Westminster Abbey

• 1. Introduction

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  Westminster Abbey has stood at the heart of English and British history since 1066, when William the Conqueror became the first of 40 monarchs to be crowned within its walls. Inside, more than 3,300 people lie buried or commemorated: monarchs, poets, scientists, soldiers, and one unknown warrior who speaks for an entire generation lost to war. The artist William Morris called it a "National Valhalla" - a place so crowded with the famous dead that it became, as he saw it, a kind of national shrine to ambition, learning, and sacrifice. But the abbey is more than a burial ground. It is a royal peculiar, accountable directly to the sovereign rather than any bishop, which means its history is inseparable from the history of English monarchy itself. How did a small island monastery on the River Thames become the stage for England's most consequential moments? The answer stretches back well over a thousand years, through legend, royal ambition, political upheaval, and extraordinary architecture.

• 2. Island Monastery

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  Around 959, the scholar and churchman Dunstan and King Edgar installed a community of Benedictine monks on a site that was then an island in the Thames called Thorney Island. That is about as precise as historians can get, because the origins of the abbey are genuinely obscure. One tradition holds that a young fisherman had a vision of Saint Peter near the site; the Fishmongers' Company still gives the abbey a salmon each year in recognition of this story. Another legend credits the Saxon king Sæberht of Essex; yet another invokes a fictional 2nd-century king named Lucius. The monks who settled the island did not leave us a building, but archaeologists have found pottery and foundations from the period. What survives above ground from those early centuries is only fragments - some of the lower parts of a monastic dormitory in the undercroft. The community that Dunstan and Edgar founded was modest, numbering about a dozen monks. That would change dramatically once a Saxon king decided he needed a burial church worthy of a saint.

• 3. Edward the Confessor's Vision

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  Between 1042 and 1052, King Edward the Confessor began rebuilding Saint Peter's Abbey as his own royal burial church. The resulting structure was the first church in England built on a cruciform floorplan, constructed in the Romanesque style. Its master stonemason was Leofsi Duddason. The patrons were Godwin and Wendelburh Gretsyd - her surname meaning "fat purse" - and a man named Teinfrith served as "churchwright", probably responsible for carpentry and roofing. Edward's endowments swelled the monastic community from a dozen monks to as many as 80. The building was completed around 1060 and consecrated on the 28th of December 1065 - about a week before Edward's death on the 5th of January 1066. He was buried inside the church he had built. His wife Edith was laid beside him nine years later. When Edward's tomb was reopened in 1103 by Abbot Gilbert Crispin and Henry I, his body was found in perfect condition. This was taken as proof of his saintliness; he was canonised in 1161, and two years later his remains were moved to a new shrine - at which point his ring was removed and placed in the abbey's collection. The only surviving image of Edward's original church appears in the Bayeux Tapestry.

• 4. Henry III Rebuilds in Gothic

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  Construction on the present church began on the 6th of July 1245, on the orders of Henry III and under his master mason, Henry of Reynes. Henry III had multiple goals: to build a worthy shrine for the canonised Edward the Confessor, to rival great French churches like Reims Cathedral and the Sainte-Chapelle, and to create a burial place for himself and his dynasty. The work was immense. During summer months, up to 400 workers laboured on the site at a time - stonecutters, marblers, stone-layers, carpenters, painters, marble polishers, smiths, glaziers, plumbers, and general labourers. Henry of Reynes was replaced around 1253 by John of Gloucester, who was in turn replaced by Robert of Beverley around 1260. The financing was extraordinary, and occasionally coercive. Some 4,000 marks (about £5,800) for the golden shrine to Edward came from the estate of David of Oxford, husband of Licoricia of Winchester; a further £2,500 came from a forced contribution from Licoricia herself - the single largest donation at that time. By 1261, Henry had already spent over £29,000. The final sum may have approached £50,000. A consecration ceremony was held on the 13th of October 1269, during which the remains of Edward the Confessor were moved to their present location behind the main altar. After Henry's death and burial in the abbey in 1272, construction halted. The old Romanesque nave Edward the Confessor had built remained attached to the new Gothic structure for more than a century.

• 5. Reformation and Survival

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  In the 1530s, Henry VIII broke with Rome and seized England's monasteries, including Westminster Abbey. When his officers assessed the abbey in 1535, its annual income stood at £3,000. They removed relics, saints' images, and treasures; the golden feretory housing Edward the Confessor's coffin was melted down, and monks hid his bones to save them. The monastery was dissolved, and the building became a cathedral for the newly created Diocese of Westminster. The abbot, William Benson, became dean. The Westminster diocese was dissolved in 1550, and for a period the abbey was recognised as a second cathedral of the Diocese of London. Money meant for the abbey - dedicated to St Peter - was diverted to the treasury of St Paul's Cathedral, giving new life to the old saying "robbing Peter to pay Paul". The phrase appears to have been already old when this happened. Benedictine monks returned under the Catholic Mary I, only to be ejected again under Elizabeth I in 1559. In 1560, Elizabeth re-established Westminster as a royal peculiar - a church of the Church of England accountable directly to the sovereign. She renamed it the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter and re-founded Westminster School, providing for 40 students known as the King's (or Queen's) Scholars. Those scholars still have the duty of shouting "Vivat Rex" or "Vivat Regina" during coronations.

