Edward II Laughs (And Even Plays Ball-Games!) In The Face Of Impending Disaster

Here's my third post (part one; part two) about entries in Edward II's chamber journal of 1325/26: glimpses at what Edward was up to in the last few months before his disastrous downfall. Although he knew that an invasion by Queen Isabella and her favourite Roger Mortimer was coming, life went on as normal for Edward to a great extent.

- Edward attended the wedding of Hugh Despenser the Younger's niece Margaret Hastings to Sir Robert Wateville at Marlborough on 19 May 1326, and gave a gift of a pound to Will Muleward, valet of the bride's mother Lady Hastings. The reason? Will "was for some time with the king and made him laugh greatly," fust ascun temps od le Roi e lui fait g’ntement rire. Edward II's willingness to talk and joke and laugh with those of low (or lowish) birth is still apparent even near the end of his reign - this was about three months after he gave a year's wages to Jack of St Albans also for "making him laugh very greatly," by dancing on a table.


- at Saltwood Castle in Kent on 1 June 1326, Edward went out into the park to play some kind of ball-game - iewer a pelot, it says, literally 'playing at ball' - with Robert Wateville, his steward Thomas le Blount and unnamed others. (Blount got twenty marks from Edward for this; maybe he was a demon goal-scorer.) Edward had gone to Saltwood on the very serious business of meeting the pope's envoys, the archbishop of Vienne and the bishop of Orange, who had travelled to England in an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the king and his estranged wife Isabella. Edward II being Edward II, he still found time to have a bit of fun and take some outdoor exercise.

And if anyone wants to know why I so vastly prefer Edward to any other king of England and am completely infatuated with him, there are two reasons, right there. Can you imagine other English kings having a laugh with a servant or kicking a ball around or actually being fun to spend time with? Can you imagine Isabella, for all her undoubtedly fine qualities, actually being fun to spend time with? I can't; I can only picture her looking down her perfectly-formed aristocratic little nose in disgust and disbelief as she watches Edward roaring with laughter and joking around with some carpenter or cowherd or fisherman. Edward might have been a disastrous king, completely out of step with contemporary expectations of a ruler and lacking in regal dignity, but at least he was a person you can imagine having a right good laugh with, the life and soul of the party.

- Hugh Despenser, by comparison, evidently wasn't coping well with the stress of Isabella and Mortimer's impending invasion. In late February 1326, one of his squires received five pounds for some unspecified prompt action he took when Hugh "made a small affray" at Rothwell in Northamptonshire, whatever that means.

- on 20 January 1326, Edward paid thirty shillings to a draper of Norwich for fourteen ells of 'cloth of Coggeshall' - a town in Essex famed in the Middle Ages for its production of cloth - to make tunics (cotes) for the wives of five of his porters.

- the cloth, however, turned out to be "too stiff" for this purpose, and was sent to Edward's wardrobe to be used for something else. Edward bought instead eighteen ells of "bright blue English cloth," at twenty pence an ell, from a draper of Leicester, to make cotes hardies and hoods for the five women.

- 29 April 1326: "Item, paid to Little Will Fisher [Litel Wille Fyssher], page of the king's chamber, who remains at Kenilworth, ill, of the king's gift, for what he did when the king mounted his horse, five shillings." Edward left Kenilworth for Stratford-on-Avon that day.

-same date: "Item, paid to Hick Mereworth, valet of the king's chamber, who has the king's permission to go to Henley to his house with his wife, who came to Kenilworth great with child [grosse denfaunt], for his expenses in going, of the king's gift, for what he did at Kenilworth before the king left there, twenty shillings. Item, paid to Joan, wife of the said Hick, who came to her baron [i.e. husband] at the said Kenilworth great with child as is said above, because she had heard that her said baron was ill, of the king's gift, for her expenses in returning, forty shillings."

- so the couple got three pounds from Edward, a lot of money. A few other members of the king's household were ill at this time, so presumably something was going around at Kenilworth. An entry of 30 June, which calls Hick by his real name of Richard, says that he got Edward's permission to leave the royal household again after receiving news that "his goods were stolen from his house." He got another pound for his expenses on that occasion.

