Tales From the Tower of London (4 page)

The ground floor, without windows or doors, would contain barracks for the king’s personal troops, beneath which were cells, dungeons and a specially constructed room with a vaulted ceiling and a massive oak door. This was the royal treasury. On the floor above the barracks would be the banqueting hall, armoury and chapel. Above these were the royal council chambers and on the top floor were the royal apartments. With the exception of the chapel, which projected from the south-east corner, the building was no more than a massive square box. The few windows were mostly limited to tall, narrow arrow slits, allowing the entire building to become a bunker should the occasion require it. The building had no adornment of the type found in the great churches and cathedrals; there were no unnecessary frills. This was not a building to be loved; it was designed only to protect the king and inspire fear and awe in both his subjects and enemies. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles lamented: ‘He built him a castle as a place to annoy his enemies from. . . . And they oppressed the people greatly with castle building.’ So it would seem that the king’s subjects were every bit as ‘annoyed’ by the project as his enemies.

Carrying out this monumental project required hundreds of workmen. Not merely masons and carpenters, but quarrymen to mine the stone as well as carters and boatmen to move it from the quarry to the building site. When Gundulf agonised over the amount of manpower needed, the king simply sent out his soldiers to commandeer London’s labour force. When this proved insufficient, farmers and craftsmen from the surrounding villages were rounded up as well. This was, in part, legitimate. Every subject under the feudal system owed forty days’ service a year to his or her lord, but partly it was pure punishment for having lost a war to the Duke of Normandy.

To his credit, this distressed Gundulf greatly. He insisted that forced labour did not make good workers, and convinced the king that everyone above the rank of common labourer should be imported from Normandy. William undoubtedly hated to spend the extra money on skilled (and more importantly voluntary) labourers, but Gundulf would not be moved. Along with the imported labour force came thousands of tons of limestone slabs from Norman quarries. The local ragstone, which the king provided as the building material, did not please Gundulf. He finally agreed it would work for the large areas of wall, but the corners and levelling courses between floors had to be good Norman limestone. Each block of limestone had to be quarried, carted to a long-ship, transported across the English Channel and then up the Thames to the castle site. As with so many government and military projects throughout history, budget was obviously not a serious issue.

No matter how impossible Gundulf must have been to work for, the results of his labours were rather impressive. After barely three years the tower was finished. With foundation dimensions of 118 by 107 feet, the battlements of the massive fortress soared more than 90 feet into the air. Higher still were four sleek towers, three of which were square and one round.

Shortly after the tower’s completion the entire outside of the building was whitewashed. Not only did this make it seem even larger and more ominous, looming over the thatched houses and huts of London, but should an enemy attack, the massive white walls would act like a mirror, reflecting the sun into their eyes. In reality, however, it simply made the entire fortress appear stark and alien on the landscape. Which, in truth, is what it was.

Although many European castles had names, there seemed no sense in giving a name to the only stone castle in England. It was just ‘The Tower’ and once painted, its gleaming walls added another dimension to the name. William the Conqueror’s castle was simply ‘The White Tower’.

William was true to his word. When Bishop Gundulf finished his work late in 1080, he was released to Rochester where he immediately began work on his beloved cathedral. Although it would not be finished until 1130, nearly three decades after his death, the wailing monk lived long enough to see substantial portions of the work completed. It would seem that he lived to be nearly eighty-four years old. William the Conqueror was not, however, so lucky. In 1087, only nine years after commissioning the construction of the White Tower, William I of England died, leaving his kingdom, his throne and his fortress to his son, William II, known as William Rufus (the red) because of his bright red hair. While the English may have understandably hated his father, Rufus was equally despised by his own Norman lords, but he did carry out substantial work on the White Tower and persuaded Gundulf, the wailing monk, to build one last castle in his bishopric of Rochester.

