Why does it matter when and how ravens came to the Tower of London? The official view there has long been that their wings were clipped on the orders of Charles II, because of an ancient prophesy that “Britain would fall” if the ravens left. When, near the end of the twentieth century, I discovered that was not the case, I initially could hardly believe the results of my research. To make a long story short, I published my book City of Ravens (London and New York, Duckworth/Overlook, 2012), in which I documented that the first mentions of ravens in the Tower of London were in 1883, probably by the Earls of Dunraven. The legend that Britain would fall if they left dates from summer 1944, when the ravens were used unofficially to give warnings of enemy bombs and planes. This made a much better story than the fabrication about Charles II, so I had left the Tower with more than I had taken from it.
Nevertheless, I braced myself for the possibility of indignant denials and even personal attacks. What I was not prepared for was the indifference with which people received the news. The Tower of London is today a sort of theme park on the foundation of a historical edifice. Everything including royal pageantry, ghost stories, and executions is marketed with a good deal of showmanship. People visit to be entertained, at least as much as to commune with history. The ravens were, for many, simply a part of the spectacle, and it did not matter very much to visitors whether the stories told about them were true or not, much less whether they were authentic folklore. But the ravens, particularly those in the Tower of London, have been our partners in an endeavor to reconnect with a mythic past.
I have just come across a document that helps me to better reconstruct the cultural context in which ravens first were brought to the Tower. As so often happens, that as not through research but serendipity. Browsing in Half Moon Books in Kingston, New York, I came across a worn but still handsome copy of Birds and Man by W. D. Hudson, published in 1901. That was 18 years after ravens had been brought to the Tower, yet before the public had begun to notice them very much. Half Moon Books seemed an uncannily appropriate place to make the discovery, since it is has the shabby elegance of a literary salon of the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.
Like many people of his day, Hudson felt disoriented by the pace of industrialization, and, despite recognizing its injustices, nostalgic for the old order, which he identified with ravens. He quotes an unnamed author of a book called Birds of Wiltshire, that a raven tree, “is no mean ornament to a park, and speaks of a wide domain and large timber, and an ancient family; for the raven is an aristocratic bird and cannot brook a confined property and trees of young growth” (p. 118). Hudson then goes on to lament that the proprietors of great estates, which might have displayed their antiquity and splendor by keeping ravens, had over the last few decades, done their best to extirpate them, simply because the birds had taken an occasional rabbit.
Hudson adds that, “At present one may go from end to end of the country, which is a long one, and find no raven; but in very many places, from North Devon to the borders of Gloucestershire, one would find accounts of ‘last ravens.’ Even in the comparatively populous neighborhood of Wells at least three pairs of ravens bred annually down to about twenty years ago ̶ one pair in the tower on Glastonbury Tor, one on the Ebor rocks, and one at Wookey Hole. . .” (p. 119). Glastonbury Tor is an iconic center of legends, comparable to the Tower of London. I wonder if the disappearance of the Glastonbury ravens may, in some fashion, have helped inspire people to import such birds to the Tower at roughly the same time.
At any rate, Hudson states that “last raven tales” could fill a volume, but he gives only a single one. Around 1841, a parish doctor was visiting a remote village in Somerset. Around midnight, he heard a loud tapping at the window, which was resumed at intervals, but the people in the house took no notice of it. He finally asked why nobody went to see if a visitor was at the door, and they told him that it was only the ravens. Whenever they saw a light burning late in the cottage, they came to inquire and rapped on the window (p. 120).
To conclude, the ravens may have been brought to the Tower of London partly in response to “last raven tales.” People wondered, “Where have all the ravens gone?” An answer might be, “We still have some here, at the Tower of London.” As the parish doctor in Somerset discovered, ravens are genuinely interested in people, and interact with men and women in complex ways. Unlike most dogs, ravens respond to human beings on a basis of equality. Unlike most cats, they seemed attuned to our emotional nuances. They are genuinely interested in men and women, and they do not even hold environmental devastation against us. By the way, if anyone would still like to collect and edit that book of “last raven tales” that Hudson envisioned, I would be delighted to read it.
