Tower of London: Ravenmaster

It is not known when the ravens first came to the Tower of London, but their presence there is surrounded by myth and legend.

Unusually for birds of ill omen, the future of both Country and Kingdom relies upon their continued residence, for according to legend, at least 6 ravens must remain lest both Tower and Monarchy fall.

As legend has it, if there are no ravens in the Tower of London, it will crumble to dust and a great harm will come to England, meaning the crown will fall and Britain with it.

The legend dates to the reign of Charles II, the revered king whose governance of England was marred, in the 1660s, by consecutive catastrophes that devastated London: a plague epidemic and a citywide fire.

It was  Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed  who  complained to Charles II that wild ravens were flying past his telescope and making it harder for him to observe the sky from his observatory in the White Tower.

Flamsteed requested that the birds be removed, but Charles II refused to comply with this request.

Another variation of this legend says that it was Charles II himself who disliked the wild ravens’ droppings falling onto the telescope.

The conversation with his astronomer that supposedly followed decided the fate not only of the ravens, but also where the Greenwich Observatory was commissioned by the King in 1675.

In this version of the legend the King complained:

“These ravens must go!” he said. “But, Sire, it is very unlucky to kill a raven,” replied Flamstead, “If you do that the Tower will fall and you will lose your kingdom, having only just got it back!” Charles, being a pragmatist, thought for a moment and said: “The Observatory must go to Greenwich and the ravens can stay in the Tower.”

Perhaps Charles II wasn’t willing to tempt fate, he and London had suffered greatly.

During the Great Plague of London (1665-1666), the disease called the bubonic plague killed about 200,000 people in London, England.

In 7 months, almost ¼ of London’s population died from the plague.

At its worst, in September of 1665, the plague killed 7,165 people in one week. After this, the number of people dying from the plague began to slow down and around September of 1666, the great outbreak ended.

Unfortunately another tragedy hit, the Great Fire of London, which happened in September 1666, which may have helped end the outbreak by killing many of the rats and fleas which were carriers of the plague.

Wild ravens, as well as pigs were the biggest scavengers in medieval London after the fire and allegedly the survivors started persecuting ravens for scavenging, but  again explained to Charles II, killing all ravens would be a bad omen, and that the kingdom would not outlive the last killed raven.

By the time the Great Plague ended, about 2.5% of England’s population had died from the plague. To compare, about 2% of the entire United Kingdom’s population

(including soldiers and civilians) died in World War I, and about 1% of the entire United Kingdom’s population died in World War II. ) 

As for Charles II himself, he was born on May 29, 1630, in England, right at the beginning of a period of political turmoil.

While he became King of Scotland in 1649, it was far from a merry event—he succeeded his father, Charles I, who was executed at Whitehall on 30 January 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War.

He ruled over Scotland for 2 years before being deposed and England entered the period known as the English Interregnumor / English Commonwealth, and the country was a de facto republic, led by Oliver Cromwell.

That’s far from where Charles’ story ends, though, and he went on to be restored as ruler in 1660.

Cromwell defeated Charles II at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, and Charles fled to mainland Europe.

Cromwell became virtual dictator of England, Scotland and Ireland.  A political crisis that followed the death of Cromwell in 1658 resulted in the restoration of the monarchy, and Charles was invited to return to Britain.

On his 30th birthday, he was received in London to public acclaim. After 1660, all legal documents were dated as if he had succeeded his father as king in 1649.

Charles’s English parliament enacted laws known as the Clarendon Code, designed to shore up the position of the re-established Church of England.

Charles sided with the Tories, and, following the discovery of the Rye House Plot to murder Charles and James in 1683, when some Whig leaders were executed or forced into exile.

Charles dissolved the English Parliament in 1681, and ruled alone until his death on 6 February 1685.

He was received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed.

The first two depictions of ravens in the Tower of London both date from the year 1883. One is in a special edition of the newspaper The Pictorial World, and the other is from the children’s Book London Town, written by Felix Leigh 

Sax found one early mention of importation of captive ravens in the 1918 book The Tower from Within by George Younghusband.

Younghusband stated that the ravens were provided by the 4th Earl of Dunraven (1841–1926).

The 2nd Earl of Dunraven had been a patron of the Druidic scholar, poet, and forger Iolo Morganwg, who convinced the family that their castle in Glamorgan had been the original residence of the raven-god Bran, actually an early king.

The Earls may have thought of the ravens as avatars of Bran, and wished to assert a spiritual claim over the Tower because Brân the Blessed’s head, according to legend, is buried beneath the Tower. 