Fourteenth-century England was a place of unprecedented social and economic turmoil. By mid-century the Black Death combined with the endless military campaigns of the Hundred Years’ War had reduced the workforce by nearly half and bled the Royal Treasury dry. Add to these disasters a series of bad laws, bad administration and pure bad luck and the result was the most devastating urban riot in the nation’s history. Fortunately the entire incident was recorded not only by numerous court chroniclers, but also by the greatest chronicler of the age, Jean de Froissart, and a young clerk named Geoffrey Chaucer.

When the beloved heir to the throne, Edward the Black Prince, died in 1376, his ageing father, Edward III, was left with a dilemma. Should the crown pass to his younger son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, or the Black Prince’s son Richard? Adhering to a strict interpretation of the succession laws, Edward left the crown to his nine-year-old grandson and appointed the massively unpopular Gaunt as head of the government and regent until Richard reached the age of majority. Gaunt, who had been appointed head of the English army in France on his brother’s death, was not pleased with his father’s choice of heir. Within a year of making these arrangements Edward III was dead, the new king was a ten-year-old child and John of Gaunt, though not king himself, was responsible for the management and welfare of England as well as the ongoing Hundred Years’ War with France.

The day after his grandfather’s death, Prince Richard was escorted to the Tower where he would be sequestered for his own safety until final plans for his coronation could be made. Three weeks later, the streets of London were festooned with banners and tapestries and lined with cheering crowds to welcome their new king as he rode to Westminster Cathedral and his coronation. It was a grand and awesome spectacle and, by all accounts, Richard II lived up to everyone’s expectations. He was an extraordinarily beautiful child; pale and aesthetic looking, with wavy golden locks that glistened like a halo in the sun ringing his delicate face. Dressed entirely in white for his investiture, the new king was, according to the chronicler Holinshed, ‘as beautiful as an arch-angel’. But beneath the fine medieval pageantry lurked a social cancer that had been eating away at English society for two generations.

Between 1348 and 1353 the Black Death had swept through England, taking the lives of nearly one-third of the population. To add to the devastation, more than a decade before the plague struck, England had begun a series of wars with France that had, by the time of Richard’s coronation in 1377, reduced the male population by another 25 per cent. This massive drop in the labour force left huge tracts of once-productive farmland untended and entire towns and villages deserted. The scarcity of farm labour brought about an acute shortage of food and an accompanying rise in prices as workers demanded higher wages, or simply left their farms in search of better paying jobs elsewhere. Understandably, landowners were desperate to keep their peasants (many of whom were serfs and legally tied to their manor) on the land and working. To make matters worse for everyone, as the economy imploded, taxes crept higher and higher to maintain government services and to fund the ongoing French wars.

As early as 1351 the government attempted to address the problem by imposing a wage and price freeze known as the Statute of Labourers. Among the provisions of the statute were the following:

All labourers under the age of thirty-six must work for the same wage as they received prior to 1348.

Any worker or servant who leaves his lord’s service without cause or licence would be imprisoned.

Any man who pays his servant more than their pre-1348 wage will be fined twice the amount of that labourer’s wage.

Anyone giving alms to the poor or gifts to beggars will be imprisoned.

This last clause was to make certain that everyone physically able to work did so. Despite the Statute of Labourers, serfs continued to steal away from their land, prices continued to rise and each new round of taxes became a heavier burden on everyone. By the time the young Richard II came to the throne, England was physically exhausted, nearing bankruptcy, and the people were growing increasingly restive. Only the natural human tendency to grumble rather than fight kept the nation from unravelling.

But John of Gaunt, Richard’s uncle and regent, was more concerned with making war on the French than bureaucratic details or public welfare. Much that could have been done to redress the problems was ignored or grossly mishandled. What taxes could be collected were promptly funnelled into the military rather than the projects for which they had been earmarked. At Gaunt’s urging, in November 1380 the new Chancellor (Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury) and the king’s sergeant-at-arms (John Legge, a member of the privy council) came up with a new, single-levy poll tax set at 3 groats (the equivalent of 1 shilling) to be paid by every person over the age of fifteen. For skilled tradesmen this was the equivalent of a week’s wages; for serfs who seldom even saw hard currency, it was nothing short of disastrous. Worse still, the 1380 levy was the third such tax to be passed in four years.

