Royal Lodgings at The Tower of London 1216–1327

One of the factors which has increasingly come to dominate any discussion of royal residences is the fact that there was a considerable specialization in function between them. Particular residences were used for specific purposes — those purposes may have been influenced by their geographical location, their physical arrangement or merely the monarch’s preferences. The purpose of this paper is to examine the royal lodgings at the Tower of London as used between 1216 and 1327 in exactly this way. It is an attempt to analyze the function of a residence and how that function — a highly specialized one — affected the form of the buildings and the timing of their construction.