Ravens have a history in the Kings of England , it’s said King Arthur’s grave can never be located because he turned into a raven, which can’t be found.

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World War II

During World War II, only one raven was able to survive the hardships of the bombing during the Blitz, so the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, ordered more ravens to be brought in, in order to bring the flock up to the correct size.

At the time, the ravens were being used as unofficial spotters for enemy bombs and planes.

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At the tower of London there are 37 Yeoman Warders who live and work there, popularly known as Beefeaters, but Skaife has what might be the coolest title of them all: He is only the sixth Ravenmaster ever to have been appointed at the Tower.

His job is to maintain the health and safety and welfare of the seven fearsome, black-as-night corvids on whose continued residence at the Tower the fate of the nation depends ravens (a flock of ravens is called an “unkindness” or a “conspiracy”) that live within the Tower walls.

His daily routine begins when he steps out of his apartment in the walls of the Tower at 5.30: “There’s no one around, just me and the shadows of a thousand years of history”.

Yeoman Alan Kingshott says, “‘You don’t have to live at the Tower of London when you’re a Yeoman Warder, but most people choose to,’ he says. ‘You pay rent and bills like everyone else, but it is a different experience. The floorboards are original and they can be a pain to vacuum, and you have to buy furniture that comes apart to get them through the doorways! The bedroom used to be a prison cell – it still has locks on the outside of the door.”

You can make your own joke about that,’ he smiles. Alan’s wife, Pat, also used to work at the Tower of London, as a Jewel House team leader. They live at the Tower most of the week but have now also bought a house in West Sussex near where they used to live, as Alan prepares for retirement.

As well as giving tours to the yearly 3 million visitors, he is responsible for releasing the ravens in the morning, ensuring they are watered and fed (apparently for a treat they get dog biscuits soaked in blood) and rounding them up at night – no easy task, one that has involved hazardous night-time climbs on scaffolding and across rooftops.

A natural storyteller, Skaife writes with affection and insight about these powerful, unpredictable and highly intelligent birds.

On a typical day, Skaife rises before dawn to fill the ravens’ water bowls, clean the enclosure, feed the ravens chicken, lamb and pig hearts, release them for the day and keep an eye on each of them as they mill about the grounds.

He will also keep his fingers crossed that no raven decides to fly the coop and makes  sure the previous day’s tours and events haven’t left any dangerous debris around the Tower that might harm his charges.

Skaife, whose  memoir of his time at the Tower, The Ravenmaster,  spoke with the National Post about his ravens, from their capacity to summon human emotions and to snap bones with their beaks, to the relationships they have with the public and with him.

Skaife said he was encouraged to set up his social media accounts after he received constant questions about the tower’s feathery residents. He said he is constantly surprised by how popular the ravens are.

Skaife also loves sharing tales of what he calls “Victorian melodrama.” In addition to his work at the Tower, he also runs Grave Matters, a Facebook page and a blog, as a collaboration with medical historian and writer Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris.

Together they post about the history of executions, torture, and punishment.

You can follow the ravenmaster here and the Tower of London here.

“They have empathy and sadness and anger and pain and frustration and excitement.

They have all the characteristics that we have. When I first started looking after the ravens, for two or three years I kind of just saw them as these extra attachments to the Tower and its history.

And then I really started to look at them in much more detail. I got fascinated by them, watching their movements and how they do things day in and day out.

For me, it was looking at how their characteristics and their personalities actually shone through. That’s what I love about them.”

“I would never suggest anybody get too close to the ravens, because they do bite. They generally have a good rapport with the public, but they’re big birds, so the public have a tendency to keep their distance from them.

We have had one or two people who have been bitten by ravens in the past — a little nip, as if to say, “Stay away.

 They can crush bone. They would be able to crush a small child’s finger quite easily. In the wild, they eat fish, rodents, mice and small birds. It’s extremely painful when you get a full bite from the raven.

If I get a full bite, it takes all my strength — and I’m quite a strong person — to pry the beak apart if I have to. So I don’t bother. I just let them bite, and then they get fed up.”

The seven currently in his charge are named Erin, Gripp II, Harris, Jubilee II, Merlina, Munin and Rocky.

It is a rule , only ravens born in captivity are allowed to stay at the tower, so it was a special occasion when proud parents Huginn and Muninn welcomed their four healthy chicks into the world in April 2019.

The chicks were the first ravens to be hatched at the Tower in 30 years.

Huginn and Muninn arrived at the Tower at the end of 2018 and in mid-April the Ravenmaster noticed they had built a large nest overnight.

Within only a few weeks he could hear the sound of chirruping chicks.