- Edward often gave generous gifts of several pounds to his knights and squires for "that done when the king ate" or for "what he did in the king's bedchamber when the king went to sleep." Annoyingly, what these rituals might have involved are not specified. Ditto what Little Will did "when the king mounted his horse."

- on 10 July 1326, the day before he ate in the park at Windsor with his niece Eleanor, Edward gave a pound to "John, minstrel of Spain, who played on the guitar and the lute" (a la gytarre e la lute) for him.

- Edward gave an enormously generous gift of a pound on 13 July, by his own hands, to one Alis de la Churche, who came to him while he was travelling between Chertsey and Shepperton and gave him a "great pike." Hick le Fisher, who also gave the king a pike at this time, for some reason received only six pence - one-fortieth of Alis's gift. (Maybe it was a much smaller and inferior pike, or maybe Edward just liked the look of Alis.) Considering how wildly unpopular Edward is meant to have been in 1326 among all classes of society, there was certainly no shortage of people willing to give him presents when he showed up in their part of the country; they appear on numerous pages of his chamber journal.

- on 15 July, Edward de Shepperton gave the king a gift of twelve chickens. Yep, that's The King Everyone Hated receiving yet another present.

- on 4 February 1326, Edward spent two pounds on "masts, cables and other equipment for ships" from a merchant of Lynn in Norfolk. His clerk recorded these items as being "for the use of the king."

- in this context, it's probably relevant that in late March, Edward invited various shipwrights (the word appears in English, shipwreghtes) of London, named vaguely as 'Adam, Martyn his brother and others', to come to him at Kenilworth. The Scalacronica says that Edward "amused himself with ships, among mariners, and in other irregular occupation unworthy of his station, and scarcely concerned himself with other honour or profit, whereby he lost the affection of his people." (But not the people who owned chickens and caught fish, apparently.)

- Edward dined with his sister-in-law Alice, countess of Norfolk, on 30 January 1326 at Burgh in Suffolk. He gave a pound each to Henry Newsom, harper, and Richardyn, citoler, who "made their minstrelsy" before them as they ate.

- there's a surprisingly large number of references to fish and fishing in the journal - or maybe it's not surprising, for a king who bought his own fish and stood by a river in November 1322 to watch men fishing. On 24 January 1326, Edward gave three shillings to Edmund 'Monde' Fisher, who is normally described as the king's valet and here as his fisherman (peschour), as per his name, to buy himself "boots for the water," presumably the fourteenth-century equivalent of waders. Monde sadly didn't have long to enjoy his new boots, as he was dead by 11 August that year.

- Edward spent a pound playing cross and pile (the medieval version of heads and tails) on 10 May 1326, and on the same day returned five shillings to his barber, Henry, which Henry had lent to him to play cross and pile at some earlier date.

- The king lost eight shillings playing cross and pile against Robert Wateville on 22 May, which was only three days after Robert's wedding - shouldn't he have had better things to do than chuck coins around with the king? (And shouldn't Edward also have had better things to do, like worry about the invasion or even, you know, govern his kingdom?) A couple of months later, Edward lost another two shillings playing cross and pile, yet again, with Peter Bernard, usher of his chamber. Peter, incidentally, was one of the men who joined the earl of Kent's 1330 conspiracy to restore Edward to the throne.

Edward II and Eleanor Despenser

This is a continuation of my last post - entries from Edward II's chamber account of 1325/26 relating to the king's eldest niece Eleanor, née de Clare, wife since 1306 of his chamberlain and favourite Hugh Despenser the Younger. The account is a fascinating illustration of the significant position the couple held in the king's life in the 1320s, and in fact two contemporary Flemish chronicles even claimed that Edward was having an incestuous affair with his niece. Whatever the truth of that, it's obvious that Eleanor was extremely important to Edward in the last years of his reign, and here are a few examples of his great affection for her.

Hugh Despenser is usually just called 'Sir Hugh', mons' Hughe, with no surname necessary - which in itself is evidence of his dominant position at court - or sometimes 'my lord Sir Hugh' or 'my lord Despenser', mon seign' le Despenser. Eleanor is usually referred to as 'my lady, Lady Eleanor Despenser', ma dame dame Alianore la Despensere. Isabella, always called 'my lady the queen', is the only other woman acknowledged with the honorific 'my lady' - other noblewomen, even Edward's niece the countess of Surrey and sister-in-law the countess of Norfolk, are not. Hugh and Eleanor's eldest son Hugh (born c. 1308) also appears in the account on occasion, called by the nickname 'Huchon'.

- I'd known for ages that Edward II had a ship called La Alianore, The Eleanor - 'Eleanor' was always spelt Alianore, Alianor, Alienora etc in the fourteenth century - and had assumed it was named in honour of his mother Eleanor of Castile or his grandmother Eleanor of Provence or even his daughter Eleanor of Woodstock. As it turns out, the ship's full name, as revealed by an entry in a chamber journal of 1323, was La Alianore la Despensere.

- Edward visited Eleanor at Sheen on the night of 2 December 1325, sailing along the Thames from Westminster and taking along only eight attendants. It appears that Edward rowed himself and that his attendants followed behind in another boat, which would hardly be surprising, given what we know of him. (This being the king who bought his own fish, invited sailors and carpenters to dine with him and went swimming in the Fens with "a great concourse of common people.") He gave his niece a whopping hundred marks or sixty-six pounds, and the chamber account says the money was "paid to my lady, Lady Eleanor Despenser, as a gift, by the hands of the king himself, when he went from Westminster to Sheen to my said lady and returned that same night to Westminster."

- Eleanor must have been heavily pregnant at the time, as on 14 December, Edward made an offering of thirty shillings to the Virgin Mary to give thanks for the fact that "God granted her a prompt delivery of her child." (As this was probably her ninth or tenth baby, I suppose it's hardly surprising that her labour didn't last long.) To the annoyance of Lady D, Susan Higginbotham and myself, who would love to know when and in what order the Despenser children were born, the clerk didn't give the child's name or even specify if it was a boy or girl. Honestly, you'd think these people didn't care at all about the needs of historians 700 years later!

- On 1 January 1326, as her New Year gift, Edward gave Eleanor a palfrey with saddle and all other necessary equipment, and paid Wat Somer for looking after the horse and Richard de la Grene, Eleanor's 'chief carter', for taking it to her at Sheen (Edward was a hundred miles away at Haughley near Stowmarket, Suffolk). If the king gave Hugh something for New Year, too, it isn't recorded here - in fact, the palfrey is the only New Year gift to anyone recorded in the chamber journal.

- Edward gave Jack the Trumpeter ten shillings on 9 October 1325 for bringing him forty-seven goldfinches in a cage from Dover. The reason for this is clarified in the next entry, where Edward paid Will of Dunstable to look after the birds "until the arrival of my lady Despenser," for whom Edward had bought them as a present. In early December, however, Jack the Trumpeter was paid a pound for bringing Edward thirty goldfinches in a cage. Were these different goldfinches, and if so, who did the king intend them as a gift for? Or had Will failed in his allotted duty and allowed seventeen of the birds to die? And why, as Susan Higginbotham reasonably asks, only forty-seven and not fifty goldfinches in the first place? I can only speculate. What is especially interesting is that the word 'goldfinches' appears in English in the middle of the French text: q’ porta au Roi vne cage od xxx Goldfynches.

- Edward and Eleanor dined alone together in Windsor park on 11 July 1326. The entry about this one is fascinating: a cook named Will was given a present of two pounds - a lot of money for a cook, a year's wages or almost - and a hackney "on which he followed the king to my lady Despenser when they ate privately in the said park." Does Edward taking a cook with him mean that Will prepared their meal in the park, i.e. that they had some kind of picnic? 11 July, during a summer when the Pauline annalist says there was a drought in England, is likely to have been a hot sunny day.

- In July 1326, a couple of weeks after the picnic with Eleanor, Edward gave Hugh a manuscript of the doomed love story of Tristan and Isolde. For some reason this gift was not recorded in the chamber account at the time but a few months later, and is one of the last entries before the account abruptly ended on 31 October 1326, sixteen days before Edward's and Hugh's capture.

- In early June 1326, Edward sent his sergeant John de Mildenhale with twenty marks as a gift for Eleanor, called 'my lady, Lady Eleanor Despenser, consort of Sir Hugh'.

- the day after Edward visited Eleanor at Sheen at night in December 1325, there's an entry recording that she gave him vne robe de iiij garnamenz, 'a robe of four...?' I'm not sure how to translate the last word in this context - it usually means garments or clothing in general, or riding gear or some kind of armour.

- Edward stayed at Sheen, where Eleanor was also staying, from 12 to 18 October 1325. Meanwhile, Hugh Despenser was in Wales: an entry of 9 October says that he was at Caerphilly, and he was still "in the parts of Wales" on 18 November, when Edward wrote to him there. The two men kept in frequent touch while apart, although, frustratingly, their letters don't survive or at least have never been discovered.

- Edward paid Eleanor's expenses while she was staying at Sheen that October, and ordered forty bundles of firewood for her chamber. He also paid her expenses at Leeds Castle in Kent when she was staying there on another occasion.

- Eleanor wrote to Edward shortly before 30 December 1325, when the king paid her valet John a pound for bringing her letters to him. She was still at Sheen (or was at Sheen again) in February 1326, when Edward gave ten shillings to his valet Syme Lawe, sent there with the king's letters to his niece.

- In March 1326, Edward gave Eleanor a silver hanap worth twenty pounds, and Hugh a silver cup worth twenty-two pounds.

- And finally for now...in July 1325, Edward paid three shillings for two gallon jars of honey to make sucre de plate for Eleanor, which I assume means some kind of sweet (sucre means sugar). But I've only gone through part of the manuscript, so no doubt there will be more interesting discoveries about Edward, Hugh and Eleanor in the future!

Random Moments in the Life of Edward II

Here are a few entries from Edward II's chamber account of 1325/26, which I've transcribed and translated from the original manuscript in the Society of Antiquaries library at Piccadilly. Edward's chamber accounts are a fascinating glimpse into his private world, detailing presents he gave out, whom he dined with and what he ate, minstrels who performed for him, names of the men who served him closely and thus knew him best, and so on - hence my willingness to ruin my eyesight by spending many hours, weeks and months peering at tiny, faded handwriting in medieval French.

- a fisherman called Cock atte Wyk - seriously - gave Edward a present of a "great eel," a barbel, dace and other fish, and received a gift of two shillings in return, in October 1325.

- in October/November 1325 Edward paid various men, including his squire Thomelyn de Haldon and the Dominican friar Thomas Dunheved, for bringing him letters from his chamberlain and favourite Hugh Despenser the Younger, "who is in the parts of Wales," and returning to Hugh with the king's letters. This is very interesting, given that Hugh had successfully persuaded Edward a few weeks earlier not to go to France without him in the belief that he would be killed in the king's absence, but evidently was happy enough to set off for Wales by himself while Edward (and Hugh's very pregnant wife Eleanor) remained in the south-east.

- Edward also paid five shillings on 23 February 1326 to one of his messengers "sent out of court secretly with letters of the king to Sir Hugh [Despenser]," and a pound on 21 March to Hugh's squire Janekyn de Sufford, "who is sent from Kenilworth to London with letters of the king to the said Sir Hugh, on private business." So it seems that Edward and Hugh were apart far more than I had ever realised, which changes the mental picture I had of their relationship.

- in August 1325, Edward gave a gift of ten shillings to Robert Traghs, porter of his chamber, whose wife had recently borne a daughter. Robert got permission to travel to London to visit his wife, Joan, and their child. (Ten shillings, half a pound or 120 pence, was a pretty generous gift to a man of Robert's rank, who only earned one and a half or two pence a day - so was the equivalent of at least two months' wages.)

