Tower of London

Yesterday we went to the tower of London.  The Queens Royal guards were there guarding the queens jewels (the Crown Jewels).

There are birds that look a bit like crows, but they are Ravens. They are bigger and their beak is bigger and they are not allowed to go out of the castle walls. At night time they get locked up. They have different coloured bands and each one has its own name. We saw a red one called Hugine. She is a female and comes from North Somerset.

There are special guards called Yeoman Warders. We made friends with one whose name was Yeoman Warder Huggins.  He lives in the Tower.  He got us special tickets to the Ceremony of the Keys where they lock up the Tower Gates for the night. This ceremony has been done every single night for 700 years, except for one night in the war when 3 of the Warders got knocked of their feet by a bomb and the ceremony was late.

We saw them changing the guards. There are cobble stones in the Tower and the guards have metal plates on the bottom of their shoes and it is very slippery on the cobble stones. One of them nearly slipped over. You can tell who is in charge because he has stripes on his sleeves.

The first changing the guards the head guard had a red sash around his uniform, but the 2nd one didn't have it on.



We saw the ceremony of the Word.  This is where the guards go to the front of the tower to collect the password for the night from one of the Yeoman Warders. This happens every day so there is a different password every night to keep the Tower safe.

We did a tour with a Yeoman Warder.  This was a house where one of the Kings used to live.

We saw lots of crowns.  He showed us the chapel where the people who live at the Tower go to worship.

There was an armory. This is where they have guns, all the armour, canon balls and a display called the line of Kings where all the Kings are dressed in their armour. The horses had armour as well but they can't cover their whole body or they wouldn't be able to walk.

At the Tower there used to be lots of animals. It was like a zoo. They had lions, an elephant and monekys. There was a polar bear that used to swim in the moat. It was tied to a chain so it could not escape or attack people.

We went into the room where the Kings used to live.  There was a man there showing us things from a long time ago.  They used bone needles from animals and they didn't have paper so they used an animal skin which they dried and stretched it.  It was really strong and you couldn't tear it.  It lasts a long time.  The bone needles don't rip through the cloth when you put it through so it doesn't make a hole.
They wrote with a feather.  It is called a quill.  The have to cut it into a pen shape and dip it into the ink.

The bed had a blanket made of squirrel skin.

It was white and very fluffy.  They used the white fur off the tummy of the red squirrel.  In the Cinderella story, they weren't really glass slippers, they were squirrel fur slippers.

In the tower is a toilet,  The waste used to go into the river.

The Tower of London was really cool.