Tales of London

London’s palaces have come and gone over the past millennium, but Westminster Abbey has remained steadfast throughout. Dating back over a thousand years, the Collegiate Church of St Peter – as the Abbey is officially known – is today a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Given the number of coronations and burials at the Abbey, it has been referred to quite fittingly as Britain’s Valhalla.

Officially constructed as a Benedictine abbey in the 960s, legend has it that Saberht, the first Christian king of the East Saxons, founded a church on the site in the 7th century. St Peter himself is said to have turned up for the consecration after being given a lift over the Thames by a fisherman; each year the Fishmongers’ Company presents a salmon to the Abbey on 29th June, St Peter’s Day.

The new Abbey was to lend itself to the name of the area in which it stood: it was the minster to the west of the City of London, hence Westminster. King Edward the Confessor rebuilt the Abbey in the 11th century, and Britain’s oldest door, dating from the 1050s, is still in situ at the building. Edward died just one week after the Abbey was consecrated and became the first monarch to be interred there.

Edward’s successor, Harold Godwinson, is likely to have been crowned at Westminster Abbey, but the first recorded coronation we have is that of the man who defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings: William the Conqueror. William’s coronation took place on Christmas Day 1066, but all did not go according to plan. When Archbishop Ealdred called upon the assembled Saxons to cheer their approval, the shouts were misinterpreted by William’s guards outside the Abbey as the beginnings of an assassination attempt. They set fire to the surrounding houses, and the coronation ceremony had to be completed amidst scenes of chaos in the smoke filled Abbey. The ceremony did, however, set a precedent: since 1066, every crowned monarch of England has had their coronation at Westminster Abbey.

Since 1308 the monarch has been crowned whilst sitting in St Edward’s Chair, one of the oldest pieces of furniture in the country. The chair housed the Stone of Scone, upon which all Scottish kings had been traditionally crowned, until 1996 (excepting a brief period in 1950 when it was snuck away by Scottish nationalists). Today the Stone is held in Edinburgh Castle, on the understanding that it will be returned to the Abbey for future coronations. In the eighteenth century visitors to the Abbey were allowed to sit in St Edward’s Chair for a fee, but early tourists and choir boys had a habit of carving their initials into the chair – including one who scribed “P Abbott slept in this chair 5-6 July 1800”.

The present Abbey was built by Henry III in the thirteenth century, although the two western towers were constructed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in the eighteenth century. It remained a Benedictine monastic church from the tenth century until the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII in the 1530s. Eager to save the Abbey from the destruction that had befallen so many other monastic houses at his own hands, Henry granted it cathedral status in 1540. His daughter Mary briefly returned it to the monks sixteen years later, but in 1560 her half-sister Elizabeth designated it a ‘Royal Peculiar’, meaning that the Abbey came directly under the responsibility of the monarch – which is still the case today.

Sixteen royal weddings have taken place at Westminster Abbey since the year 1100, including that of the future Elizabeth II to Prince Philip in 1947, and Prince William to Kate Middleton in 2011. But the Abbey is also the site of 3300 burials: sixteen monarchs, eight Prime Ministers, poets, actors, scientists, military leaders, and possibly most famously of all the Unknown Warrior. Selected at random from four anonymous bodies exhumed from First World War battle sites, the Unknown Warrior's coffin was processed down Whitehall on Armistice Day 1920 before being laid to rest inside a special tomb at the Abbey. The Tomb of the Unknown Warrior is today the only gravestone in Westminster Abbey upon which it is forbidden to walk.

For more stories about the bizarre and quirky history of the capital, check out my other articles, or click here to subscribe to future updates!