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– a hearth – печь
Work began on the White Tower in or shortly before 1078, under the supervision of a Norman monk,
Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester, and was probably not completed until 1097, ten years after the death of William
the Conqueror.
As a palace-fortress, the White Tower was designed to accommodate both the King and the Constable of
the Tower, or his deputy, who commanded the garrison. Each occupied a self-contained set of rooms, the Con-
stable on the entrance floor, the monarch on the upper floor. Each floor contained a hall, for public occasions, a
chamber, no doubt divided up into smaller apartments by wooden partitions, and a chapel. The royal suite,
naturally on a grander scale, occupied the whole of the upper two storeys, the present top floor being inserted
much later. The basement contained the storerooms and the well.
After a century or so, as the castle was enlarged, the Constable took up residence at a key point in the new
defences while royalty moved to the new palace outside the White Tower. Even so, monarchs still worshipped
in the royal chapel and in times of crisis the White Tower was a secure meeting place for the king’s council and
a refuge for the monarch himself.
At other times, the royal apartments might be occupied by distinguished prisoners. The first, in 1100,
shortly after the building was completed, was Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, imprisoned by order of
Henry I, who escaped from an upper window, down a rope which had been smuggled in to him.
In 1244, the Welsh prince Gruffydd ap Llewelyn, a prisoner of Henry III, tried to emulate Flambard’s
escape but his improvised rope of knotted bed sheets came apart and he plunged to his death. In 1358, two more
princely prisoners of war, the King of France, John the Good, and his son the Dauphin, were lodged in the
White Tower; and after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 Charles Duke of Orleans came there to begin his
twenty-five years of imprisonment in England.
No doubt the basement of the White Tower sometimes held less fortunate anonymous captives, especially
if a large batch of prisoners had to be accommodated at short notice, but these rooms were not regularly used as
dungeons.
By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, the White Tower had become an armoury, a storehouse for palace
furnishings, and a wardrobe for royal costumes. By the eighteenth century, most of the rooms were given over
to military stores and the rest to the public records, and structural changes were made which greatly altered the
appearance of the building inside and out. Eventually, the military stores gave place to historic arms and
armour, and the White Tower now houses part of the national collection of arms and armour in the care of the
Royal Armouries.
The White Tower rises 90 feet (27.4 m) to the battlements and measures 118 feet (35.9 m), from east to
west, by 107 feet (32.6 m), north to south. The walls are 15 feet (4.6 m) thick at the base and 11 feet (3.3 m) at
the top. They were built of Kentish rag, a rough limestone quarried near Maidstone. Caen stone, a finer
limestone from Normandy, was used sparingly as ashlar, that is, cut stone, at the corners of the building and
around door and window openings. For visual effect as well as protection from the weather, the walls were
regularly whitewashed, and so the White Tower came by its name.
At the corners of the buildings are four turrets; three are rectangular but one, at the north-east angle, is
rounded, for it contains the main spiral staircase. For a few months in 1675 this turret was used by Charles II’s
‘astronomical observator’, John Flamsteed, before he moved to his new observatory at Greenwich. Even in
Norman times the turrets probably had caps, though conical. The present cupolas date from Henry VIII’s reign.
The most striking change in the outward appearance of the White Tower came with the enlargement of the
windows, in 1715. Two pairs of the original Norman two–light windows remain on the top storey above the en-
trance. The entrance doorway now in use is the original one, set high above the ground out of reach of fire and
battering ram, while the timber staircase leading up to it is a reconstruction.
The first room the visitor enters was most probably intended as the Constable’s hall and the room next to it
as the chamber. Originally the cross wall between was unbroken except for doorways at either end. In both
rooms there are wall fireplaces, with sloping chimneys that carried the smoke out of holes higher up in the
walls. The second room leads to the crypt, once the Constable’s chapel.
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