• 6. Centuries of Crisis

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  In 1642, the English Civil War broke out, and the Dean and Chapter fled. Priests loyal to Parliament replaced them. The abbey suffered: altars, stained glass, the organ, and the Crown Jewels were damaged or destroyed. Oliver Cromwell was given an elaborate funeral at the abbey in 1658, only for his body to be disinterred in January 1661 and posthumously hanged on a gibbet at Tyburn. In 1669, the diarist Samuel Pepys visited the abbey and saw the body of the 15th-century queen Catherine de Valois, who had been buried in the Lady chapel in 1437 but exhumed during building work and never reburied in the intervening 150 years. Pepys leaned into the coffin and kissed her on the mouth. She was not reinterred until 1878. Suffragette protests reached the abbey in 1913 and 1914, when protesters interrupted services by chanting "God Save Mrs Pankhurst" and praying for suffragette prisoners. On the 11th of June 1914, a bomb planted by the Women's Social and Political Union exploded inside the abbey. No serious injuries were reported, but the blast blew a corner off the Coronation Chair and cracked the Stone of Scone in half - a fracture not discovered until 1950, when four Scottish nationalists broke in to steal the stone and return it to Scotland. During World War II, incendiary bombs struck the abbey on the night of the 10th of May 1941. The lantern tower above the crossing collapsed, leaving the building open to the sky. The estimated cost of the damage was £135,000.

• 7. Architecture and Interior

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  Westminster Abbey's Gothic architecture draws primarily from 13th-century French models, particularly Reims Cathedral, rather than contemporaneous English styles. The nave is the highest of any Gothic church in England and far narrower than any medieval English church of comparable height. It has a long, rounded apse and radiating chapels - features typical of French Gothic practice. The church's interior has Purbeck marble piers and shafting; at 102 feet, the roof vaulting is among Britain's highest church vaults. To fit more guests during coronations, the transepts were designed to be unusually long, and the choir was placed east of the crossing rather than west. Before the crossing is the Cosmati pavement, a 700-year-old floor of almost 30,000 pieces of coloured glass and stone, measuring almost 25 feet square. It was commissioned by Richard Ware, who travelled to Rome in 1258 and returned with stone and craftsmen. The inscription in brass letters surrounding it - since lost - identified the artist as Odericus and predicted the end of the world 19,863 years after its creation. The Henry VII Chapel, at the eastern end, was described by John Leland as orbis miraculum - "the wonder of the world." Its fan vault ceiling, probably designed by William Vertue, was described by the writer Washington Irving as "achieved with the wonderful minuteness and airy security of a cobweb." The ceiling is not a true fan vault but a groin vault disguised as one. At its centre is the tomb of Henry VII and his wife Elizabeth of York, sculpted by Pietro Torrigiano, who had fled Italy after breaking Michelangelo's nose in a fight.

• 8. The Weight of the Dead

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  For most of the abbey's history, the people buried there were those with a connection to the church itself - local residents and monks, generally interred without surviving markers. That began to shift in the 18th century, boosted by the lavish funeral and monument of Isaac Newton, who died in 1727. By 1900, William Morris could describe the abbey as a "National Valhalla". Politicians buried there include William Gladstone and Clement Attlee. A cluster of scientists surrounds Newton's tomb, among them Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. Musicians tend to rest in the north aisle of the nave, including Henry Purcell and Ralph Vaughan Williams; George Frideric Handel lies in Poets' Corner. The first poet buried in the south transept was Geoffrey Chaucer, around 1400, who had been employed as Clerk of the King's Works and had apartments in the abbey. The grave of the Unknown Warrior - an unidentified soldier killed on a European battlefield in the First World War - lies just inside the Great West Door. The idea came from army chaplain David Railton, who proposed it in 1920. The funeral was held on the 11th of November 1920, the second anniversary of the end of the war; an estimated 1.25 million people viewed the gravesite in the following week. It is the only floor stone in the abbey on which it is forbidden to walk, and every visit by a foreign head of state begins there. On the 19th of September 2022, the state funeral of Elizabeth II was held at the abbey - the first funeral of a monarch there in more than 260 years.