessity submitted'. He in turn 'promised to be a kind lord to them': but he did not trust to agreements alone. Before entering London he sent a detachment ahead to begin erecting fortified posts and after his coronation in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day withdrew east to Barking 'while certain strongholds were made in the town against the fickleness of the vast and fierce populace'.There were three, all banking on the Thames. Two, later known as Baynard's Castle and Montfichet Castle, stood in the west and have not survived. The third, the Tower of London, was placed at- what was then the south-east corner of the City, immediately within the boundary wall built during the Román occupation and restored by Alfréd the Great in885, a site of more than local import-ance. The Thames estuary had from time immemorial been one of the chief inlets into Britain, and as London marks the lowest point at which the river can readily be bridged, the Tower commanded the eastern approaches both by water and by land and had full surveillance of the passage of ships.The Román wall, part of which is still preserved in the Tower precincts, förmed the eastern side of what may initially have been a small garrison-fort, bounded on the south by the tidal river and on the west and north by a rampart and newly dug ditch. The work was directed by Gundulf, a monk of Bee in Normandy who became Bishop of Rochester and is remem-bered both for his able administration and for his personal sanctity. A later reference suggests that the first Constable may have been a Norman named Ravenger who died about 1086.Gundulf laid the foundations of the White Tower about 1078. A three-storeyed palace-keep with dressings of Caen stone, it stands over a vaulted basement containing a well 40 feet deep. The beautiful tunnel-vaulted Chapel Royal of St John the Evangelist rising through the two upper floors, and above a crypt and sub-crypt, at its south-east corner dates from about 1080, but the Tower was still un-finished when William the Conqueror died seven years later at Rouen. His son, William II, continued the work, which was completed about 1097. The turreted White Tower, 90 feet high and with walls varying in thickness from fifteen feet at the base to eleven in the uppermost storey, stands today as the paramount memóriái of the Norman Conquest, one of the most significant events in English history.The entrance, on the first floor of the south front, facing the river, was originally reached by a stone staircase demolished in the 17th century. It was thereafter long represented by an opening fiiled with glass, a ground-floor doorway on the north front being used instead, but in 1974 it was reopened and a great timber staircase erected up to it, so that the White Tower is again entered by the route Gundulf planned and which he himself was concerned to render more formidable than hospitable. Security, the essence of his structural accom-plishment, is further emphasized by the varying rangé of the interior stone staircases in the angle turrets, three of which are square while the fourth, the one at the north-east, is circular: not only are these winding corner staircases the sole means of communi-cation between one storey and another, but only one, the main staircase in the circular north-east turret, makes the complete descent from the top storey to the basement.Military requirements having been satisfied, Norman architecture had alsó to include a humán dimension. On the ground and first floors of the Wrhite Tower can still be seen the remains of the small privies in the thickness of the wall, somé of which retain their originál arched shoots on the outside.The name 'White Tower' com-memorates the dazzling artistry of Henry III, who in 1240 had the keep whitewashed both inside and out. He it was who began extension of the precincts into the squarish concentric fortress which today covers eighteen acres and endowed it with the full attributes of a royal palace. The Norman kings, who usually kept their seasonal ceremóniái courts at Winchester, Westminster, Gloucester and, after 1110, Windsor, had not invested the banqueting hall and council chamber of the White Tower with any marked regality, although it was deseribed by William Fitzstephen, the London-born monk of Canterbury who died in 1191, as arx palatina, the fortress palace. William II's brother, Henry I, had found a very different - use for its vast-stone apartments. On 15 August 1100, thirteen days after