St. John's Chapel, Tower of London.
It is somewhat difficult to assign any precise date for the first foundation of the "Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula apud turrim." It is not probable that it was contemporary with the Chapel of St. John, but was doubtless erected by Henry I. when he enlarged the area of the outer ward of the Tower; as this necessitated a considerable increase to the permanent garrison, St. John's Chapel in the keep would no longer suffice for their accommodation, and a new chapel would become necessary. If St. Peter's Chapel had only been parochial (which at its first erection it was not), it might have been possible to ascertain the precise date of its foundation.
In 20 Henry II. (or 1174), Alnod, the engineer, received the sum of £11 13s. 4d. for works at the Tower. Other payments occur for sheet-lead for the repairs of the chapel, the carriage of planks, and timber for the kitchen,[23] the gateway of the gaol (probably Cold Harbour Gate "u"), various repairs to the "King's houses within the bailey of the Tower," and occasionally for the repairs to the "turris" or great keep itself. This, when first built, was of rough rag-stone, rudely coursed, with very open joints in thick mortar, so that these repairs (consisting, doubtless, of patching and pointing) occur with more or less frequency.
Not until 1663 did the keep receive its final disfigurement, at the hands of Sir Christopher Wren, who cased part of the exterior in Portland stone, rebuilt two of the angle turrets, and "Italianised" all the window openings, thereby obliterating many valuable mediæval details.
All these outlays are certified by the view and report of two inspecting officials, Edward Blund and William Magnus, the works being carried out by Alnod, while the writs authorising payments were signed by one or other of the justiciars, Ranulph de Glanville and Richard de Lucy, or by the King himself.
The following reign marks a period of great constructive activity at the Tower. The new monarch was one of the foremost military engineers of the age; and when we consider the valuable experience in the art of war which he had already gained, in the decade prior to his accession to the throne, in conducting (while Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine) various sieges of the castles of his rebellious barons in those provinces, it seems improbable that he would have been satisfied to leave the Tower in the condition it then was, with a keep standing in a small inner ward, enclosed by a plain stone curtain wall, devoid of any projecting towers, unless perhaps the base of the Hall tower, and the Cold Harbour Gate (see [plan]), and a large outer ward, only enclosed by a wooden palisade and ditch.
Richard must have been well aware of the enormous increase to the power of effective defence conferred by salient or boldly projecting towers flanking with their fire the curtain walls, which in England, at any rate, were then somewhat of a novelty. At this time the Tower was extremely defective in this respect, its great need being not for mere repairs, but for effective modernization as a fortress.
Before embarking upon the hazardous enterprise of the third Crusade, Richard left his trusted Chancellor, William Longchamp, to carry out an extensive series of new works at the Tower, all of which were probably from the designs of the sovereign himself.
In his valuable monograph upon the Tower,[24] the late G. T. Clark, F.S.A., has fallen into a strange error as to the actual amount expended upon works there during the earlier years of the reign of Richard I., which he states "do not show above one or two hundred pounds of outlay." When this rather dogmatic assertion is tested by reference to the existing documentary evidence of the Public Records, its glaring inaccuracy is at once apparent; indeed, it might fitly serve as an illustration of Pope's well-known lines: