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VII. THE TOWER OF LONDON.

PROGRESS OF THE TOWER.

THE Tower is the very germ of London. How many shadowy recollections arise as we contemplate the time-worn walls, the slight elevation of the ground, and the modern reparations! Here, at least, tradition informs us, was a strong-hold of the Britons; here have been found traces of the Romans; here, no doubt, was a Saxon boch or castle; and here yet exist the fortifications of the early Normans. The forest of masts which now stretches eastward as far as the eye can pierce, was in those days comparatively a blank, while a living forest, the haunt of the wolf and the wild boar, formed the boundary line on the hills to the north and west, and along the valley of the Lee and Essex on the north-east, with the "tillage lands of the city," as Fitzstephen writes, lying between, which, he adds, "are not barren gravelly soils, but like the fertile plains of Asia, which produce abundant crops, and fill the barns of the cultivators' with Ceres' plenteous sheaf.'" From the earthen mound with its timber palisades of Trinobantium or Troynovant have alike extended the city of King Lud and the endless miles of streets which now form the immense town of London, while the Tower remains the oldest monument of the kingdom.

The earliest historical description of the Tower, that of Fitz-Stephen, who died in 1191, has something striking amidst its brevity. "It (London) hath on the east part a Tower Palatine, very large and very strong, whose court and walls rise up from a deep foundation. The mortar is tempered with the blood of beasts." There is no real connection between the fabulous blood-tempered mortar of the old monkish writer, and the subsequent history of the Tower of London. Yet, when we think of that history, how appropriate does it seem that the very foundations of those walls should be laid in blood! Fitz-Stephen was nearer than we are to the period when these foundations were laid, by almost seven centuries; and yet he tells us not who laid them. Tradition says, Julius Cæsar; and Poetry is the step-nurse of the children of Tradition:

"Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame."

Why does the poet himself tell us, in a note upon his well-known line, that the oldest part of the Tower is vulgarly attributed to Julius Cæsar? He had authority enough for his apostrophe to the towers of Julius, even if the belief of the vulgar were not a sufficient basis. Stow, who endeavours to depreciate the value of its traditional history, tells us, "It hath been the common opinion, and some have written (but of none assured ground), that Julius Cæsar, the first conqueror of the Britons, was the original author as well thereof, as also of many other towers, castles, and great buildings within this realm." How does the good painstaking antiquary disprove the common opinion? how does he show that the old writers who adopted the common opinion had "none assured ground?" "Cæsar remained not here so long, nor had he in his head any such matter; but only to despatch a conquest of this barbarous country, and to proceed to greater matters. Neither did the Roman writers make mention of any such buildings erected by him here." He knows what was in Julius Caesar's head, and he knows what is not in the Roman writers, but he knows no more. And then come other antiquaries, who would give us something not quite so far off as Julius Caesar to rest our faith upon. Dr. Stukeley would have a

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citadel raised here, about the time of Constantine the Great; and Dr. Miller proves that the Tower of London was the capital fortress of the Romans, their treasury, and their mint, from the circumstance that three coins of the Emperors Honorius and Arcadius were found within the Tower walls, in digging for the foundations of some modern building. When we talk of the beginnings of such a place as the Tower of London, we rejoice in these gropings and mystifications of the learned; for, unmolested by their facts, we desire to look into the depths of a fathomless antiquity. It is little to us that Stow the modern tells us, as if settling the matter, “I find in a fair register-book of the acts of the Bishops of Rochester, set down by Edmund of Hadenham, that William I., surnamed Conqueror, builded the Tower of London, to wit, the great white and square tower there, about the year of Christ 1078, appointing Gundulph, then Bishop of Rochester, to be principal surveyor and overseer of that work, who was for that time lodged in the house of Edmere, a burgess of London." But mark how the modern antiquary is presently lost in the dim morning of history; and how even he falls back upon tradition :-"Ye have heard before, that the wall of this city was all round about furnished with towers and bulwarks, in due distance every one from other; and also that the river of Thames, with its ebbing and flowing, on the south side had subverted the said wall and towers there. Wherefore, it is supposed, King William, for defence of this city, in place most dangerous and open to the enemy, having taken down the second bulwark in the east part of the wall from the Thames, builded this tower, which was the great square tower (now called the White Tower), and hath been since at divers times enlarged with other buildings adjoining, as shall be showed hereafter." Fitz-Stephen is Stow's authority for the fact of the Thames washing away the south wall; all the rest is conjecture. But since Stow's time-that is in 1720, and again in 1777-foundations of buildings long swept away were discovered near the White Tower. They were of stone, of the great width of three yards, and so strongly cemented that they were with difficulty removed. Who built these walls, which correspond so remarkably with Fitz-Stephen's description? How are we sure that the White Tower was the building of which Gundulph was the architect? Can we be certain that the White Tower was the Arx Palatina described by Fitz-Stephen? These are questions which the antiquaries will not solve for us, even while they command us to believe in no vulgar traditions. Let them remain unsolved. We have got our foot upon tolerably firm ground. We see the busy Bishop (the same who built the great keep at Rochester) coming daily from his lodgings at the honest burgess's to erect something stronger and mightier than the fortresses of the Saxons. What he found in ruins, and what he made ruinous, who can tell? There might have been walls and bulwarks thrown down by the ebbing and flowing of the tide. There might have been, dilapidated or entire, some citadel more ancient than the defences of the people whom the Norman conquered, belonging to the age when the great lords of the world left everywhere some marks upon the earth's surface of their pride and their power. That Gundulph did not create the fortress, is tolerably clear. What he built, and what he destroyed, must still, to a certain extent, be a matter of conjecture.

