A Medieval Garden at the Tower of London

The Tower of London has in its time performed many roles: royal castle, state prison, armoury and arsenal, observatory, zoo and mint. It is best known today as the treasury of the Crown Jewels and as the historic place of execution of two of Henry VIII’s wives, Lady Jane Grey and Sir Thomas More, or as the prison of the ‘Princes in the Tower’ and Sir Walter Raleigh. Of the two and a half million visitors who pass through every year, it would be surprising if even a dozen had heard of the castle’s connections with medieval royal gardening. (A few more may know about Sir Walter Raleigh's attempts to grow tobacco in the Lieutenant’s garden adjoining his prison). And yet there is documentary evidence from the thirteenth century onwards that both inside and outside the castle, there were large orchards and gardens, in which the Kings and Queens took a personal interest. Though we can do little to reconstruct details of their planting or their layout, recent research is offering some clues as to where exactly they lay. This has opened up a potentially-fascinating line of conjecture, bringing in literary evidence from a quite unexpected source.