A major new Tower of London excavation reveals its hidden medieval history
The dig might have uncovered some of the earliest victims of the Black Death, and other tantalizing clues about medieval life in the citadel.
The Tower of London has loomed over the River Thames since the 1070s, bearing witness to everything from executions to rebellions and plague. It’s been home to many of Britain’s most infamous figures—some of whom were doomed never to leave—and the site of some of history’s most enduring mysteries, including the disappearance of two young Plantagenet princes whose fates remain unknown to this day. But for all of the lives that brutally ended in the Tower, for almost a thousand years, the citadel has been teeming with the lives of its many permanent residents, including the guards, clerks and their families.
Until recently, the medieval lives of the Tower residents—and the older history of the Tower itself—has been its own mystery, lacking rich details and intimate knowledge. But a recently completed archeological excavation—overseen by the Historic Royal Palaces, the organization that manages the Tower—is shedding new light on how its medieval residents lived and died. “It is the largest excavation that’s been done within the inner ward for at least 40 years, and the largest excavation in general at the Tower for at least 20 or 30 years,” says Alfred Hawkins, Curator of Historic Buildings at the Tower of London, who led the excavation.
The dig focused on the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula (translated from the Latin to “Saint Peter in chains,”), a parish church for the working residents of the Tower. Though better known as the final resting place of Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, and Sir Thomas More, all of whom were executed for treason by their Tudor king, the chapel long predates that bloody history. The current structure, commissioned under Henry VIII and finished in 1520, is part of a much older, continuous timeline: “It has this amazing legacy from perhaps the ninth century but definitely the 12th century of chapel buildings that have been on that site,” says Hawkins. He adds that the “continuum” at the chapel “may be longer than the White Tower itself.”
The excavation’s findings, which are currently undergoing further testing at Cardiff University, are unraveling the Tower’s oldest mysteries, offering a fuller picture of how medieval Londoners experienced the castle, and hinting at wealthy residents who may have worshipped at Saint Peter ad Vincula, medieval burial rituals, and plague victims hastily buried far beneath the Tower’s grounds.
The medieval history of the Tower of London
The Tower of London that visitors see today is a bit misleading: “It looks very clean and very organized, but that’s mostly a result of the Victorian re-presentation of the site,” says Hawkins. The Tower’s development was organic: the buildings and space expanded and evolved over time, morphing to serve new uses from generation to generation.
The heart of what’s presently the Tower of London—the now-iconic White Tower—was commissioned by William the Conqueror shortly after his historic 1066 victory, part of his efforts to swiftly solidify Norman control over England. Additions began almost immediately: curtain walls, towers, a well-appointed royal residence. It became a fixture of London’s skyline. Consider that most houses in medieval London were roughly three stories tall, while the Tower sat on a rise, slightly apart from the city, surrounded by walls and a moat, defended and tough to access. “It’s definitely a big presence,” explains Katherine French, a professor of medieval English history at the University of Michigan who was not involved with the excavation.
The castle was a symbol of sheer royal might—and its strategic location and impenetrable architecture made it an ideal place for a king to retreat in times of upheaval, like the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt’s, when Richard II fled to the Tower for protection. It saved Richard, but not his widely loathed Lord Chancellor, who was dragged to nearby Tower Hill and beheaded. But it also served as a prison for those of high status, including the 15th-century King Henry VI who ultimately died in the Tower under suspicious circumstances.
But apart from the moments of high drama and bloody turmoil, it was also an administrative hub for the whole of England, housing the Royal Mint and producing all the country’s coinage for centuries. The Tower, says Hawkins, is “quite cold, it’s quite dusty, it’s not very well organized. And so, it’s always been useful for administration and storage, with the actual royal palaces being in Westminster and Greenwich and various other places.”
There has been a place of worship on the site of St. Peter ad Vincula throughout that tumultuous history, which makes it a particularly special site: “Crucially, it’s only ever been one thing,” says Hawkins. Other Tower buildings have served a variety of purposes, from storehouses to prisons to residences to even an elephant house. But the chapel has always been a chapel. “It looks like it’s mostly just been the parish church for the fortress,” says Hawkins. “Because religion was so important to people, through looking at that building, you can see the stories of every different element of the site.”
(The Tower of London has impressed--and terrified--people for nearly 1,000 years)
What archeologists uncovered during their historic excavation
Historians know that the Tudor structure replaced a chapel built in the 13th century that was destroyed in a fire in the 1510s. But that 13th-century chapel wasn’t the first; it likely replaced an earlier chapel, and maybe even multiple previous chapels. “During the course of the work, we’ve discovered potentially four high-status medieval buildings, likely the previous chapels that have all been built on top of each other,” says Hawkins.
Though it was common knowledge that there have been burials at St. Peter ad Vincula stretching back centuries, the site had never been excavated until now, prompted by the need to add an elevator to the building, making the historic site more accessible. The dig was around 10 feet deep, encompassing about 650 square feet of spoil (the archeological term for the material that comes out of a dig), in a place where it’s rare to excavate more than about 12 inches deep. Effectively, archeologists dug to the early 13th century. “This is a very, very rare opportunity to get this information,” says Hawkins.
Archeologists, Hawkins says, “found elements that relate to almost every aspect of human life,” from pieces of jewelry to shards of stained glass, and even exceptionally rare burial shroud fragments. Textiles are delicate and difficult to preserve even deliberately; typically, they only survive in anaerobic conditions. It appears they just got lucky in how the pieces lay in the clay: “They had no business surviving where they did,” says Hawkins. Further examination will say more about the weave and make of the fabric, fleshing out our understanding of funerary practices in the period.
