The most famous Norman great tower today is the White Tower of
London (Figure 8). The castle was begun in the 1070s and construction
continued into the 1090s. To improve his original ditch and bank de
fenses in London, William the Conqueror put Bishop Gundolph of
Rochester in charge of the building project. The building we see today
is twelfth century and later. (A study of the wood gives a date in the early
twelfth century for the upper part of the tower.) The kings lavished
money on the castle in 1129–30, 1171–72, and the 1180s and recorded
the annual expenses in official royal accounts (known as Pipe Rolls). In
1190 Richard the Lion Hearted spent enormous sums on a new ditch,
bank, and curtain wall. Today the castle has been heavily restored and is
entirely surrounded by later buildings, but it still exerts a sense of grim
strength.
With plastered and whitewashed walls, the White Tower lived up to
its name. Since it stood beside the river Thames, not on a hill or motte,
its lower walls had to be very thick, between fourteen and fifteen feet
thick at the base. The tower had a rectangular plan, 97 feet by 118 feet.
Four pilaster buttresses (projecting masonry panels) enriched each outer
wall, dividing the walls into bays (compartments or units of space), and
corner buttresses extended upward to form turrets at the corners. The
windows have been enlarged, and a top story added. The forebuilding
that once held the stair has been destroyed and replaced today with
wooden stairs. The tower had only this one entrance, so everyone and
everything—even supplies going to the basement—came through this
door.
Since there are few accommodations for a household, the White
Tower may have been designed as a public and administrative building
rather than as a residence. It has two levels of state rooms. A wall pierced
with wide arches divides each floor into two halls of unequal size. Spiral
stairs join the floors, and in one corner an unusually wide stair must have
been used for formal processional entrances. A chapel dedicated to St.
John replaces one corner turret. Its apse forms a semicircular tower (Figure
9). Romanesque in style and construction, the chapel’s cylindrical
columns divide the space into a nave and aisles and support a barrel vault.
The groin-vaulted aisles support galleries, which join a wall passage running
all the way around the tower at the upper window level. On the
upper floor the rooms are luxurious, with large windows, fireplaces, and
garderobes.
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