Westminster Abbey

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Westminster Abbey is the great Gothic church beside the Thames in central London, the coronation church of the English and later British crown and the burial place of monarchs, statesmen, poets, and scientists. Its formal name — the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter at Westminster — preserves an older identity: for most of its history it was a Benedictine monastery, and a place of the daily liturgical round long before it became a national shrine. The dedication is to Saint Peter, keeper of the keys; the building stands not on a hill but on what was once marshy ground at a bend of the river, a site whose sanctity is asserted rather than inherited, made holy by what has been done on it across a thousand years.

That double character — house of prayer and theater of the state — is the key to the place. Almost everything the abbey is for can be read as a form of consecration: the setting-apart of ground, of relics, of a king. The crowning of a sovereign here is treated, in its central act, as a sacrament in all but name, and the same grammar of blessing that governs water, oil, and altar in the wider church governs the making of a monarch within these walls.

The Benedictine foundation

The traditional foundation runs to the tenth century, when a community of monks was established here under the monastic reforms of King Edgar and Saint Dunstan around 960. Dunstan, abbot and later archbishop of Canterbury, stood at the center of the English Benedictine revival — the movement that rebuilt cloistered life in the kingdom on Continental models, with the Rule of Benedict of Nursia as its charter and the unbroken cycle of the daily offices as its discipline. A small community of black monks at Westminster belongs to that reform: an outpost of monasticism on the edge of London, ordered by the Rule’s measured day of prayer, reading, and labor. For close to six hundred years the abbey was first of all a monastery, and only by accretion the other things it became.

The legend grew, characteristically, in the direction of greater sanctity: a story held that the original church was consecrated not by men but by Saint Peter himself, who appeared on the riverbank to bless it, leaving the fish of the Thames as his token. The tale is unverifiable and almost certainly later, but it does the work such stories do — it claims for the ground a holiness prior to and independent of any king, a consecration from above rather than from the throne.

The Confessor’s church

It was a king, all the same, who made Westminster a royal house. Edward the Confessor re-endowed and vastly enlarged the existing Benedictine monastery, raising a great stone church in the Romanesque manner of Normandy — the first building on the site to match the ambitions later piled upon it. That church was consecrated at the end of 1065, on 28 December, days before the king’s death in the first week of January 1066. Edward was too ill to attend his own foundation’s dedication. He was buried within it, and his tomb became the seed around which everything else would grow: a saint-king at the heart of a church that would crown his successors.

Edward’s death without an heir opened the succession crisis that ended at Hastings, and so the Confessor’s new church stood ready, by the year’s end, for a use he had not foreseen.

Henry III and the Gothic rebuilding

The building seen today is largely the work of Henry III, who from 1245 demolished the Confessor’s Romanesque church bay by bay and raised in its place a church in the new French Gothic manner — tall, light-flooded, its apse ringed with radiating chapels in the French fashion, its proportions closer to the cathedrals of the Île-de-France than to anything English. The model was Continental and deliberate; the abbey rises higher in the vault than any other medieval church in England, a French idea built in English stone. Henry poured more than a quarter-century and a king’s fortune into it, and the purpose was twofold: to make a fitting setting for the rite of crowning, and to enshrine the Confessor.

In 1269 the rebuilt eastern arm was ready, and on 13 October — the feast of the Translation of Saint Edward — the Confessor’s relics were carried to a new shrine raised behind the high altar. Henry himself, with his brother Richard of Cornwall and his sons, bore the coffin on their shoulders into the new sanctuary. The shrine was sheathed in the colored stone inlay of Italian craftsmen brought north for the work, and it sits at the dynastic and devotional center of the church, ringed by the tombs of the medieval kings who chose to lie near the saint. The last great medieval addition came two centuries later: the Lady Chapel of Henry VII, begun around 1503, a fan-vaulted masterwork of the English Perpendicular Gothic that the antiquaries called the chapel “of the whole world the wonder.”

