Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (2 page)

Eventually, the Normans would build some eighty-four motte-and-bailey castles across their newly conquered kingdom. The early ones were sited near their Sussex beachhead – Lewes, Bramber and Arundel – guarding strategic river valleys in case they needed to retreat to the coast in a hurry.
The temporary wooden castles were soon replaced by solid stone, once the Normans felt confident that they were in England for good. The functions of the castle were twofold: as the imposing home and headquarters of the local magnate; and as a refuge for his loyal soldiers, servants and tenants in times of trouble. They were the nodal points of the feudal mesh of occupation that the Normans threw over the conquered kingdom.

William rewarded the knights who had followed and fought alongside him with large parcels of conquered English land – together with the overlordship of the peasants who tilled the soil. Great castles were erected at Dover, Exeter, York, Nottingham, Durham, Lincoln, Huntingdon, Cambridge and Colchester. Norman names – de Warenne, de Lacey, Beauchamp – replaced Saxon ones in the nobility and clergy as a military occupation morphed into a new social structure.

William lavished special care on one castle in particular. His new capital, London, was vulnerable to attack on its eastern, seaward side. It clearly needed the protection that only a great castle could provide. England’s earlier military masters, the Romans, had pointed the way. In the fourth century AD, to defend the port-city they called Londinium Augusta, they had thrown up a stout city wall. It ran north–south from today’s Bishopsgate down to the Thames before swinging west along the northern bank of the river. Only the foundations of the wall remained by William’s time, but it was in the angle of its south-eastern corner, on the site of a former Roman fort named Arx Palatina – erroneously thought by the Normans (and by Shakespeare) to have been put up by Julius Caesar – that William decided to build his super-castle.

The rowdy scenes at his coronation had made it very clear that Norman rule could only be imposed by brute force. As a contemporary French chronicler, William of Poitiers, recorded, ‘Certain strongholds were made in the town against the fickleness of the vast and fierce populace.’ A fortress to house London’s garrison and intimidate its inhabitants – who totalled around 10,000 in 1066 – had to be constructed without delay. Within days of the Christmas coronation, conscripted gangs of Saxon labourers were hacking into the frozen soil. The remains of the Roman city wall served as a temporary barrier on the new fortress’s eastern and southern sides. A wide and deep ditch, surmounted by a palisaded rampart, went up on the western and northern sides of the site. A wooden tower was erected within three days in the middle of this rough rectangle. After
a decade, however, largely spent in stamping out rebellions in the west and north of his new kingdom, William decided to remake his temporary timber structure in permanent stone.

William had the very man in mind to realise his vision. He envisaged the building of a mighty edifice that would be at once fortress and palace – the last word in state-of-the-art military architecture, as well as an impressive royal residence. A towering, solid structure that would literally set Norman superiority in stone, inducing a Saxon cultural cringe and snuffing out any notion of further resistance to his rule. The master architect that William hand-picked to oversee the project was a talented cleric named Gundulf.

Born in 1024 near Caen, Gundulf, like many medieval bright lads, entered the all-powerful Church. Legend says his decision was prompted by his miraculously surviving a storm during a perilous pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the 1050s. He became a protégé of Lanfranc, the Italian-born prior of the great Benedictine Bec Abbey. Gundulf demonstrated a particular talent for architecture, designing churches and castles. He was an emotional man, given to outbursts of weeping, which won him the disrespectful nickname ‘the Wailing Monk’. Nevertheless, when William sacked the Saxon Stigand and chose Lanfranc to succeed him as the first Norman Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070, the new archbishop brought his temperamental clerk with him to Canterbury, where Gundulf supervised extensions to the cathedral.

The castle-building cleric caught the Conqueror’s eye, and Gundulf was soon summoned to London. William suggested that Gundulf should crown his architectural career by building in London the greatest castle in all Christendom. Gundulf was reluctant. Ageing and increasingly pious, he told the king that in his time left on earth he wanted to construct an ecclesiastical, rather than a secular, edifice – if possible a cathedral. No problem, William replied. At Rochester, near Canterbury, there already was a cathedral, in ruins since being pillaged in a Viking raid. He offered Gundulf the vacant bishopric and money for the cathedral’s restoration – so long as he built the great London castle first. So – doubtless with more tears and fears – Gundulf accepted his commission. In 1077 he became Bishop of Rochester, and the following year – 1078 – work on London’s new Tower commenced.

