Secret stories from the capital's castle.
Doors: 7pm.
The Tower of London is one the UK's most popular and well-known tourist attractions (although strangely not visited much by Londoners). But beneath the famous histories, archaeologists and historians are still revealing extraordinary secrets and stories.
Fortress, palace, prison, and refuge? Dr. RORY MCLELLAN tells how over for over a century, the Tower of London was also central to the lives of medieval England's Jews, a site of sanctuary during riots and attacks on their community and a place of imprisonment when the English Crown turned against them. From 1189 to 1290, hundreds of Jews entered the Tower as prisoners, sanctuary-seekers, or workers. In the 1270s alone, hundreds of Jews were held in the Tower, with one woman imprisoned in the old elephant house. When Edward I banished the community in 1290, almost 1500 Jews took ship into exile from the Tower wharf. Taxes raised on the Jews were used to expand the Tower, building the outer wall and the infamous Traitors' Gate.
Meanwhile, Dr JAMIE INGRAM explores the historic graffiti within the Tower of London. With the majority of our famous graffiti left behind by those accused of being heretics and traitors we also have evidence for a wider tradition of mark making and the use of the walls of the Tower of London through time to communicate and mark presence within the space, - voluntarily or otherwise. The graffiti now asks questions of us, both in terms of our modern understanding of the nature of these kinds of marks - and in the way that they were created and used in the past.
Dr.RORY MCLELLAN was a researcher at Historic Royal Palaces, working on the medieval Jewish history of the Tower of London. He is the author of Donations to the Knights Hospitaller in Britain and Ireland, 1291-1400 (Abingdon, 2021), the editor of The Modern Memory of the Military-religious Orders Engaging the Crusades, Volume Seven (Abingdon, 2022), and is now a Cataloguer and Manuscript Researcher at The British Library.
Dr JAMIE INGRAM has a doctorate in medieavel archaeology specialising in the use of historic graffiti as a marker for human behaviour within religious and secular buildings and a particular interest in the use of graffiti for place making. He is a researcher at Historic Royal Palaces looking at the historic graffiti within the Tower of London.
