Tower of London: William the Conqueror's White Tower

The White Tower is the great stone keep at the centre of the Tower of London, begun around 1078 on the orders of William the Conqueror. Built to overawe the people of London after the Norman Conquest, it was one of the largest and strongest buildings in eleventh-century Europe. Over the following centuries the fortress around it grew into a royal palace, prison, armoury, mint and treasury, making the Tower one of the most important sites in English history.

Background: securing London after 1066

After his victory at the Battle of Hastings in October 1066, William of Normandy was crowned king in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day. London was England’s largest and richest town, and its loyalty was uncertain. The chronicler William of Poitiers records that William had fortifications built in the city to guard against its many inhabitants.

The first defences in the south-east corner of the city were probably earth banks and timber palisades, using the old Roman city wall on two sides. Within a decade or so, William ordered something far more permanent: a massive stone tower that could not be ignored by anyone approaching London along the Thames.

Building the White Tower

The exact start date is uncertain. Historians usually place it in the mid- to late 1070s, with 1078 the traditional date. A text from Rochester Cathedral, the Textus Roffensis, records that Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, supervised the work on the king’s behalf. Gundulf was an experienced builder who also worked on Rochester’s cathedral and castle.

Construction was slow and probably paused at times. The tower was finished under William’s son, William II, known as William Rufus, probably by about 1100. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle complains of the burden of labour placed on many shires for work on the wall around the Tower in 1097.

The keep is roughly 36 metres by 32 metres at its base and about 27 metres (90 feet) high, with walls around 4.5 metres (15 feet) thick at ground level. Its builders used local Kentish ragstone and fine pale limestone shipped from Caen in Normandy for the dressed details. Inside were large halls and chambers, latrines built into the walls, and the Chapel of St John the Evangelist, a plain but impressive Norman chapel with thick round columns that survives almost unchanged.

The name “White Tower” dates from 1240, when Henry III had the building whitewashed inside and out.

A building meant to impress

The White Tower was not only a military strongpoint. Its sheer size was a political message. Most Londoners in the 1070s lived in timber houses, and few buildings in England were made of stone apart from churches. A pale tower rising nearly 30 metres above the riverbank announced that the Normans had come to stay.

Its design also reflected Norman tastes in lordship. The upper floors held great halls where the king could receive visitors in state, while the entrance was set high above the ground and reached by an external wooden stair that could be removed in an attack. The building is often compared with the slightly earlier great keep at Colchester, built on the foundations of a Roman temple, which shares a similar plan and may have been designed by the same circle of builders.

From keep to great castle

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Tower expanded around its keep. Richard I’s chancellor, William Longchamp, extended the defences in the 1190s. Henry III (reigned 1216-1272) built new royal lodgings and a much larger curtain wall with towers. His son Edward I (reigned 1272-1307) completed the transformation, adding an outer wall and a wide moat.

By about 1285 the Tower had become a concentric castle, with one ring of defences inside another, so that attackers who broke through the outer wall faced a second, higher wall. Edward also built St Thomas’s Tower with a water gate onto the Thames, later known as Traitors’ Gate.

Palace, prison and treasury

In the Middle Ages the Tower served many purposes. Kings stayed there in times of danger and traditionally lodged there before their coronations. It held stores of weapons and armour, and royal records were kept in its towers. From the late thirteenth century it housed the Royal Mint, which remained there until the early nineteenth century.

It also held a royal menagerie. Henry III received three leopards (probably lions) from the Emperor Frederick II, a polar bear from King Haakon IV of Norway in 1252, and an elephant from Louis IX of France in 1255.

The Tower’s first well-recorded prisoner was Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, imprisoned by Henry I in 1100. He escaped the next year by climbing down a rope that had reportedly been smuggled in to him in a wine cask. Over the following centuries the Tower held many high-ranking captives, including royal prisoners of war such as Charles, Duke of Orléans, captured at Agincourt in 1415.

The fortress was not impregnable. During the Peasants’ Revolt of June 1381 rebels entered it and dragged out and beheaded Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor, along with the Treasurer, Sir Robert Hales. In 1471 the deposed Henry VI died in the Tower, almost certainly killed on the orders of Edward IV. In 1483 the young Edward V and his brother Richard disappeared there, in the mystery of the Princes in the Tower.

Key people

William the Conqueror (c. 1028-1087) ordered the building of the White Tower to secure his hold on London and England.

Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester (c. 1024-1108) was a Norman monk and builder who, according to the Rochester record, supervised the work.

Henry III and Edward I turned the Norman keep into a vast concentric fortress and royal residence in the thirteenth century.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Tower was mainly a place of torture and execution. Torture was used there, mostly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a few famous prisoners were executed within its walls. But for most of the Middle Ages the Tower was above all a royal castle, store and workplace.

Myth: the ravens have guarded the Tower since the Middle Ages. The legend that the kingdom will fall if the ravens leave is popular, but clear evidence of ravens being kept at the Tower dates only from the late nineteenth century.

Legacy

The White Tower stands today largely as the Normans designed it, though its windows were enlarged in the eighteenth century. It is one of the best-preserved great keeps of its age in Europe and a powerful symbol of the Norman Conquest, the same conquest recorded in the Domesday Book. The Tower of London was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988 and is home to the Crown Jewels and the Royal Armouries’ collections.

Timeline

• 1066, 25 December: William the Conqueror is crowned at Westminster Abbey.
• c. 1075-1079: Work begins on the stone keep, traditionally in 1078.
• c. 1100: The keep is completed under William II.
• 1100-1101: Ranulf Flambard is imprisoned in the Tower and escapes.
• 1240: Henry III has the keep whitewashed, giving the White Tower its name.
• c. 1275-1285: Edward I completes the concentric defences and builds St Thomas’s Tower.
• 1381, 14 June: Peasants’ Revolt rebels enter the Tower and kill Archbishop Sudbury.
• 1483: The Princes in the Tower disappear.
• 1988: The Tower of London becomes a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

The White Tower was a statement in stone of Norman power over England, and it still dominates the Tower of London nearly a thousand years later. The fortress that grew around it reflects the history of the English monarchy itself, from conquest and royal display to imprisonment, rebellion and political murder.