The continuity of crowning

Since the coronation of William the Conqueror on Christmas Day 1066 — the first crowning that can be shown beyond doubt to have taken place at Westminster — nearly every English and British sovereign has been crowned within these walls. Around thirty-nine coronations have been performed here — nearly every English and British sovereign since 1066, only Edward V and Edward VIII among them never crowned. That first one set, in miniature, the strangeness of the whole institution: the Norman guard stationed outside the abbey heard the roar of acclamation rise from inside, mistook it for an assault on their duke, and began burning the houses round about, so that the new king was anointed amid the smoke of a city he had just conquered.

The continuity of rite is what gives the abbey its weight for the study of sacred space. A coronation is among the last surviving public ceremonies in Western Europe to treat a political act as a sacrament. Two objects fix that continuity in matter. The Coronation Chair, commissioned by Edward I around 1296 to enclose the Stone of Scone seized from the Scots, has held every English and British monarch crowned since the early fourteenth century — a plain oak throne, scarred and graffitied, that is among the oldest pieces of furniture in Europe still used for its original purpose. And the anthem that frames the central act, Handel’s setting of Zadok the Priest, written for the crowning of George II in 1727, has been sung at every coronation since; its text is the scriptural warrant for the whole proceeding, the anointing of Solomon by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet.

Anointing and the quasi-priestly king

The heart of the rite is not the placing of the crown. It is the anointing — the moment, screened from view beneath a canopy, when the archbishop touches the sovereign’s hands, breast, and head with consecrated oil. The same logic that runs through the church’s other blessings runs here: a substance set apart by consecration is applied to a person or thing to mark a change of state, much as holy water carries the church’s blessing into the world of ordinary matter. The oil descends, in the rite’s own self-understanding, from the consecration of the kings of ancient Israel — Saul and David and Solomon, anointed by priest and prophet — and the medieval church read it as conferring on the monarch a character that crosses the line between lay and clerical. The anointed king became, in this reading, a sacred person: not a priest, but no longer simply a layman; robed after the anointing in vestments that echo a bishop’s, set apart by oil as a bishop or a priest is set apart by oil.

It is for exactly this reason that the anointing is the one part of the coronation hidden from every eye. The crowning, the enthroning, the homage — all are spectacle. The anointing is treated as a mystery, an act done to the king by heaven rather than shown to the crowd, and the canopy that hides it makes the theological point in cloth: that this, and not the regalia, is the moment the sovereign is made. The sibling church of Reims held the same conviction for the kings of France, where the holy chrism of the Sainte Ampoule made the anointing, not the crown, the act that made a king; Westminster shares the doctrine without the relic, grounding the oil’s authority in scripture rather than in a vial brought down by a dove.

The Cosmati pavement and the figure of the cosmos

Directly before the high altar, where the sovereign is crowned, lies the Great Pavement — a panel of colored stone laid in 1268 by Roman craftsmen of the family that gave such work its name, under a master recorded in the inscription as Odoricus. It is the finest Cosmati pavement north of the Alps: porphyry, green serpentine, and colored glass set in geometric figures around a great central roundel, a quincunx of circles within a square. The materials were exotic and ancient — much of the porphyry quarried in antiquity and reused, old imperial stone carried into a new dedication.

The pavement once carried brass-lettered inscriptions, now mostly lost, recorded before they perished. One dated the work in the medieval fashion of arithmetic riddle — the year of Christ one thousand two hundred and twelve, plus sixty, less four: 1268 — and named the king, the city, the abbot, and Odoricus as its makers. Another set the pavement against the scale of the cosmos. The reader who weighs all that is laid here, it said, will find the measure of the primum mobile — the outermost, ninth sphere of the geocentric heavens, the first-moved that God sets turning and that drives all the spheres within it. The text then ran a chain of multiplying lifespans — a hedge, then dogs, horses, men, stags, ravens, eagles, sea-monsters, the world — each term tripling the one before, a geometric progression that resolves to the duration of the created order before the Day of Judgement. A further inscription, around the central globe, declared that this spherical figure shows the archetypal macrocosm: the pattern of the whole.