Archeologists also found “22 articulated individuals and a significant quantity of charnel,” according to Hawkins, dating from the 13th century to the 16th century. Clues suggest many of these people were of high status: Many appear to have been buried in coffins rather than shrouds, which were more common, and it appears as though the lowest burials were originally inside an older version of the chapel, which also suggests social importance. “Typically, if you’re buried closer to the church, you’re more important, and if you’re buried inside the church, you're much, much more important, and if you’re buried under the altar, you are the most important person,” Hawkins explains.
Perhaps one of the most tantalizing finds was among those deepest and therefore oldest burials: a pair of funerary incense pots that are likely to date from sometime between 1150 and 1250. Such a find is exceptionally rare: “Grave goods in Medieval England aren’t really a thing,” says Hawkins. They simply weren’t a common cultural practice at the time, and similar “gravpottes” have only been identified in the country twice, in Oxford and in Scotland. The finding suggests that the individual may have come from Northern France or Denmark, where grave goods were a common practice. If the charcoal fragments in the incense pots are large enough, Historic Royal Palaces may be able to have an archaeobotanist, a specialist in ancient plant remains, reconstruct the incense.
Scientific testing reveals what medieval life was like at the Tower
Historical records are rich sources of information about medieval London, the Tower, and its residents, but archeology can fill important gaps. “We know about trade into London, but that doesn't necessarily tell us what individual people were eating, or how diet might differ according to status,” says French.
“The human story locked in the bones is something that’s been missing from the story of the Tower for a long time, because there’s very little that’s been recovered and there’s very little that’s been analyzed,” says Richard Madgwick, an archaeological scientist at Cardiff University and part of the team analyzing the remains. “They give us pretty much an individual level of resolution in terms of where these people came from, what they were consuming, and also their health status in the past.”
The project began with a test trench, dug in 2019 to evaluate the site. The team recovered the remains of two individuals, which were transferred to Cardiff University, where researchers used a combination of methods including macroscopic analysis of the bones to reveal information like age, sex, disease, and health, as well as isotope analysis, to learn more.
“Isotope analysis involves some complex science, but the principles behind it are very simple indeed,” said Madgwick: “You are what you eat, you are where you eat, you are to some degree how you eat, as well.” Food and drink leave chemical signals in everything from human hair to teeth and bones. Different landscapes, too, have different chemical compositions; London, for example, has certain ranges of sulfur and strontium. That enables archeologists to build a picture of where exactly a medieval Londoner may have lived and what they ate.
The Cardiff team found that one of the individuals excavated was a middle-aged female, who died sometime between 1480 and 1550. She was probably well-off since she was buried in a coffin and had a rich diet that included sugar, a rare and expensive ingredient. The chemical signals in her teeth indicate that she was not originally from London and had likely moved to at least two different places— potentially the Southwest Peninsula, Cornwall and Devon, or even Wales.
The second individual was a younger man from around the same period and roughly apprenticeship age, possibly from the north but potentially somewhere closer to London, like Kent. Researchers found evidence of significant childhood stress; his diet wasn’t as rich, and he was most likely buried in a shroud. Taken together, the findings suggest the diversity of life experiences at the Tower. (There’s no sign either died by violence; most likely, they were parishioners.)
Tantalizing clues about the Black Death
The 2019 trial excavation scratched the surface. The team at Cardiff will now perform the same types of examinations on the remains from the most recent excavation. “At the moment we’ve got these lovely two biographies,” says Madgwick. “It hints at the dynamic movement of people and the dynamic life trajectories of the people who were buried in the Tower, but it’s going to be really exciting to see whether we’ve picked two anomalies, or whether we see the broader range of lifeways that we see of those buried here.”
One mystery that researchers hope to unravel is where the Tower workers came from. “It’s one of those big questions—is the Tower of London community a community or is the Tower of London community a kind of transient collection of people that come from here, there, and everywhere?” asks Hawkins.
The composition of the Tower community makes this project particularly interesting because researchers are largely looking at what’s essentially a middle-class community, according to Katie Faillace, a dental anthropologist and bioarchaeologist, who is part of the Cardiff team. Though several individuals were buried in coffins, most of “the people buried here are not going to be the most elite. We’re looking at this middle class that we don’t often get archeologically.” Dentine analysis, too, will reveal information about things like what individuals were weaned on and when they were being weaned. The excavation included remains of younger children, reflecting the brutal infant mortality rate of the period and potentially offering an unusual glimpse of medieval family life in the Tower.
One thing that further analysis will be able to tell us: whether some of those individuals died from the Black Death, which swept furiously through London beginning in 1348. “We have a collection of seven burials from a mid-14th century context that appear rushed,” says Hawkins. If DNA testing does find traces of yersinia pestis bacteria, it would make these burials particularly interesting. That’s because medieval Londoners quickly realized the plague dead needed special handling, and authorities created emergency burial grounds specifically to deal with the casualties, two of which were close to the Tower. The people buried at St. Peter ad Vincula instead of plague burial grounds are tantalizing to researchers because they might be some of the earliest victims of the Black Death. If that’s the case, the discovery may provide a glimpse of what life during the early, likely confusing outbreak was like.
The remains from the 2025 dig are being transferred to Cardiff University for further testing over the next few months. (The bodies will eventually be reinterred at St. Peter ad Vincula’s crypt.)
“It’s not a very big hole in the ground, really, is it?” says Madgwick. “But the transformative potential not only to understand the people and the activities of the Tower but technology, trade, connectivity across England and perhaps beyond is just so exciting.”
