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Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London - Hardcover

 
9780312622961: Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London
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A dazzling history of the Tower of London, one of the world's busiest tourist attractions, and the people who populated it


Castle, royal palace, prison, torture chamber, execution site, zoo, mint, home to the crown jewels, armory, record office, observatory, and the most visited tourist attraction in the UK: The Tower of London has been all these things and more. No building in Britain has been more intimately involved in the island's story than this mighty, brooding stronghold in the very heart of the capital, a place which has stood at the epicenter of dramatic, bloody and frequently cruel events for almost a thousand years.

Now historian Nigel Jones sets this dramatic story firmly in the context of national―and international―events. In a gripping account drawn from primary sources and lavishly illustrated with sixteen pages of stunning photographs, he captures the Tower in its many changing moods and its many diverse functions. Here, for the first time, is a thematic portrayal of the Tower of london not just as an ancient structure, but as a living symbol of the nation of Great Britain.

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About the Author:

NIGEL JONES is a historian, journalist, and biographer, covering subjects ranging from Nazi Germany to the lives of British writers. He has written for the Cambridge Evening News, the Press Association News Agency, and has been an editor on BBC and independent radio, as well as for History Today and BBC History magazines.

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Tower
PART ONECHAPTER ONEBEGINNINGSThey had been fighting all day, and sheer exhaustion was sapping their strength. The light of the autumn afternoon was fading fast. The grass covering the long slope of Senlac Hill was sodden and greasy with mud and blood, littered with the mangled corpses of the slain, 'soiled with their own gore'. Seven hours of savage combat, as the famed Norman cavalry charged repeatedly uphill, meeting the unbreached dam of the Saxon shield-wall, had taken a grim toll of both armies. They had started the day with roughly equal numbers - seven to eight thousand men each - but a quarter were already dead, and another quarter would follow them to Valhalla before the day was done.The Normans, after the rough cross-Channel voyage in their open longships, were near despair as their assaults dashed against the rampart of the shield-wall. The English Saxons, dog-tired from their week's forced march from Yorkshire after smashing the last Viking invasion of England at Stamford Bridge, could hardly stand from fatigue. The wall of their inter-locked shields was looking ragged, the gaps torn by the falling dead too wide to be plugged. Only the fierce spirit of their warrior king, Harold, sternly ordering them to close ranks, kept them in their places.Duke William of Normandy seized the situation at a glance. He had less than two hours left to win a decisive victory and with it the throne of England. If he failed to break the Saxon line by dark, his cause would be lost. Harold would remain king, and William would be lucky to escape ignominiously back across the Channel. Only a massive final effort might yet secure the kingdom. William had already tried a few tricks that day. He had swerved his knights away just as they reached the English front line after a headlong charge. It was a risky manoeuvre - a feigned downhill retreat could easily become a rout. But it had worked. Believing that their enemies were fleeing, some Saxons had broken ranks and chased theirenemies down the slippery slope. Once in the open, however, the Norman horsemen had turned on the isolated foot soldiers and cut them down.Now, William again threw in his cavalry. He flung them at either end of the English line. Simultaneously, William ordered his archers to unleash a storm of arrows at the heart of the Saxon defences: the elite housecarls who guarded Harold with their terrifying five-foot axes. William ordered his bowmen to shoot so that their arrows arched over the shield-wall and fell from the sky, a hard rain on a soft target - the exhausted English rear ranks. A lucky arrow found a spectacular mark: King Harold's eye. Although the faithful housecarls closed ranks for a brave last stand around their stricken king, Saxon morale finally cracked.Pursued by Norman horsemen, the surviving conscript soldiers of the fyrd fled first. Behind them on the torn ground lay the hacked bodies of England 's last Saxon king and his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine. Harold's body was so slashed and battered that only his mistress, Edith Swan-neck, could recognise it by intimate 'certain indications' when she searched the battlefield. Here, on the evening of 14 October 1066, it was Anglo-Saxon England that lay dead along with its king, its bleeding body trampled into the earth. To the victor went the spoils. 
Hastings was not the first battle that Duke William had fought - nor would it be the last. Born in 1027/8 as the illegitimate son of Duke Robert 'the Devil' of Normandy by Herleva, a humble tanner's daughter, William learned early that life is an unceasing struggle. Aged eight when his father died in 1035, he was surrounded by plots and assassinations as ambitious nobles vied for the throne. At twenty-three, William won his first victory near Caen against his rebel cousin, Guy of Burgundy. A successful soldier, and a lucky one, William fought off repeated French incursions and steadily expanded his duchy.His triumphs whetted William's ambitious appetite. He persuaded England 's ageing king, the childless Edward the Confessor, to accept his tenuous claim to the English throne. (William's wife Matilda was descended from Alfred the Great, so he was Edward 's second cousin, once removed.) Despite having allegedly pledged William his support after being shipwrecked on the Normandy coast, Harold Godwinson, England 's leading Saxon nobleman, accepted the crown offered him by the Anglo-Saxon council, the Witan, on Edward 's death in January 1066. Incensed, William prepared to back his ambitions by force. He assembled a fleet and an armyof Normans, Bretons and French mercenaries, secured the blessing of the Pope, and sailed for the Sussex coast. 