Here then, about the middle of the eleventh century, was a Bishop of Rochester, with that practical mastery of science and art which so honourably distinguishes the ecclesiastics of that age, building some great work at the command of the King. The register referred to by Stow speaks of it as the Great Tower. But the chroniclers tell us that in the year 1090 the Tower of London was "sore shaken by the wind." There was a mighty tempest in that year, which they inform us blew down more than five hundred houses in London. These were houses of wood and mud,-huts not built to brave the elements. But the great White Tower to be sore shaken with the

wind! The wind might as well attempt to shake Snowdon or Ben Nevis. This single fact is to us a pretty satisfactory proof that the Tower, in the reign of Rufus, was a collection of buildings of various dates, and of various degrees of strength. Stow, describing the additional buildings of Rufus and his successor Henry I., says, "They also caused a castle to be builded under the said tower, to wit, on the south side toward the Thames, and also encastelated the same round about." The castle under the Great Tower is held to be that anciently called St. Thomas's Tower, beneath which was Traitor's Gate. Here, again, the precise building erected is not very clearly defined. That the Tower gradually assumed the character of a regular fortress, by successive additions, there can be little doubt. At the period of which we are speaking its limits were not very exactly defined; and its liberties or juridical extent continued to be a matter of controversy for several centuries. The chroniclers tell us that the first four constables of the Tower of London after the Conquest made a vineyard of the site now known as East Smithfield, which they held by force from the Priory of the Holy Trinity, within Aldgate, to which it pertained. It was restored to the Church in the second year of King Stephen. It cannot be exactly determined whether, previous to the reign of Stephen, the Tower was capacious enough for a royal residence; but as early as the reign of Henry I. it had been employed (as probably all places of strength were then occasionally employed) as a prison for state offenders. In the first year of that king, Ralph Flambard, the belligerent Bishop of Durham, was here confined. He kept a sumptuous table, and his jovial character was agreeable enough to his keepers, amongst whom he circulated the wine-cup with a very unclerical intemperance. A rope was conveyed to him in a fresh tun of the generous liquor wherewith he made the hearts of his companions glad. Their wassail was prolonged to the point of the most helpless drunkenness; and the bishop escaped from the window by the aid of his good rope, whilst his warders were soundly sleeping. A century or so later, Griffin the eldest son of Llewellyn, Prince of Wales, tried a similar experiment with a rope, with no such happy result:—the bishop got safe to Normandy; the Welsh prince broke his neck.

During the absence of Richard I. in the Holy Land, in 1190, Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, held the Tower against John and his partisans. He "enclosed," say the chroniclers, "the tower and castle with an outward wall of stone, and also caused a deep ditch to be cast about the same, thinking to have environed it with the river of Thames." Stow has looked upon this occurrence with the eye of one skilled in local bound-marks. He tells us, with delightful simplicity, "by the making of this ditch in East Smithfield the church of the Holy Trinity in London lost half a mark rent by the year, and the mill was removed that belonged to the poor brethren of the Hospital of St. Catherine, and to the church of the Trinity aforesaid, which was no small loss and discommodity to either part. And the garden which the King had hired of the brethren for six marks the year for the most part was wasted and marred by the ditch." He complains, too, that the enclosure and ditch took away the ground of the City on Tower Hill, besides breaking down the city wall. The citizens, however, did not complain, because they thought all was done for "good of the city's defence." But in the reign of Henry III. their opinions underwent a material change. That King saw the weakness of the Tower as a fortress; and, whilst he made it his chief residence, adding to its internal comfort and beauty, he was careful to strengthen its bulwarks, especially towards the west. The work was probably hurried on, for the walls twice fell down, "shaken as it had been with an earthquake." Matthew Paris, who tells us this, adds, "for the which chance the citizens of London were nothing sorry, for they were threatened that the said wall and bulwarks were builded to the end that if any of them would contend for the liberties of the city they might be

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