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Gundulf set about his task with vigour. He was fifty-four, old by medieval standards, yet would not only complete both the White Tower and Rochester Cathedral (along with a fine new castle there), but also see out both the Conqueror, and William’s son and successor, William Rufus. The White Tower gained its name from the blocks of pale marble-like Caen stone imported from Normandy with which it was constructed – with infill of local coarse Kentish ragstone – and from the coats of gleaming whitewash with which it was eventually plastered. The Tower was a huge structure, the biggest non-ecclesiastical building in England, rising some ninety feet above ground, with four pepperpot turrets, one at each corner. All the turrets were rectangular, with the exception of the north-east one, which was rounded to contain a spiral staircase.

When complete, the White Tower measured 107 feet (33 metres) from east to west, and 118 feet (36.3 metres) from north to south. The massive walls were fifteen-foot thick at their base, tapering to eleven at the top, built on foundations of chalk and flint. An undercroft, or basement, formed the lowest floor of the White Tower, where a well was sunk to supply the inhabitants with water. The cellar vaults were used at first for storing food and drink, as well as arms and armour. A more sinister function was their later use as the Tower’s principal torture chambers, the agonised screams of victims muffled by the surrounding earth and stone. The main, middle floor was entered, then as now, on the south side by an exterior wooden staircase, which could be quickly removed in case of siege. This floor was originally the living quarters of the Tower’s garrison, and was divided into three vast rooms: a refectory with a great stone fireplace where the soldiers ate and made merry when off duty; a smaller dormitory with another fireplace where they slept; and, in the south-east corner, the beautifully simple Romanesque Chapel of St John, with its twelve huge pillars.

The second floor of the White Tower was reserved for the use of the constable – the Tower’s commander appointed by the monarch – for important guests, and eventually for state prisoners of high status. The rooms consisted of a great hall complete with fireplace – used for state banquets – with a minstrels’ gallery running around it; and the constable’s chamber, a space which served as bedroom, meeting room and living quarters for the Tower’s top official. Each floor had latrines with chutes into underground cesspits emptied by the ‘night soil men’.

South of the White Tower, a gaggle of smaller buildings sprang up to
serve Gundulf’s great structure. These, the first of many additions and extensions added to the original keep across the centuries, were temporary structures not designed to last. There were stables, blacksmiths’ forges, stores for building materials, chicken coops and pigsties. Before he died, Gundulf oversaw the building of a high curtain wall guarding the Tower on its southern, river side, and the first of many smaller towers girding the great central keep. It is not known exactly when the oldest surviving tower outside the White Tower, the Wardrobe Tower, was built; and the date of the construction of the royal palace south of the White Tower is equally uncertain. It is likely, however, that by the time of Gundulf’s death, aged eighty-four, in 1108, a start had been made.

Gundulf had long outlived his original patron. Having finally subdued the English, William the Conqueror was faced with rebellion in his native Normandy by his own oldest son, Robert Curthose. It was on a punitive expedition against the rebellious town of Mantes, in 1087, that the Conqueror, his youthful stockiness run to fat, met his end. Having torched the conquered town with his customary savagery, William was riding through the blazing streets when his horse stepped on a burning ember. The beast bucked violently, throwing William’s great gut against the hard iron saddle pommel, and causing devastating internal injuries to his swollen stomach. William took ten days to die in agony. Feared more than loved, when he expired, his remaining followers stripped his bloated corpse and then scarpered. The Conqueror’s final indignity came at his funeral, when monks attempted to stuff his carcase into a small sarcophagus. The cadaver split, filling the church with such a noxious stench that mourners fled. It was an inglorious end for the victor of Hastings and the founder of the Tower.

William’s second son, Rufus, succeeded him as King William II of England. Rufus was a tyrant who quarrelled violently with the Church, offended his nobles with his extravagance and apparent homosexuality, and oppressed his long-suffering Saxon subjects with punitive taxation. But Rufus, like his father, was an enthusiastic builder. His most lasting legacy was the great Westminster Hall, and he supervised the completion of Gundulf’s work at the Tower before his violent and mysterious death by an arrow fired in the New Forest in August 1100.

