Memorials of Old London. Volume 1 (of 2) — John Shaqi
Memorials of Old London. Volume 1 (of 2)
History
Memorials of Old London. Volume 1 (of 2)
London (England) -- Antiquities; London (England) -- History
The following reign marks a period of great constructive activity at the
Tower. The new monarch was one of the foremost military engineers of the
age; and when we consider the valuable experience in the art of war
which he had already gained, in the decade prior to his accession to the
throne, in conducting (while Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine)
various sieges of the castles of his rebellious barons in those
provinces, it seems improbable that he would have been satisfied to
leave the Tower in the condition it then was, with a keep standing in a
small inner ward, enclosed by a plain stone curtain wall, devoid of any
projecting towers, unless perhaps the base of the Hall tower, and the
Cold Harbour Gate (see plan), and a large outer ward, only enclosed by a
wooden palisade and ditch.
Richard must have been well aware of the enormous increase to the power
of effective defence conferred by salient or boldly projecting towers
flanking with their fire the curtain walls, which in England, at any
rate, were then somewhat of a novelty. At this time the Tower was
extremely defective in this respect, its great need being not for mere
repairs, but for effective modernization as a fortress.
Before embarking upon the hazardous enterprise of the third Crusade,
Richard left his trusted Chancellor, William Longchamp, to carry out an
extensive series of new works at the Tower, all of which were probably
from the designs of the sovereign himself.
In his valuable monograph upon the Tower,[24] the late G. T. Clark,
F.S.A., has fallen into a strange error as to the actual amount expended
upon works there during the earlier years of the reign of Richard I.,
which he states "do not show above one or two hundred pounds of
outlay." When this rather dogmatic assertion is tested by reference to
the existing documentary evidence of the Public Records, its glaring
inaccuracy is at once apparent; indeed, it might fitly serve as an
illustration of Pope's well-known lines:
"A little learning is a dangerous thing,
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring."
The Pipe Roll of 2 Richard I. discloses an expenditure, "ad operationes
turris Lundoniae," amounting to no less than L2,881 1s. 10d., in itself
a sufficiently large sum, but one which, when multiplied twenty-fold in
order to bring it up to its present-day value,[25] is increased to
L57,621 16s. 8d. of our modern money!
The custody of the Tower was entrusted by Longchamp to one of his
dependents, William Puinctel, who seems to have acted as Constable and
superintendent of the new works, according to the Pipe Roll of 2 Richard
I.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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