Moving slowly, and savagely stamping out sparks of resistance as he went, William took until mid-December to reach Southwark on the south bank of the Thames. He found the wooden London Bridge - the only river crossing - barred against him. Cautiously, he marched west, burning and looting, until at Wallingford he met a submissive Archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand, sent by the Witan to offer him the crown. On Christmas Day 1066, William I was crowned by Stigand in Edward the Confessor's newly built Westminster Abbey.Outside the abbey, the coronation ceremony was disrupted by angry Londoners loudly opposing their new, foreign-born king. Alarmed, Norman soldiers rushed from the abbey with drawn swords. It was a reminder that their conquest was far from complete. They were a tiny, beleaguered army amidst a hostile, barely cowed populace which bitterly resented these strangers with their weird tongue and alien ways. The Normans had killed the English king and decimated his host, but to enjoy the fruits of victory they realised they must be equally ruthless in repressing Harold's discontented former subjects. And they had a tried and tested method at their disposal: the castle.Fortified hilltops had been commonplace in England for centuries; as the ramparts and ditches of Dorset's Maiden Castle, dug by the ancient British, attest. The Romans had their fortresses too, as the stones of Hadrian's Wall bear witness. But it was the Normans who patented the 'motte-and-bailey' castle. The idea was simple. Where there was no convenient natural hill, as with a sandcastle, the Normans threw up an artificial mound - the motte - crowned by a wooden tower. They then dug a defensive ditch - the bailey - around its base, using the excavated earth to make an additional encircling rampart, surmounted by a wooden fence. By 1066 the Normans were past masters at the speedy construction of these flat-pack fortresses - they could build one within a week - and their first acts upon landing had been to put up two, at Pevensey and Hastings.Eventually, the Normans would build some eighty-four motte-and-bailey castles across their newly conquered kingdom. The early ones were sited near their Sussex beachhead - Lewes, Bramber and Arundel - guarding strategic river valleys in case they needed to retreat to the coast in a hurry.The temporary wooden castles were soon replaced by solid stone, once the Normans felt confident that they were in England for good. The functions of the castle were twofold: as the imposing home and headquarters of the local magnate; and as a refuge for his loyal soldiers, servants and tenants in times of trouble. They were the nodal points of the feudal mesh of occupation that the Normans threw over the conquered kingdom. 
William rewarded the knights who had followed and fought alongside him with large parcels of conquered English land - together with the overlordship of the peasants who tilled the soil. Great castles were erected at Dover, Exeter, York, Nottingham, Durham, Lincoln, Huntingdon, Cambridge and Colchester. Norman names - de Warenne, de Lacey, Beauchamp - replaced Saxon ones in the nobility and clergy as a military occupation morphed into a new social structure.William lavished special care on one castle in particular. His new capital, London, was vulnerable to attack on its eastern, seaward side. It clearly needed the protection that only a great castle could provide. England's earlier military masters, the Romans, had pointed the way. In the fourth century AD, to defend the port-city they called Londinium Augusta, they had thrown up a stout city wall. It ran north - south from today's Bishopsgate down to the Thames before swinging west along the northern bank of the river. Only the foundations of the wall remained by William's time, but it was in the angle of its south-eastern corner, on the site of a former Roman fort named Arx Palatina - erroneously thought by the Normans (and by Shakespeare) to have been put up by Julius Caesar - that William decided to build his super-castle.The rowdy scenes at his coronation had made it very clear that Norman rule could only be imposed by brute force. As a contemporary French chronicler, William of Poitiers, recorded, 'Certain strongholds were made in the town against the fickleness of the vast and fierce populace.' A fortress to house London's garrison and intimidate its inhabitants - who totalled around 10,000 in 1066 - had to be constructed without delay. Within days of the Christmas coronation, conscripted gangs of Saxon labourers were hacking into the frozen soil. The remains of the Roman city wall served as a temporary barrier on the new fortress's eastern and southern sides. A wide and deep ditch, surmounted by a palisaded rampart, went up on the western and northern sides of the site. A wooden tower was erected within three days in the middle of this rough rectangle. Aftera decade, however, largely spent in stamping out rebellions in the west and north of his new kingdom, William decided to remake his temporary timber structure in permanent stone.William had the very man in mind to realise his vision. He envisaged the building of a mighty edifice that would be at once fortress and palace - the last word in s...

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  • PublisherSt. Martin's Press
  • Publication date2012
  • ISBN 10 0312622961
  • ISBN 13 9780312622961
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages464
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