Henry Beauclerc – so called because, alone among the Conqueror’s
children, he could read and write – William I’s third and youngest son, succeeded Rufus as Henry I. Ruthless, ambitious and astute (he was in the fatal hunting party and may have engineered his brother’s death), Henry lost no time in riding to London and claiming the throne. Henry consolidated Norman rule during his long and stable reign – partly by marrying a Saxon wife, Edith, heiress to King Harold’s House of Wessex. But although he fathered more bastard children (over twenty, by half a dozen mistresses) than any other English king, like that other later fertile monarch, Charles II, Henry left no legitimate male heir. His only sons by Edith, William and Richard, died when their vessel, the
White Ship
, failed to clear rocks outside Barfleur on a drunken homecoming voyage from Normandy in November 1120.

Henry named his daughter Matilda, widow of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, as his heiress. But a female ruler – even an empress – was an unwelcome novelty to the Norman nobility. When Henry died in 1135, the majority of England’s barons invited Stephen of Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror by his daughter Adela, to take the throne. Matilda, endowed with her combative family’s ferocious genes, refused to accept Stephen’s claim to the crown. Aided by her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, she invaded England to assert her right by force of arms.

Stephen’s seizure of the throne and Matilda’s outraged opposition condemned England to two decades of sporadic civil war known as ‘the Great Anarchy’. Stephen, though a brave and stubborn warrior, lacked the ruthlessness essential in a medieval ruler. He was too weak to eliminate Matilda, yet the prospect of a woman ruler was terrifying enough to his barons to keep him on his increasingly shaky throne. The result was a bloody stalemate in which the over-mighty barons – constantly changing sides – lorded it over their long-suffering serfs as the rival rulers fought like cat and dog.

The more unscrupulous barons, like modern mobsters, imposed a protection tax known as a ‘tenserie’ on their unlucky tenants. But the extortion provided no protection at all. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
laments, ‘When the wretched people had no more to give, they plundered and burned all the villages. Then was corn dear, and flesh and cheese and butter, for there was none in the land. The wretched people perished with hunger; some who had been great men were driven to beggary. Never did a country endure more misery, and men said openly that Christ and His saints slept.’

One of these robber barons was Geoffrey de Mandeville, holder of the office of Constable of the Tower of London, whom his biographer, the Victorian historian J. H. Round, calls, ‘the most perfect and typical presentment of the feudal and anarchic spirit that stamps the reign of Stephen’. The office was then a hereditary post, and the first constable, appointed by the Conqueror, had been Geoffrey’s grandfather, another Geoffrey de Mandeville – rewarded for his courage at Hastings. The first Geoffrey was succeeded by his son William, and in his turn Geoffrey the younger had taken the post. He had done fealty to Stephen when the new king arrived to secure the capital and the Tower after Henry I’s death. A grateful Stephen created Geoffrey 1st Earl of Essex – the first of three holders of that title to enjoy close, but ultimately fatal, connections with the Tower – and rewarded him with land.

Stephen was the first monarch to reside in the Tower, keeping the Whitsuntide festival there in 1140 in the newly built royal palace south of the White Tower. The king hoped that his generosity to Geoffrey would ensure the constable’s loyalty as the civil war dragged on. But the unscrupulous Geoffrey took advantage of the chaos to advance his own interests. Given custody of the daughter of King Louis VI of France, Princess Constance, who was betrothed to Stephen’s eldest son and heir, Eustace, Geoffrey kept the young girl under virtual house arrest – the first of the Tower’s many royal captives – defying Stephen’s demands for her release until he had seen who would win the civil war.

In 1141, Stephen was defeated and captured by Matilda’s forces at Lincoln and taken in chains to Bristol. Geoffrey deftly changed sides and pledged the Tower’s allegiance to Matilda. He demanded in exchange that he should receive yet more land, acquiring in addition the powerful post of sheriff of the counties adjoining London. Matilda also gave him permission to strengthen the Tower’s defences. De Mandeville’s defensive work came just in time. When Stephen was freed, civil war flared up again and the London Mob – strong supporters of Stephen – chased Matilda from the capital and besieged the Tower. Not only did Geoffrey see them off, he staged a sortie as far as Fulham and abducted the Bishop of London – the king’s leading supporter in the capital – as a hostage.