Every Church afforded the same form of protection and there were in London two special chartered sanctuaries that, owing to the security afforded them within their sacred bounds, became strongholds of thieves and robbers, where the frontier was a deadline that no outsider dared to trespass. Across that deadline the inhabitants of the sanctuary conducted raids upon the peaceful inhabitants of the City. These sanctuaries were the notorious St.
Martin le Grand—now occupied by the General Post Office, and Alsatia, a name applied by the lawless inhabitants to Whitefriars adjoining the Temple, now the territory of the Press.
Broad Sanctuary never was subject to the abuses that made St. Martin le Grand and Alsatia a menace to their neighbours and a scandal to the City. At Westminster the right of sanctuary remained what it was intended to be, a refuge where anyone might find safety from the vengeance of the law or from the persecution of his fellowmen.
The privilege of Sanctuary was abolished in We have seen how King Canute built himself a palace at Thorney on the site of older buildings and how Edward the Confessor occupied and enlarged the same Royal dwelling. William the Conqueror resided there at times and it was probably his principal dwelling while the Tower was building. His son William Rufus started to rebuild the Palace of which he lived to complete only the Banqueting Hall now called Westminster Hall.
Westminster Palace was like a little City enclosed by towered walls. The appearance that it presented must have been picturesque in the extreme.
When its courts and halls and galleries and gardens were filled with colour, with the splendour of a mediaeval court and its gorgeous retinue, it must have been very wonderful. The walls that enclosed the Palace enclosed also the Abbey. There was a private communication between the two, and the church was in fact the Royal Chapel attached to the Palace of Westminster. All of the Palace buildings with one exception were burned down in in a great fire.
When the ground was being cleared of the debris left by the fire, a vast system of crypts, cellars, vaults and foundation walls belonging to the Palace of Canute and his successors were uncovered. To give a solid foundation for the new buildings these were filled in with cement, and on those venerable foundations the Houses of Parliament stand. It adjoins Westminster Hall, now used only on rare occasions, a noble old edifice whose oaken roof with its hammer beams was restored by Richard II.
It was formerly used as a law court and it is crowded with memories of historic scenes. The trial of Wallace, the trial of Raleigh, the trial of Charles I, and the trial of Warren Hastings, stand out among events the most stirring in the history of England and the Empire.
One great figure in the long procession moving across that space is revealed with distinctness among innumerable shadows. Shakespeare who had been dead two years was spared that scene, as strange, as tragic and as great as anything his genius had created for the stage.
But there was a. It is a chill November morning. The pavements and the roofs are covered with a mantle of hoar frost. Early though it is, Old Palace Yard is filled with people. From every window others look down—waiting. There is no movement. It is an expectant crowd, subdued and mournful, but here and there a suppressed voice is heard in angry tones.
The venerable pile of the Palace, its roofs whitened with the frost, its hoary battlements and turrets outlined against the eastern dawn, fills in the prospect, closing the view like a scene on the stage. A little advanced in the foreground stands a scaffold draped in black. The waiting is not prolonged. In the centre of the approaching group is a weary man whose hair and beard are turning grey.
There is a great dignity in his look and he walks with firm step and proudly, head erect. The heart within him is a broken heart but it is the heart of an Englishman. And all England is regarding him.
Some had been his fellows in the Temple, some had drunk with him at the Mermaid, some had known him as the gallant favourite at a brilliant court, some had fought beside him in Ireland in the service of the Queen and some had been with him when he drove his questing keels through perilous seas to shores unknown.
And now they see him once again—see him with a front as bold as when he stormed the Spanish Main. The sheriff asks him respectfully whether he will step within and warm himself at the fire before ascending the scaffold.
Turning towards the headsman standing there he touches lightly the edge of the axe. A few words of farewell with his face raised towards the hushed assembly. Standing over him, the headsman seems nervous and hesitant. His body was laid in St. There in the chancel you may read his name. His head, wrapped in a cloth, was carried from the scaffold on that morning to a closed carriage not far away in which his lady sat waiting to receive it. She took it home and laid it in a shrine she had made for it and kept it all her days and when she died she left it to her son—and that is the end of the story.
The Houses of Parliament are by tradition a Royal Palace and by virtue of that fact are in the custody of the Lord Great Chamberlain, an hereditary office not to be confused with that of the Lord Chamberlain. The exterior of Westminster Palace presents a richly ornamented late Gothic style of architecture dominated by Victoria Tower on the South end and by the Clock Tower on the North.
Its Western front is partly occupied by Old Westminster Hall incorporated on that side, but the East front rising from the river presents in an unbroken stretch the outlines of a well proportioned and stately building, a legend expressed in modern terms but with a fine sense of its ancient glories. It shows what the Nineteenth Century could do.