The chicks are currently feeding at least every two hours during this growth development stage.

The parents work as a team: the male, Huginn, prepares the food and then passes it to the mother, Muninn, who then gives it to the chicks.

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They have a varied diet of quail, mice and rats, provided to them by the Ravenmaster.

One of the chicks will stay at the Tower and it will join the other ravens later in the summer, when it is older.

As the ravens started to hatch on the 23 April, St George’s Day, the raven that will be staying at the Tower will be called George or Georgina in honor of the occasion.

The ravens are free to roam the Tower precincts during the day and preside over four different territories within the Tower’s walls.

Ravens are intelligent birds and each of ours has its own personality; they can mimic sounds, play games and solve problems.

Skaife said,  “some ravens mimic humans. We had one raven once who said ‘Good morning’ to Vladimir Putin,” Skaife went on.

“He was quite taken aback.” They are said to have a York accent and unfortunately sometimes tell visiting students to b…..r off.

Ravens are big: some two feet high, with a wingspan of up to four feet and weighing two and a half pounds. They are equipped with a vicious beak (“as good as any axe or razor”) and powerful talons.

He was once summoned by the sound of tourists screaming: a raven had caught a pigeon and was eating it “from the inside out while it was still alive” next to a queue for the Jewel House.

With their iridescent black plumage, the birds have long been associated with death and war. They are, he says, “the soldier’s natural ally”.

 Skaife writes, “I have discovered a lot about what it means to be a human: I’ve learned to listen, to observe, and to be still. The ravens have been my teachers and I have been their pupil.”

Ravens in the wild work in pairs. They like to command a lot of ground. They’re very territorial.

Each pair of ravens will go and hang around their own territories throughout the day.  Skaife says , “I let them out in order: the junior ones go out first and the dominant pairs come out later. They do come together, but generally, they get on OK.”

As tradition going back 700 years, all Yeoman Warders and their families live within the Tower walls. Right now about 150 people, including a doctor and a chaplain, claim the Tower of London as their home address.

Skaife ‘s house at the Tower, is surrounded by forty-foot walls and arrow slits for windows.

He used to live next to the Bloody Tower, but had to move to a different apartment within the grounds because his first one was “too haunted.”

He doesn’t really believe in ghosts, he says, but does put stock in “echoes of the past.”

He once spoke to a little girl who was sitting near the raven cages, and when he turned around, she had disappeared. He also claims that things in his apartment inexplicably move around, particularly Christmas-related items.

When he’s at work, at the Tower of London, Yeoman Warder Christopher Skaife typically wears a uniform featuring a royal-blue tabard with scarlet ornamentation, a brass-buckled belt, and a bonnet. (Formalwear involves stockings and a ruff.)

 He has tattoos on his calves depicting ravens, as well as, he said, “the skulls of those who were executed on the Tower Green.

Only the Yeoman Warders, their families, and invited guests can go inside a secret pub on the Tower grounds. Naturally, the Yeoman Warder’s Club offers Beefeater Bitter beer and Beefeater gin.

It’s lavishly decorated in police and military memorabilia, such as patches from U.S. police departments.

There is also an area by the bar where a section of the wall has been dug into and encased in glass, showing items found in an archaeological excavation of the moat, such as soldiers’ discarded clay pipes, a cannonball, and some mouse skeletons.

The Byward Tower, which was built in the 13th century by King Henry III, is now used as the main entrance to the Tower for visitors. It has a secret glass brick set into the wall that most people don’t notice.

When you peer inside, you’ll see it contains a human hand (presumably fake). It was put in there at some point as a bit of a joke to scare children, but ended up being walled in from the other side, so is now in there permanently.

The title Ravenmaster came from the period of time when  Henry Johns was appointed Yeoman Quartermaster just after World War II, some of the old Yeoman Warders used to joke that he was raving mad—so keen was he on caring for the birds—and so he affectionately became known as the Raving Master instead of the Quartermaster.

It wasn’t until John Wilmington took over from Henry Johns in 1968 that the more sane-sounding title of Raven Master became official, and not until some years later—doubtless due to some clerical error in a back office somewhere—that the Raven Master became known as the Ravenmaster.

All Yeoman Warders must have at least 22 years of military service to qualify for the position and have earned a good-conduct medal.

Skaife served for 24 years—he was a machine-gun specialist and is an expert in survival and interrogation resistance. He is also a qualified falconer.

Skaife started out as a regular Yeoman Warder who had no particular experience with birds. The Ravenmaster at the time “saw something in him,” Skaife says, and introduced him to the ravens, who apparently liked him—and the rest is history.

