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Answer the following questions.
1. Why was the First Castle created?
2. How did the Tower of London get its name?
3. In what way was the Castle enlarged?
4. What changes did Henry III make to improve the Tower?
5. How was the Tower expanded in Henry III’s reign?
6. What new fortifications did Edward I make?
7. Why did the exuberant crowd managed to sweep in the Tower?
It’s interesting to know.
Arsenal, Treasury and Mint
A medieval castle, as well as being the stronghold and residence of its lord, was also the place that held his
treasure, armoury and prisoners. The Tower, as a great royal castle adjoining London, the commercial capital,
and near Westminster, which had become the seat of government, was a major centre of the power and wealth
of English monarchs.
Following Edward I’s expansion of the Tower, it soon came to contain one of the main royal treasuries, a
storehouse for official documents, the largest of the royal mints and the only one coining in gold as well as
silver, and the chief arsenal in the kingdom, storing and assembling armaments for the royal armies and fleets.
To speed the movement of supplies and afford storage and working space, the wharf was extended along the
entire river front.
State Prison
In medieval times the Tower also found room for prisoners who in one way or another were accounted the
king’s enemies, ranging from rioting London apprentices to foreign monarchs and nobles captured in war.
From the later years of Henry VIII’s reign (1509 – 1547) the Tower gradually went out of use as a royal
palace as Whitehall became the monarch’s usual London residence, and the Tower’s defences were allowed to
decay. The expanding operations of the arsenal and the mint came to dominate Tower life, along with the ever-
growing number of prisoners of state, the victims of court rivalries, dynastic disputes and religious animosities.
Of the many hundreds of prisoners brought to the Tower, a small number were kept in deliberately harsh
conditions and put to the torture. They, and a larger number who were spared such horrors, left the Tower only
to suffer a traitor’s death. The great majority of men and women held there were sooner or later released, and
stories of innumerable prisoners suffering in deep dungeons and torture chambers are mostly the inventions of
propagandists at the time or romantic novelists of a later age.
Garrison and Showplace
Following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, with the return from exile of Charles II, the Tower
underwent major renovation, with substantial changes to its buildings and character. To ensure that the new
King should never lose control of London, as his father Charles I had done on the eve of the Civil War, a large
permanent garrison was housed in the Tower and batteries of guns set in place along the walls, while the
arsenal, by then under the control of the Board of Ordnance, was expanded. Soon the coronation regalia were
put on public show at the Tower, and the historic arms and armour, as well as parts of the new arsenal, were
arranged in spectacular exhibitions calculated to impress sightseers with the strength and splendour of English
monarchy. Meanwhile, the Tower remained the prison of state, though not much used except in national
emergencies, such as the Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 and the French Revolution; and it still accom-
modated the Royal Mint and state records.
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