The tax collectors were resisted everywhere they went. Taxmen were run out of towns and villages while thousands of people temporarily disappeared. When the tax boxes returned to London, they contained less than two-thirds of what had been expected. To make up for the loss in revenue, in the spring of 1381 the tax men were sent out to collect the tax again – from everyone, whether they had paid the previous tax or not. Riots broke out wherever the taxman showed his face.

Anywhere people congregated, in churches, in public squares and at town markets, agitators were there inciting them to resist the extortionate tax. Among the most virulent opponents of government policy was a defrocked priest from Maidstone, Kent, named John Ball. He not only advocated refusing to pay the tax, but called for massive social changes including stripping the nobility of its power to impose such taxes. Ball was repeatedly arrested and thrown into jail. As soon as he was released, he returned to his personal crusade.

With the economy collapsing at an ever-increasing rate and people simply running away from their homes to escape the taxmen and the ‘enforcers’ who now accompanied them, by late spring thousands of starving, homeless peasants wandered England. In early June 1381, nearly twenty thousand dispossessed men and women from the county of Kent chose an ex-soldier and highwayman named Wat (or Walter) Tyler to be their leader, though it is equally possible that Tyler elected himself. In either case, he seems to have been a mesmerising speaker whose military experience provided him with a basic understanding of organisation and crowd control.

In a matter of days, Tyler began formulating an agenda. He and his motley band of followers marched along the River Medway. Their first stop was Maidstone, where they ransacked the local jail, freed all the prisoners and invited them to join the crusade. Among those who accepted the invitation was John Ball. Between Ball’s fiery rhetoric and Tyler’s organisational skills, the group quickly became a formidable force. Moving east from Maidstone, their next stop was Canterbury, where they gathered so many additional recruits that Froissart said ‘they departed [there] and all the people of Canterbury with them. . . . And in their going they beat down and robbed houses . . . and had mercy of none.’

Now turning back to the west, the mob moved slowly towards London, solidifying their plans. The only person to whom they would pay allegiance was King Richard. Everyone else in the ruling class, from the greatest nobleman to the humblest lawyer, was to be forced out of office and put on trial. Halfway along the 40-mile stretch between Canterbury and the capital lies the town of Rochester, and here the rebels seized the castle, ransacked it and took the family of Sir John Newton, the constable, prisoner. Newton himself was sent to London with a message for the king: Richard would meet with the rebels at Blackheath in three days to hear their demands. If Newton failed to deliver the message, or if the army was called out, his family would be killed. Over the next two days, Tyler’s army plodded steadily westward. Unknown to them, another rebel army even larger than their own was also converging on London from Essex, north-east of the capital.

For some reason, word of the rebels’ approach took the King’s Council and the government completely by surprise; certainly they should have been aware of the level of discontent in the country, and the tax riots could hardly have escaped their attention. Possibly, it was the sheer size of the uprising that overwhelmed them. The combined force of Tyler’s army and the Essex men has been estimated at more than one hundred thousand – nearly twice the population of London itself and three times the size of the largest medieval army ever assembled. Certainly it did not help matters that the government’s driving force and chief military mind, John of Gaunt, was in Scotland at the time.

Trying to come to grips with an unprecedented situation, the Council sent messengers to Windsor to bring King Richard to the safety provided by the Tower and the 1,200 troops stationed there. The Queen Mother, Joan (known as the Fair Maid of Kent), was also rushed to the Tower where she and her son were joined by virtually everyone in the government. The king’s uncle, the Earl of Buckingham, along with the Earls of Suffolk, Kent, Salisbury and Warwick were there, along with Sir Robert Hales, the Lord Treasurer, John Legge, who had devised the poll tax, and Simon Sudbury the Archbishop of Canterbury and Chancellor of England. With them was Willian Walworth, a successful fishmonger serving as that year’s Lord Mayor of London. Everyone had their own idea of how to deal with the mob, but the king insisted that the only right thing to do was to meet them and hear their demands.