He did, however, have to complete a five-year apprenticeship with the previous Ravenmaster.

The Tower ravens are enlisted as soldiers of the Kingdom, and were issued attestation cards in the same way as soldiers and police.

As is the case with soldiers, the ravens can be dismissed for unsatisfactory conduct.

For example,  some ravens have gone absent without leave in the past and others have even been sacked. Raven Munin flew off to Greenwich and was eventually returned by a vigilant member of the public after seven days.

“I have something of a troubled relationship with Munin. Sometimes I think she hates me.She has been giving me the run-around for years and, since research suggests that ravens can recognise human faces, I can only assume that I did something horrendous in my early days at the Tower for which she has never forgiven me.

Raven George was dismissed for eating television aerials and Raven Grog was last seen outside an East End pub.

A special decree was issued about the incident:

On Saturday 13th September 1986, Raven George, enlisted 1975, was posted to the Welsh Mountain Zoo. Conduct unsatisfactory, service therefore no longer required.

In 1996, two more ravens fell out of favor and were dismissed from the Tower for “conduct unbecoming Tower residents.”

Despite having their flight feathers clipped on one wing, sometimes the Tower ravens desert their duties. In 1981, Grog the raven decided to leave the surroundings of the Tower for those of a pub, after 21 years of faithful service to the Crown.

 In contrast, a raven named Mabel was kidnapped from the Tower soon after World War II, a mystery that has never been solved.

Another story concerns the two ravens named “James Crow” and “Edgar Sopper”. James Crow, who was a much-loved and long-lived raven, had died. After noticing the commotion surrounding the other raven’s death, Edgar Sopper decided he could “play dead” in order to bring more attention to himself.

His trick was so convincing that the ravenmaster fully believed that Edgar Sopper had died. When the ravenmaster picked up the “corpse”, Edgar bit the man’s finger and “flapped off croaking huge raven laughs”.

Skaife says ravens can be extremely smart, and Merlina is among the smartest. She’s fond of pranking visitors by stealing their snacks, or when she’s especially bored, playing dead (to the shock of the occasional visitor who gets taken in by her act).

But she doesn’t do tricks on command — while there have been ravens in the past who could croak out a few words in English, Skaife says he’s committed to keeping these ravens as wild as possible. So you won’t hear a “Nevermore” echoing across the green — and Merlina and her colleagues are surprisingly free to fly around. .

In 1990 a chaplain named Norman Hood died in his chamber on the Tower grounds.

Former Assistant Ravenmaster Tom Trent has reported that the ravens appeared to be aware of the death, for they soon gathered on the Tower Green near the chapel, called out, and then became quiet, as though to pay their respects.

Corvids have been widely reported to hold “funerals,” in which they mourn and then cluster around a dead bird in silence.

Relative to their body size, ravens have the biggest brains of just about any birds in the world. For evidence of their intelligence, you need look no further than the storeroom which is the  inner sanctum for the  Ravenmaster at the Tower of London.

The Raven’s have an old version of the classic children’s game Kerplunk. In the raven edition, the challenge for the birds is to remove the straws in order to win a dead mouse, which I place in the tube, ready to fall down and be eaten.

Alongside the fishing net which is handy for raven-catching in case of emergency, there is the freezer that contains assorted meats such as mice, rats and day-old chicks.

The birds are fed nuts, berries, fruit, mice, rats, chicken, and blood-soaked biscuits. (“And what they nick off the tourists,” Skaife says.) He has also seen a raven attack and kill a pigeon in three minutes.

Each evening, Skaife whistles a special tone to call the ravens to bed—they’re tucked into spacious, airy cages to protect them from predators such as foxes.

All the Tower ravens are able to fly but, with careful feather management, plenty of food and a comfortable new enclosure, they are happy to call the Tower their home.

 I am the Ravenmaster, I don’t want the ravens to fly off, otherwise I’ll be out of a job. So what I actually do is that I’ll trim up the odd flight feather or two.” But he doesn’t truly clip their wings — and he doesn’t like the term “clipped.”

That’s occasionally led to some precarious situations. “I have, as the Ravenmaster, on one occasion — or maybe two or three — swu

ng on the spire of the tower up there, trying to catch a naughty raven,” he says. Indeed, later on we spot Merlina in her favorite perch high atop one of the Tower’s towers — accompanied at a safe distance by Jubilee, who’s showing some signs of being sweet on her

He states,  the new enclosure we use allows me to administrate the birds much better than I have done previously. It’s like their home. When we finish work for the day, we want to go back to our homes, have our tea, put our feet up and sleep. This is what the enclosure is — their safe haven.