The ravens: a legend younger than it looks

At least six ravens live at the Tower under a Ravenmaster, with their lodgings on the South Lawn below the White Tower. The story goes that Charles II ordered them protected after being warned the kingdom would fall if they left, overruling his astronomer John Flamsteed, who complained they got in the way of his observatory in the White Tower. The Tower tells the tale, and this site enjoys it too, but the former Tower historian Geoffrey Parnell searched the records and found no mention of ravens here before the 1880s. The birds are real, clever, named, ringed and fed twice a day on raw meat and blood-soaked biscuits. The legend that surrounds them is a much newer bird.

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Here is the story as it is usually told. In the 1670s Charles II’s astronomer, John Flamsteed, complained that the ravens roosting on the White Tower fouled his instruments and got in the way of his observations. The king was about to have the birds destroyed when someone warned him that if the ravens ever left the Tower, the White Tower would crumble and the kingdom fall. Charles, who had just been restored to a throne his father lost, took no chances: the ravens stayed, and the astronomer went to Greenwich.

It is a lovely story, and Historic Royal Palaces tells it with the careful phrase that Charles II “is thought to have been” the first to protect the birds. This site tells it too. But you should know what sits underneath it.

What the records say

In 2004 Geoffrey Parnell, then the Tower’s official historian, went looking for the ravens in the archives, in a thousand years of accounts, surveys, letters and guidebooks. He found nothing. The earliest reference he could find to captive ravens at the Tower was from the 1880s, roughly two centuries after Charles II. The American scholar Boria Sax, working independently, reached the same conclusion: the Tower ravens, as an institution with a legend attached, appear in the late Victorian period, when a taste for Gothic atmosphere and Celtic myth was at its height, and there is no trace of them earlier.

That does not make the birds any less real, or the modern custom any less serious. It makes the legend a piece of Victorian folklore that has been so successful that it now looks medieval. Ravens, after all, are scavengers, and a fortress with an execution site, a menagerie and a river was probably never short of them. The step from birds that happened to be there to birds that must be there was taken by someone with a sense of theatre, in the reign of Queen Victoria rather than the reign of Charles II.

The birds themselves

Whatever its age, the arrangement today is exact. There must be at least six ravens; there are usually a few more, including a spare. Their names at the time of writing were Harris, Jubilee, Poppy, Edgar, Georgie, Chaos, Henry and Poe. They are cared for by a Yeoman Warder with the title of Ravenmaster, who feeds them twice a day on mice, chicks, rats and raw meat, with biscuits soaked in blood as a treat. Some flight feathers are trimmed so that a bird is discouraged from leaving, though all of them can fly. In 2019 four chicks were hatched at the Tower, the first known to have been bred here.

They are not tame. They respond to the Ravenmaster, tolerate everyone else, and bite if their territory is crowded. They are also, like all corvids, alarmingly clever: they mimic sounds, play games, hide food and solve problems, and the best thing you can do with ten minutes on the South Lawn is simply to watch one think.

Occasionally one leaves anyway. Munin flew off to Greenwich and was returned by a member of the public a week later. George was sacked for eating television aerials. Grog was last reported outside a pub in the East End. The kingdom, so far, has survived.