How to Siege the Tower of London – The Peasants' Revolt of 1381

Alfred Hawkins (0:16)

The Tower of London has been part of the landscape of the city of London since 1067 While the White Tower no longer dominates the skyline, when it was built by William the Conqueror, it was the tallest, most imposing building in England.

This monument to the Norman Conquest was the biggest most people had ever seen, the centre of a nationwide campaign of castle building. The tower's defences were upgraded in the 12th and 13th centuries, forming the basis of the fortress that we know today.

These defences were continually upgraded right until the 19th century, maintaining the tower's formidable reputation.

In its nearly thousand year long history, the Tower of London has been sieged several times.

The tower's performance in these sieges is checkered, but it has only been breached once. So what defences did it have to prevent that? And how could anyone get inside? Today on the Historic Royal Palaces Podcast, we are going to siege the Tower of London.

I am stood on the tower approach, and in the evening sunshine, I can see the Tower of London in all its glory. And it is very romantic and it's a beautiful sight, but it's also an imposing mass of walls and towers, which appear almost impregnable. And from this point, I can even see the White Tower at the heart of the fortress. And today we are going to be sieging the Tower of London and trying to get ourselves into the White Tower. I am Alfred Hawkins. I am curator of historic buildings at the Tower of London. And today we are going to take a walk through this amazing fortress. I am going to take you through some of the main defensive features of the Tower of London when they were at their most fearsome. In the 14th century, following the work of Edward III himself building on the massive works of expansion undertaken by Henry III and Edward I, which expanded the tower into a concentric castle in the 13th century.

Our first barrier in our siege of the tower is the moat constructed in the 13th century by Edward I, which surrounds the massive outer curtain walls.

Originally filled with water, the moat was around four to five meters deep and this was maintained by ingenious sluice gates built by Flemish engineers on the order of Edward I and was around 40 meters wide.

The moat is really interesting and really one of the most important defensive features of the tower, because usually you would dig something like a ditch and that would make it quite difficult to approach the walls. But filling a ditch with water means that we're not able as attackers to bring things like siege towers up against the walls because they would go into the water and they would sink. Similarly, the moat means that we are unable to undermine the defences, and this is a really ingenious way of attacking a fortification. The most famous example being the Siege of Rochester, where you could dig underneath the walls and support that tunnel with timber. And once you reach a certain point, you're able to set those supports on fire after you've reached a certain depth underneath the foundations. And when that tunnel collapses, it would take part of the fortress with it. But having a wet moat, a moat filled with water, means that we are unable to do that. And so the moat really forces us to focus our attack upon the entrances to the castle, which is precisely where we're expected.

So our siege has to be directed towards the entrances to the fortress, the main one of which approaches from the city of London. It's important to note that the tower did have other entrances, particularly from the river, such as through Traters Gate, then the Water Gate and the Cradle Tower. But those were both high status, royal means of accessing the fortress. And so they're not particularly useful to us today as attackers. Today, our attack, our siege of the tower, is following what we believe to be the route taken by the peasants in the 1381 attack. And so we, today, will be smashing through the main entrance to the Tower of London. And while today this is a very welcoming entrance, in the 14th century, this was a formidable defensive bastion formed of three great towers built in the 13th century during Edward I's expansion of the tower. These three towers were known as the Lion Tower, so-called, because it was where the lions of the menagerie were kept, the Middle Tower, because it's in the middle, and the Bywood Tower, which is by the outer ward. The Lion Tower, although now demolished, was a formidable construction formed of the Lion Tower itself and the Lion Tower gate. And when you enter the tower today, on your left, you can see the remains of its drawbridge, which was part of the structure known as the Lion Gate. And this gives us an insight into the technology that was built into the entrance to the Tower of London. And the amazing thing about drawbridges, and what is a real problem for us as attackers, is that when they're raised, they not only create a huge drop, and you can see that drop looking at the ruins as you enter the tower, but they also provide an additional layer of defense for the gate.