One of the many “back blogs” that we’ve been queuing up to post…  Again, a bit of history, but mostly pix…

We visited the Tower of London twice.  (Thus actually paying for the Historic Royal Palaces membership.  Heh.)  So some of these pics are from winter (Jan) and others are from spring (May).  So if you detect strangely vanishing and returning greenery, that’s why…

The name is a bit misleading and inclines people who haven’t been there to think that it’s a single building.  Rather, it’s a complex — a fortress including a central tower, rings of buildings and towers, gates and battlements, a (disused) moat, two chapels, a garrison — the whole bit.

The Tower really got started in 1066, when William the Conqueror, having recently wrested power from the locals, needed a seat for government and, not incidentally, a stronghold from which to dominate the populace.  So he commanded the construction of the White Tower (the central building in the modern Tower complex), starting from foundations and wall fragments that date back to the Romans.  From there, the Tower complex was extended for about four centuries, continuing to serve as fortress and picking up duties as royal prison, execution grounds, and armory along the way.

The White Tower

It’s a bit hard to see, but in the lower left, you can just make out some of the old Roman foundations.

Today, the entire Tower complex is essentially a museum, though it is still inhabited by the Tower Guard (the famous “Beefeaters”).  It also still functions as a real Royal military garrison, at least in limited ways — the Crown Jewels of Great Britain are housed in one of the buildings there and very serious guards with very big guns keep a close eye on them.  However, if you’re clever enough to go in early January, you can get in to see the jewels without a 2 hour wait.  ;-)  (Still not allowed to photograph them, however.)

Our guide, one of the famous "Beefeaters" -- the Tower Guard -- harranguing the tourists

One of the most notorious uses of the Tower has been to hold royal prisoners (or anybody else who was important enough to merit real imprisonment, rather than just summary execution).  Many of same prisoners never left the tower, or left it only as far as the headsman’s block on the nearby hill.  Even Elizabeth I was prisoner there briefly.

The axe used to behead Lady Jane Grey (in common legend, anyway, though apparently not in fact)

(Incidentally, they have reproductions of the famous painting of Jane Grey up all over the place there.  I can’t tell if it’s a kind of self-flagellating penance or if the romance of the tragedy appeals.)

But the widely known executions, like Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn, were really the smallest part.  Many, many people met essentially anonymous ends there.  When they excavated the floor of the “modern” chapel of the Tower complex (not to be confused with the medieval chapel, shown below), they found about 1500 unaccounted-for skeletons.  No record of who they were.  All clearly beheaded and buried anonymously and, presumably, ignominiously.  We don’t even know what era they died there.

When we were there in May, they had an exhibit of Henry’s armor.   (That’s Henry VIII, of course).

Henry VIII's tournament armor when he was c. 20 yo

Check out that joint articulation! Amazing craftsmanship.

In Jan, before the Henry exhibit was on, we met a chap who had a bunch of armor gear available to play with.

Susan stylin', Seventeenth century cavalier-style

Susan with more armor -- this time, Thirteenth century foot-soldier's helmet

Some miscellaneous inside architecture shots.  (Yes, it’s dark inside.  And hard to photograph.  At least we didn’t have to photograph by candle light…)

The medieval chapel, where centuries of English monarchs sat vigil before coronation

Vaulted ceiling. Did I mention that it was dark in there?

A medieval bedroom layout. (If you're royalty, that is.)

View along one of the Inner Ward's curtain wall battlements, now a springtime promenade for tourists

We arrived on a day when they were demoing their siege equipment in the greensward-formerly-known-as-a-moat.  Terran got to play with the toys.  (Tee hee.)  This one is called a “perrier”, pronounced “pear-ee-ur”.   (No shit — the etymology goes back to Latin for “stone”, via French, pierre.)  For scale, it’s probably about 20 feet tall at the top.  It’s a counterweight-based stone-caster, similar in principle to a trebuchet.  Unlike the latter, however, this one depends on human-power.  The thing that looks like a weight, on the left, is actually just a fixture for the ropes (that you can just see dangling beneath it).  You hang a bunch of big, burly guys (like, say, me) off the ropes and have them drop their body weight on them when the artillery commander gives the signal.  We were only tossing water balloons and we managed to fling them all of about 50m.  Woo — hardly a terror to the besieging hoards, I’m afraid.  But we only had 4 guys — the historians/artillery commander claimed that there are medieval woodcuts depicting giant versions of this sucker with about 100 people acting as weights.  Yike…

Medieval siege engine, or modern play toy?

Another of the myriad of legends associated with the Tower concerns the Ravens of the Tower.  Apparently the story goes that the Tower will fall if the Ravens ever leave.  This was a bit of a problem in the sixteenth century when the Royal Observatory was established there.  Apparently, the Tower featured about 2000 of the birds at the time, which was enough to…  Well, “obscure” the optics of the instruments, if you will.  But they clearly couldn’t kill all the ebon intruders.  So since then, they’ve maintained a small flock of tame ravens on the grounds.  To cover all the bases, though, they clip their wings, so the birds are stuck there…

One of the Tower Ravens, on whom so much depends.

(You may ask: Why were there so many ravens there?  Well, aside from the bloodthirstyness alluded to above, there’s the small fact that the moat was misdesigned, so it didn’t drain properly into the Thames.  As a result, everything that went into the moat, stayed in the moat.  And, of course, in that era, it was most common to dump all of the…  detritus of the fortress straight into the moat.  Mmmm….)

My grandmother on my father’s side was born a Boyer.  She once pointed out to me that there’s a Bowyer tower in the Tower of London.  I’m not entirely clear on whether our family is connected to this bit of architecture in any way, but I couldn’t resist going to find the tower.  (It turns out that its major claim to fame now is that some poor bastard got hisself murdered by being drowned in a barrel of sack [white wine] there.)

Bowyer tower -- my Grandmother's heritage?

We were particularly struck by the juxtaposition of this ancient fortress, nestled into the midst of a bustling modern mega-metropolis.

Two millenia of architecture: Roman wall (far foreground), medieval battlements (middle distance), and Victorian Tower Bridge (background).

Shadows of past and present