- Edward gave twenty-five shillings to Will Shene, another porter of the chamber, about to marry a woman whose name the king's clerk recorded as 'Isode'. The money was intended in part as a gift and in part to cover the expenses of their wedding, celebrated at Henley-on-Thames on Sunday 20 October 1325.

- on his way from Walton-on-Thames to Cippenham on 17 October 1325, Edward bought a pike, two barbels and a trout from Jack Fisher ('Jak Fyssher', as his clerk wrote it) of Shepperton, also giving Jack four shillings as a gift. The entry makes it clear that it was Edward himself, not one of his servants, who bought the fish from Jack: achatez de lui p’ le Roi mesmes. Edward also bought quantities of fish from four other people the following day, which were carefully recorded as having been purchased by the king himself.* That is soooo Edward.

* les queux choses susditz furent achatez en lewe de Tamyse p’ le Roi mesmes.

- there's a nice fishy entry in the account for the period when Edward was staying at Langdon in Kent, the end of August 1325, while he and his advisers debated whether or not he should travel to France to pay homage to Charles IV for his French lands - you know, the time he didn't stupidly fall into Isabella and Mortimer's Oh-So-Cunning Trap as so many writers like to claim he did. He, both Hugh Despensers, the earl of Arundel, Edward's friend the abbot of Langdon, the chancellor Robert Baldock, Robert Mohaut and unnamed "other magnates" sat in the garden at the abbey of Langdon and dined on large quantities of fish and seafood bought for them in Dover, Sandwich and other places: bream, cod, whiting, sole, salted herring, crabs and so on. There's a nice image, I think - the king and some of his great magnates sitting in an abbey garden enjoying the late-summer sunshine*, eating platters of fish and seafood.

* presumably - though I don't actually know what the weather was like then. There was a drought in England the following summer, 1326, according to Annales Paulini.

- Edward had chamber staff called Litel Wille, Litel Colle and Grete Hobbe.

- it has been known for many years that Edward gave two and a half pounds or the equivalent of a year's wages to his painter Jack of St Albans for dancing on a table and making him laugh uproariously. What is usually missed or ignored is that Edward intended the gift for Jack to support his wife and children - en eide de sa femme et ses enfauntz, the entry says - and that he gave Jack the money with his own hands, a great honour for the painter. Nor is it ever stated that this pleasant little interlude took place on 11 March 1326, when Edward was expecting Isabella and Mortimer's invasion at any time - but evidently hadn't lost his sense of humour.

- Edward gave a pound to one Alis Coleman for brewing ale for him in late 1325. He seems to have been fond of that particular drink: in February 1323, he gave five shillings to another Alis who had travelled from York to Pontefract to bring him ale as a present from her mother.

- Edward also gave a pound in November 1325 to a woman named Luce, who had brought him a gift of bread, chickens and ale (again!) while he was staying at Cippenham. Maybe she thought his cooks weren't feeding him properly. A pound each to two women of humble birth - very generous.

- The king spent five pounds on food for the poor to celebrate St Katherine's Day, 25 November 1325, and somewhat mysteriously, gave ten shillings to a woman called Anneis "for that done at the gate of the Tower" of London to mark the day. Presumably this had something to do with the church of St Katherine's by the Tower, next to the Tower.

- Edward's fondness for the company of the lowborn is demonstrated by the entries revealing that he invited sailors, carpenters and the like to dine privately with him reasonably often, such as Adam Cogg, captain of Hugh Despenser the Younger's barge, who ate with the king on four days in June 1325.

- contrary to popular belief, there is nothing in Edward's chamber account to demonstrate that he didn't enjoy the company of women. For example, he dined alone with Lady Hastings on or shortly before 8 August 1326 and with his sister-in-law Alice, countess of Norfolk on 30 January that year, giving presents of ten shillings to Lady Hastings' valet and the same each to Henry Newsom, harper, and Richardyn, citoler, who "made their minstrelsy" before Countess Alice and himself as they ate. Not to mention his enormous affection for his niece Eleanor Despenser, who, with her husband Hugh, was arguably the most important person in Edward's life in the last eighteen months or so of his reign.

