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A major project at the Tower of London has revealed hundreds of graffiti written by prisoners, as well as other historical visitors to the site, thanks to cutting-edge technology.
The initiative, conducted by Dr Jamie Ingram as part of his post-doctoral fellowship with Historic Royal Palaces, identified 354 examples of graffiti in the Salt Tower, which is located on the south-eastern corner of the complex. Previously, only 79 examples had been documented in this area.
The new study began with raking light survey, a method which runs a band of light parallel to the surface of the walls in order to document features that might otherwise be invisible to the naked eye. Jamie employed this technique to create a database of exposed graffiti, which he could then use to understand individual examples in relation to their location on the walls, and their position relative to other markings. He then used structured light scanning to generate digital 3D models of areas of graffiti, before 3D scanning them and tracing the resulting images by hand using online illustrator software to aid interpretation.
This close analysis has shed light on how the markings were made. Some of the graffiti have been applied to the wall, rather than scratched into it, and infrared spectroscopy (a method of chemical analysis used to measure interactions of matter with infrared radiation) and X-ray spectroscopy (a technique which analyses the chemical and physical properties of materials) have been applied to the wall in order to explore what substances may have been used to create these examples. This data is still being analysed but suggests that chalk and pencil (graphite) were the primary means of applying marks.
The graffiti found so far are difficult to date, but are thought to span the whole lifespan of the Tower. A wide range of languages have also been identified, attesting to the diverse make-up of the prison population. One example, written in Breton, includes the word for ‘husband’, and is thought to possibly represent the first evidence of a woman imprisoned in the Salt Tower, or perhaps an echo of someone coming to visit her incarcerated husband. Middle English, Latin, and what is possibly 16th- or 17th-century Italian and French are present, too. ‘The study is adding new stories to the history of the Tower of London, and these are not just the stories of elite prisoners but of non-elite members of society as well,’ Jamie commented.
Other examples identified by the project are religious in nature, including a variety of symbols that have not been recorded in past surveys at the Salt Tower. This has opened up questions about how much freedom prisoners were given to maintain their personal religious practices: a line of investigation currently being explored by one of Jamie’s colleagues. There are markings reflecting much more recent episodes in the Salt Tower’s history as well, among them the name and service number of a soldier stationed there during the Second World War, which could be connected to men based at the site who were working for Naval Intelligence at that time.
Jamie next hopes to map the graffiti across the whole of the Tower complex, with the help of trained volunteers. The team are currently working on the south-western Byward Tower, where they have already found merchants’ marks in the archway, and possible examples within the Tower itself. The Byward Tower was used to house the Royal Mint from c.1279 until 1810, and it is known that the first floor was used historically to test the quality, purity, and composition of gold and silver arriving there. The merchants’ marks may therefore relate to this period of the Tower’s history, offering interesting insights into the groups who were affiliated with the minting process.
The work to-date will be used to inform a research funding application which, if successful, will allow a better understanding of the graffiti collection not just at the Tower of London, but also at other sites managed by Historic Royal Palaces. ‘This will give us a consistent approach and standardised typology for the recording and study of historic graffiti within Historic Royal Palaces and a strategy that can be shared with other researchers and organisations if they wish to use it,’ Jamie explained. In the meantime, the records of graffiti discovered so far are being uploaded to the Historic Royal Palaces collections management database, to become a recorded collection. This will allow better management and monitoring of the graffiti for years to come, as well as allowing researchers to access it more easily, which will facilitate further studies of these tangible traces of the Tower’s past and the people who lived and worked within its walls.
Text: Rebecca Preedy / Image: © Historic Royal Palaces
