3-101-137 - "Royal Academy of Arts, London"/Heritage Images

Lambeth Palace - "Lollards' Tower", c1883. '[From] Mr Cave-Brown's Lambeth Palace and its Associations. This is the stone tower seen on the right of the photograph; that...to the left, of brick, being known, traditionally, as "Cranmer's Tower." As we now see it, the Lollards' Tower or more properly, The Water Tower, was, in the main built by Archbishop Chicheley, and completed in the year 1435, though portions of it are of a much earlier date. Mr Cave-Brown has carefully inquired into the origin of the popular name which would claim the Tower as a Lollards' prison, and has arrived at the conclusion that the tradition is baseless...Cave-Brown accounts for the tradition by suggesting that when the actual Lollards' Tower at St. Paul's was destroyed in the Great Fire, the name transferred to Lambeth. At the top of the Tower is a small room...the walls covered with thick oak, in which there are large iron rings. This room was undoubtedly used as a prison. There still remains names and sentences carved in the oak by the occupants of this room. The character and style of the inscriptions appear, according to Mr Cave-Brown, to belong rather to the seventeenth than to the fifteenth century, and, so far, to tell against the popular name of the Tower".' Description by Alfred Marks.