- Alison Weir, in her biography of Queen Isabella, points out that men named Wat Cowherd, Simon and Robin Hod and others appear in Edward's chamber account of 1322 and received what she calls "substantial" sums of money (though she doesn't specify the amounts) from the king for spending time "in his company." She speculates that Edward "was being promiscuous with low-born men" and that Isabella must have heard about it and been angry. In fact, Wat, Simon and the others were pages and porters of Edward's chamber and crop up extremely often in the accounts, accompanying the king on his travels and receiving their wages. There's no way of proving that Edward didn't have sex with them, of course, but there's no reason at all to think that he did. Sadly, reality proves far more mundane than speculation.

- Edward's scribes sometimes referred to his chamber staff by nicknames in the account - for example, the Simon Hod mentioned above (not the king's bit of rough but one of his porters) was often called 'Syme', short for 'Symond', the usual spelling then, as was Syme Lawe, a valet of the chamber. Hugh de Greenfield and Hugh Smale were often called 'Huchon'. Edmund Fisher and Edmund Quarrell, valets, were called 'Monde', short for 'Esmond', the usual contemporary spelling. Monde Fisher's wife Isabelle was sometimes called 'Sibille'. Men called John were often called 'Janekyn', men called Thomas 'Thomelyn' and the name Richard was sometimes written 'Richardyn'. Wat Cowherd's name was spelt 'Watte Couherde' (or Couhierde).

- One especially interesting piece of info I've found is the approximate date of the marriage between Sir Richard Talbot - a Lancastrian knight captured at the battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, who pragmatically switched sides and joined the Despensers - and Elizabeth Comyn, daughter of the John Comyn, the lord of Badenoch murdered by Robert Bruce in 1306, and niece and co-heir of the earl of Pembroke. Richard and Elizabeth married in secret, at Pirbright in Surrey, shortly before 10 July 1326: an entry in the chamber account on that day giving Richard a gift of ten marks says that he avoit espouses p’uement la dame de Comyn, 'had married secretly the lady Comyn'.

I'll post soon about entries from Edward's accounts relating to his niece, Eleanor Despenser.

The Tower Of London, 2

More pics of the Tower of London!

Left: this is Water Lane, which lay under the Thames until the 1270s, when Edward I pushed back the river and extended the Tower, building a new curtain wall. Ahead on the left is Wakefield Tower (the round building) and Bloody Tower; ahead on the right, St Thomas's Tower and Traitors' Gate.

Right: the Byward Tower, which was behind me when I took the photo of Water Lane. It contains wall paintings dating from the reign of Richard II at the end of the fourteenth century, but isn't open to the public. You can see some of the paintings here and here.

Another shot of the Traitors' Gate and St Thomas's Tower. The timber-work dates from 1533, during a renovation of the Tower for Queen Anne Boleyn's coronation.

The White Tower, oldest part of the Tower, built by William the Conqueror. In the background on the left is the building which houses the Crown Jewels. In the foreground on the left you can see the remains of the old wall of the Inmost Ward, built by Henry III. According to the guidebook, these remains were covered over by later buildings and only discovered thanks to bomb damage to the Tower during World War Two.

Next photo: taken from the same spot as the last one, with the White Tower on the right and the remains of the Inmost Ward and some of the famous Tower ravens in the foreground. The low building behind the trees is the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, with Tower Green in front and the Beauchamp Tower on the left.

Photo taken out of a window in the Lanthorn Tower (you can see bird droppings on it, which I didn't notice when I took the pic!) of Cradle Tower, built by Edward III as his private watergate.

There's a lot of graffitti in the Salt Tower - built c. 1240 - carved in the walls by men imprisoned there in the sixteenth century. Sadly the pics haven't come out well at all, and you can see me reflected in the protective glass in one of them.

Some medieval pottery:

The archway of Bloody Tower, vaulted by Edward III at the beginning of the 1360s.

Below, the castle moat.

Photo taken from the (modern) entrance to the Tower of London, with Middle Tower on the right and Byward Tower in the, umm, middle, with Water Lane just past Byward. Both were built by Edward I.

