The Tower of London

 

On 31 January, we had a group outing to the Tower of London. Above you see the the students (with me hiding in the back) on the side of the Thames in front of  the Tower looking downstream to the Tower Bridge. The day quickly turned from cloudy to rainy (surprise?) and we dodged showers and generally got a little wet.





At the center of the castle is the White Tower, shown below. It is called this since it was originally (or at least at some time or other) painted white. The original structure was built starting sometime in the 1070's by William the Conquerer and completed by 1100. It has been amended many times in the last thousand years to be the structure we see today. In typical Norman fashion, the entrance (not seen in the photo) is on the 1st level (what we call the 2nd floor) and reached by wooden stairs. This allowed a besieged king to retreat inside and burn the stairs to create a defendable bastion. Now it is a museum.

In the museum, we find an extensive display of royal armor.

Many pieces had intricate tooling on steel and gold. It is hard to image that any of what is displayed was every really intended to we warn into battle.

Of course, the Tower is the home to the crown jewels. These are location another building in which no photos are allowed. To guard the jewels and the rest of the facility are the Yeomen Warders or the Beef Eaters, apparently because they were allowed to eat all the beef they wished from the King's table. We saw the changing of the guard.

Inside the building housing the jewels was a truly dazzling display of gold, silver, diamonds, rubies, and anything else expensive. After a few short videos to describe the history a bit and a compressed verso of the Queen's coronation (where all the jewels and crowns and such are used), you enter the room with the jewels themselves. They are places in a row of glass cases with room to walk on either side. In place of a floor, however, are moving walkways to regulate the rate at which people move past the jewels. We came on a rainy day in January and there really wasn't a crowd at all. I could ride past several times and on both sides to see all I wanted. I'm told that the wait in season can be several hours to pass by once.

The Tower is a moated castle. The moat is now dry and sitting in the moat is trebuchet to show one of the siege engines used in days of yore. The moat was filled and flushed by the Thames (from which is it now separated by walls). I used "flushed" in a literal sense - all the waste from the castle was dumped in the moat, thereby adding to the danger of trying to cross it to attack.

Below, we see a portion of the castle from outside the moat as we departed. Here in the middle of one of the larger cities in the world is a 1000 year old structure that, like many others, capture a snapshot of the much of the history that happened in the intervening 1000 years.

Things we did not have time to see include the Bloody Tower. It was first built during the reign of Henry III as a watergate for the Tower and opened onto the Thames. The name commemorated a tradition that it was in the tower that the two ‘Princes in the Tower’ were murdered in 1483. A top floor was completed in 1606 to house Sir Walter Raleigh.