It is interesting and instructive to compare these two ancient cities, London and Westminster, lying side by side on the same bank of the Thames. The history of Westminster leaves one to infer that it has been remarkably indifferent to all these things.
Until it became a Metropolitan borough, almost the only government that City had known was an ecclesiastical government, following its traditional position of an estate attached to the Abbey. Its population had inherited no experience of government and it had no civic consciousness. Yet Westminster was the birthplace of modern constitutional government and remains the seat of national administration and of organized Society as represented by parliament.
It is the peculiar quality of London on the other hand that it always had a strong civic consciousness and also, from the time its history becomes clear, the kind of assurance that is born of long experience with the management of its affairs. What was the source of that consciousness and that assurance and how did London gain that experience?
The Saxons were not City builders; they knew only village life. Notable among the burials is the Unknown Warrior , whose grave, close to the west door, has become a place of pilgrimage. Heads of State who are visiting the country invariably come to lay a wreath at this grave. This has a spectacular fan-vaulted roof and the craftsmanship of Italian sculptor Pietro Torrigiano can be seen in Henry's fine tomb.
The chapel was consecrated on 19th February Since it has been associated with the Most Honourable Order of the Bath and the banners of the current Knights Grand Cross surround the walls. A new stained glass window above this, by Alan Younger, and two flanking windows with a design in blue by Hughie O'Donoghue, give colour to this chapel. Two centuries later a further addition was made to the Abbey when the western towers left unfinished from medieval times were completed in , to a design by Nicholas Hawksmoor.
Little remains of the original medieval stained glass , once one of the Abbey's chief glories. Some 13th century panels can be seen in the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries. The great west window and the rose window in the north transept date from the early 18th century but the remainder of the glass is from the 19th century onwards.
History did not cease with the dissolution of the medieval monastery on 16th January The bishopric was surrendered on 29th March and the diocese was re-united with London, Westminster being made by Act of Parliament a cathedral church in the diocese of London. But on the accession of Elizabeth I the religious houses revived by Mary were given by Parliament to the Crown and the Abbot and monks were removed in July Queen Elizabeth I , buried in the north aisle of Henry VII's chapel , refounded the Abbey by a charter dated 21 May as a Collegiate Church exempt from the jurisdiction of archbishops and bishops and with the Sovereign as its Visitor.
Its Royal Peculiar status from was re-affirmed by the Queen and In place of the monastic community a collegiate body of a dean and prebendaries, minor canons and a lay staff was established and charged with the task of continuing the tradition of daily worship for which a musical foundation of choristers, singing men and organist was provided and with the education of forty Scholars who formed the nucleus of what is now Westminster School one of the country's leading independent schools.
In addition the Dean and Chapter were responsible for much of the civil government of Westminster, a role which was only fully relinquished in the early 20th century. Thus the Abbey was reshaped and newly patterned to discharge a distinctive yet worshipful role in a modern age. Still today, a daily pattern of worship is offered to the Glory of God. He built it to honour St Edward the Confessor in a new Gothic style. It also incorporates English features such as single rather than double aisles, and wide projecting transepts projecting from the long nave.
The entire Abbey is covered by a Cosmati pavement made up of thousands of cut pieces of mosaic and porphyry. There are missing letters that explain the symbolic meaning of how long the universe would last which is 19, years. Ben Jonson, a celebrated 17th-century poet, could only afford two square feet of space and was buried standing up in His grave is in the north aisle of the Nave. A total of 39 coronations have taken place in the abbey with the most recent one being in That was the coronation of the current Queen Elizabeth II.
The chair used in all royal coronations since is at the Abbey too. The chair was damaged by visitors in the s and s, it is therefore now under high-level security.
The stone had been brought from Scotland in by Edward I and was kept under the coronation chair where monarchs were crowned for more than years. The Unknown Warrior was buried in the presence of the sovereign in , and his grave became a place of popular pilgrimage. Royal weddings returned to the abbey, where they had not been held since medieval times. This close association between the monarchy and the abbey has been consolidated since the second half of the 20th century.
So, the abbey today is very royal, but also very popular; it is very sacred, yet also very secular; it is very old, but with a constant capacity for renewal. It is the setting for great ceremonials — focused on the monarchy and royal family — yet it is also a place for private devotion and prayer.
But it cannot be too often stressed that none of this could have been foreseen when a group of monks founded their small monastic community, to the west of the city of London, in what may or may not have been the year AD Sign in. Back to Main menu Virtual events Masterclasses. From the time of Henry III, it had become the established burial place for monarchs, their consorts and often their children as well. The execution of Charles I ushered a new era for Westminster Abbey.
The abbey seemed not so much a house of God, but a world of patronage, pensions, sinecures, family connection and self-perpetuating oligarchy. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster. More on: William the Conqueror.
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