Legend has it that if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, the kingdom will fall. Nobody is quite sure when the story began, and it may be no older than the Victorians, but nobody has wanted to test it either. There are always at least six ravens at the Tower, looked after by a Yeoman Warder called the Ravenmaster, and their wings are trimmed so they cannot wander far. It is a very English way of looking after a building that has been at the centre of the country's history for nearly a thousand years.
The Tower of London: Quick Facts
- Founded: 1066, by William the Conqueror; the stone White Tower was begun in the 1070s
- Location: the north bank of the Thames, at the eastern edge of the old City of London
- Uses over the centuries: royal palace, fortress, prison, place of execution, armoury, treasury, Royal Mint, royal zoo and home of the Crown Jewels
- Famous prisoners: Anne Boleyn, Thomas More, Lady Jane Grey, Princess Elizabeth, Walter Raleigh, Guy Fawkes, Rudolf Hess
- Executions inside the walls: seven on Tower Green, plus a number of spies shot during the two World Wars
- Status: a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988
The Conqueror's Castle
When William the Conqueror marched on London after the Battle of Hastings, he found a wealthy city whose citizens were not at all sure they wanted a Norman king. So one of his first acts was to build a castle in the south-east corner of the old Roman city walls, where it could keep an eye on the Londoners and on anyone sailing up the Thames. At first it was a timber fort surrounded by a ditch. In the 1070s William began replacing it with a great stone keep, which took around twenty years to finish. The work was overseen by Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, and some of the stone was shipped over from Caen in Normandy.
When it was finished, the keep was the tallest building in London, around ninety feet high, with walls up to fifteen feet thick. It must have looked terrifying to the English, which was rather the point. Nobody called it the White Tower until the reign of Henry III, who had it whitewashed in the 1240s. Inside you can still see the Chapel of St John the Evangelist, one of the finest surviving Norman church interiors in England.
A Royal Fortress
Later kings turned the Tower into one of the strongest castles in Europe. Henry III, who spent a good deal of time there hiding from rebellious barons, built a new curtain wall with towers around the keep and added comfortable royal apartments. His son Edward I surrounded it with a second, outer wall and a wide moat, turning it into a concentric castle like the great fortresses he was building in Wales. Edward also built a new water gate, St Thomas's Tower, under which boats could come in directly from the river. Centuries later, when prisoners were brought in that way, it became known as Traitors' Gate.
For much of the Middle Ages the Tower was a royal residence as well as a fortress, and until the time of Charles II, English monarchs traditionally spent the night before their coronation there, then rode in procession through the City to Westminster. You can read more about castles like it on our page on medieval castles.
The Royal Menagerie
One of the Tower's stranger roles was as a zoo. Around 1235 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II sent Henry III three "leopards" (probably lions), and the royal menagerie was born. In 1252 the King of Norway sent a polar bear, which was allowed to swim in the Thames on a long chain to catch fish, and in 1255 Louis IX of France sent an elephant, the first ever seen in England. It did not survive long. Over the following centuries the menagerie housed lions, tigers, monkeys, ostriches and kangaroos, and by the eighteenth century members of the public could visit, paying three halfpence or bringing a cat or dog to feed to the lions. The animals were finally moved out in the 1830s, and many of them went to the new London Zoo in Regent's Park.
Prisoners of the Tower
The Tower was never meant to be a prison, but it soon became one, and its most famous prisoners were usually important people held for political reasons. The very first was Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham and chief minister of William Rufus, locked up by Henry I in 1100. He also became the first to escape, in 1101, climbing down a rope that had been smuggled in to him in a barrel of wine, after he had got his guards drunk on the rest of it.
Many were not so lucky. In 1483 the twelve-year-old King Edward V and his younger brother Richard were lodged in the Tower by their uncle, who then took the throne as Richard III. They were never seen again. In 1674 workmen found the skeletons of two children buried under a staircase near the White Tower, and Charles II had them reburied in Westminster Abbey as the princes. Whether they really were the princes, and who killed them, are still some of the most hotly debated questions in English history. Our page on the Princes in the Tower goes into the mystery in detail.
Under the Tudors the Tower was busier than ever. Sir Thomas More spent over a year there before his execution in 1535 for refusing to accept Henry VIII as head of the Church. In 1554 the future Queen Elizabeth I was brought in by river on the orders of her half-sister Mary, suspected of involvement in Wyatt's rebellion. According to a famous story, she sat down on the wet steps and refused to go in, declaring that she was no traitor. She spent two months in the Bell Tower and was lucky to come out alive. Sir Walter Raleigh spent thirteen years in the Bloody Tower under James I, where he grew tobacco, conducted chemical experiments and wrote a History of the World. And in November 1605 Guy Fawkes was interrogated, and tortured on the king's authority, in the Tower after the failure of the Gunpowder Plot.
Executions on Tower Green
Most people executed at the Tower actually died outside it, on Tower Hill, in front of large crowds. Only a handful were given the privilege of a private execution inside the walls, on Tower Green, away from the public gaze. There were seven of them:
- William, Lord Hastings, in 1483, on the orders of Richard III
- Queen Anne Boleyn, in 1536, beheaded with a sword by an expert swordsman brought over from Calais
- Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, in 1541, aged sixty-seven
- Queen Catherine Howard, in 1542
- Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, beheaded the same day as Catherine Howard
- Lady Jane Grey, in 1554, aged about sixteen
- Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, Elizabeth I's former favourite, in 1601
Five of the seven were women, and three were queens or had been proclaimed queen. For a full list of those who died at the Tower and on Tower Hill, see our page on famous people executed at the Tower of London. The last person executed at the Tower was Josef Jakobs, a German spy, who was shot by firing squad in August 1941. That same year Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy, was held there for a few days after his extraordinary flight to Scotland.
The Crown Jewels and the Royal Mint
The Tower has also been a treasury. The Crown Jewels have been kept there since the fourteenth century, though most of what you can see today dates from 1661, because Oliver Cromwell's government had the medieval regalia melted down or sold after the execution of Charles I. In 1671 an Irish adventurer called Colonel Thomas Blood, disguised as a clergyman, tried to steal them. He flattened the crown with a mallet to hide it under his cloak, and was caught making his escape. Astonishingly, Charles II not only pardoned him but gave him land in Ireland worth £500 a year. Nobody has ever been quite sure why.
For more than five hundred years the Tower was also home to the Royal Mint, which made England's coins. In the 1690s its warden and later master was none other than Isaac Newton, who took the job very seriously and personally hunted down counterfeiters, sending several of them to the gallows. The Mint moved out in 1810.
The Beefeaters
The Yeoman Warders, better known as Beefeaters, trace their history back to the bodyguard of Henry VII after the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. Today there are around three dozen of them, all former senior soldiers from the armed forces with at least twenty-two years' service, and they live inside the Tower with their families. Every night for around seven hundred years the Chief Yeoman Warder has locked the gates in the Ceremony of the Keys, and it has famously been late only once, when German bombs fell on the Tower during the Blitz in 1941.
Nobody really knows where the name "Beefeater" came from, but the most popular explanation is that the royal bodyguard were allowed to eat as much beef as they liked from the king's table, a great luxury in those days. What we can say is that the Tower is one of the most visited places in Britain, with nearly three million people passing through its gates in a normal year. It is hard to think of another building that has been a palace, a prison, a zoo and a bank, and is still standing after nearly a thousand years.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "The Tower of London" https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/tower-of-london/, September 30, 2026