On the right, within the present wooden gateway, the unattractive erection known as the “ticket-office” occupies the site of the royal menagerie, which existed here from the days of our Norman kings to the year 1834, when it was removed to Regent’s Park, and from which the present Zoo has developed. In the time of Henry III. (1252) the Sheriffs of London were “ordered to pay fourpence a day for the maintenance of a white bear, and to provide a muzzle and chain to hold him while fishing in the Thames.” In Henry’s reign the first elephant seen in England since the time of the Romans came to the Tower menagerie, and lions and leopards followed. James I. and his friends came here frequently “to see lions and bears baited by dogs,” and in 1708 Strype, the historian, mentions “eagles, owls, and two cats of the mountain,” as occupants of the cages. In 1829, and during the last five years of its existence here, the collection consisted of lions, tigers, leopards, a jaguar, puma, ocelot, caracal, chetah, striped hyæna, hyæna dog, wolves, civet cats, grey ichneumon, paradoxurus, brown coati, racoon, and a pit of bears. The “Master of the King’s bears and apes” was an official of some importance, and received the princely salary of three halfpence a day; but this was in Plantagenet times.
_Middle Tower._--The first “Tower” that the visitor of to-day passes under is called, by reason of its position at one time in the centre of the old ditch, the Middle Tower. Its great circular bastions commanded the outer drawbridge, and its gateway was defended by a double portcullis. The sharp turn in the approach--formerly a bridge, now a paved roadway--to this Tower would make it impossible to “rush” this gateway with any success. When Elizabeth returned as Queen to the Tower, which she had left, five years before, as prisoner, it was in front of this Middle Tower that she alighted from her horse and fell on her knees “to return thanks to God,” as Bishop Burnet writes, “who had delivered her from a danger so imminent, and from an escape as miraculous as that of David.”
_The Moat and Byward Tower._--The bridge and causeway connecting the Middle and Byward Towers has altered little in appearance, and looks, to-day, very much as it does in Gascoyne’s plan. But the broad Moat has been drained; the water was pumped out in 1843, and the bed filled up with gravel and soil to form a drill ground. It was across that portion of the Moat lying to the north, under Tower Hill, that two attempts at escape were made in the last years of Charles I.’s reign. Monk, the future Duke of Albermarle, had been taken captive at the siege of Nantwich by Fairfax, and was a prisoner in the Tower for three years. With him were brought two fellow-prisoners, Lord Macguire and Colonel MacMahon.