Staircase in the White Tower, where two bodies discovered in 1674 were assumed to be those of the Princes in the Tower. The sign says "The tradition of the Tower has always pointed out this as the stair under which the bones of Edward the 5th and his brother were found in Charles the 2nd's time and from whence they were removed to Westminster Abbey."

Display in Bloody Tower, where you can cast your vote for 'What really happened to the Princes in the Tower?' Options, left to right: murdered on the orders of Henry VII, murdered on the orders of Richard III, not murdered but disappeared. Richard III is currently a nose ahead of 'not murdered'.

Drawings of how the Tower of London might have appeared in the thirteenth century, in the reigns of Henry III and Edward I.

I haven't mentioned Edward II at all in this post, have I? Unlike his father and son, he didn't do any major building work at the Tower, though he did spend a lot of time here in the last year or two of his reign. He was here on 24 February 1325, when he paid Thomelyn Sautriour a pound for playing the psalter before him in his chamber, probably in the Lanthorn Tower.

The Tower Of London, 1

Lady D and I spent a fantastic few days in London last weekend, mostly to view Edward II's chamber accounts of 1322 to 1326 at the Society of Antiquaries library and the National Archives (thanks to the staff of both places, by the way). Strange people that we are, we jumped up and down with excitement to see the original fourteenth-century documents written by Edward's clerks! I've posted a random page of the accounts - which are in French - so you can see what they look like.

Last Sunday, we visited the Tower of London - extremely crowded on a warm, sunny weekend. Talking of the Tower, I found an entry in Edward's chamber account of July 1326 where the king spent four pounds on cloths with gold and silver thread for his favourite Hugh Despenser the Younger's chapel in the Tower - which is an interesting revelation in itself, that Despenser had his own chapel there. (Of course the entry doesn't say where it was, frustratingly.) Lots more on Edward's chamber accounts coming soon.

OK, time for some pics! Clicking on them should bring up a larger version, at least if Blogger's behaving itself. And apologies in advance for any formatting weirdnesses. Blogger is not great on photo posts.

If you're visiting the Tower with a tiresome relative and have exhausted the possibilities of the cafe, shop, education centre and church, why not take them along to be beheaded?














This is the Lanthorn Tower, originally built between about 1220 and 1240, where Edward II mostly stayed when he was at the Tower. Sadly, the original building was destroyed by fire in the 1770s, and this one is a nineteenth-century reconstruction.

A view of Tower Bridge (far left) and across the Thames from the Lanthorn Tower, as never seen by Edward II. (Bet he'd have appreciated that ice-cream van.)

Reconstruction of Edward I's bedchamber in St Thomas's Tower:

A touchy-feely exhibition of cloths in said bedchamber:

In the Constable Tower, there's an exhibition on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (with Lady D's hand in one of the pics!):

Below: a portable altar of the fourteenth century. Not a great photo - came out a bit blurred with the windows behind me reflected in the protective glass - but an incredibly gorgeous object.

The rounded building on the right of this pic is Wakefield Tower, built in the early thirteenth century, where Henry VI died (or rather, was murdered) in 1471. The rectangular building on the left is Bloody Tower, formerly called Garden Tower, where Edward V and his brother the duke of York were held in 1483. (And possibly murdered. There's a display in the tower where you can vote for who you think murdered them, or if they weren't murdered at all. And no, I'm definitely not wading into that particular argument.)

The green area in this pic is the part of Tower Green where executions took place. On the right, the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula; in the middle, the Beauchamp Tower, built by Edward I in the 1270s and named after Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, imprisoned there by Richard II in 1397. The other buildings in the pic aren't open to the public.

Sculpture commemorating the deaths on Tower Green. The text begins: "Close to this site were executed: William, Lord Hastings 1483 - Queen Anne Boleyn 1536 - Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury 1541..."

Below: St Thomas's Tower, built by Edward I in the 1270s, and its water gate, later known by its far more notorious name, Traitors' Gate.

More pics of the Tower to follow soon!