How literally the makers intended that meaning remains debated. The fullest modern reading, by Richard Foster in Patterns of Thought (1991), takes the pavement as a deliberate picture of the universe rendered in geometry — a map of the spheres and the ages, an image of cosmic order spread beneath the feet of the king at the instant of his anointing, so that the sovereign is crowned standing on a diagram of the cosmos he is sworn to keep in order. Other scholars read the figures as decorative and the cosmological program as a later, modern construction laid onto an inscription that may have meant less than it has been made to mean. What is not in doubt is that the rite of order — the crowning of the keeper of the realm — is performed on a floor that at least one medieval hand wished to read as the order of the heavens, and that the theme of proportion and ordained span belongs, by long descent, to the same family of ideas that classical antiquity bequeathed to the medieval picture of a measured, nested, intelligible world.

The Reformation and the royal peculiar

The monastery did not survive the sixteenth century intact. On 16 January 1540, in the dissolution of the religious houses, the Benedictine community at Westminster surrendered, and monastic life ended. The abbey itself was spared destruction: Henry VIII raised it to a short-lived cathedral with its own bishop. Mary I briefly restored the black monks in 1556 under Abbot John Feckenham; Elizabeth I removed them again, and by charter of 21 May 1560 refounded the church as a collegiate body exempt from the jurisdiction of archbishop and bishop, answerable directly to the Crown. Since then Westminster has been a “royal peculiar” — a church belonging to the sovereign rather than to any diocese, governed by a dean and chapter, the monks’ choir replaced by a college of canons but the daily round of sung offices continuing on the same stones. The institution changed its theology and its order; the liturgical clock kept running.

A secular pantheon over a sacred one

The abbey’s later associations are gentler but real, and they thicken the meaning of the place rather than dilute it. It holds the tomb of Isaac Newton — the monument raised in 1731, four years after his death — whose private writings on alchemy and biblical chronology were vast and largely unpublished in his lifetime. The monument was much remarked on as an emblem of reason enshrined in a house of faith, the new natural philosophy laid to rest beneath the same vaults that crowned kings by oil. Around him the building filled with the great dead of the nation: Geoffrey Chaucer, first of the poets to be buried in what became Poets’ Corner; the scientists’ graves of Darwin and Herschel and Rutherford; the statesmen, the explorers, the unknown warrior of the First World War buried in the nave under stone from the fields of France.

Over time the building became a kind of secular pantheon laid over a sacred one — a tension the place has never resolved and perhaps was never meant to. The poets and philosophers are not crowded out by the saint-king at the center; they are gathered around him, as the medieval kings were, drawn to a ground whose holiness they may or may not have shared but whose gravity they all sought. What the abbey offers the comparative eye is not a doctrine but a working example: a continuously consecrated ground where rite, memory, and the symbolism of order have accumulated across a thousand years, and are still in use.

Scholarship and sources

The architectural and documentary record of the abbey is unusually deep, and the building has been studied as fabric, as institution, and as theater of the state. The shrine, the royal tombs, and above all the Cosmati pavement have drawn a dedicated literature. Richard Foster’s Patterns of Thought: The Hidden Meaning of the Great Pavement of Westminster Abbey (Jonathan Cape, 1991) is the fullest argument for reading the floor as a cosmological diagram; its decoding of the primum mobile inscription and the multiplying lifespans is the standard reference for the cosmic interpretation, even where later scholars qualify it. The edited volume Westminster Abbey: The Cosmati Pavements, edited by Lindy Grant and Richard Mortimer (Ashgate, 2002), gathers the art-historical and archaeological scholarship on the Roman work in its English setting. Warwick Rodwell’s two-volume The Cosmatesque Mosaics of Westminster Abbey: The Pavements and Royal Tombs (Oxbow, 2020) is the definitive technical study, written after the pavement’s modern conservation revealed its full state. The geometry of the Cosmati floors — their nested circles and proportional ratios — has been analyzed in its own right in the Nexus Network Journal, the venue for mathematics in architecture, which treats the pavement as a worked example of a building made to embody number. For the building as a whole the Encyclopaedia Britannica gives a reliable overview of foundation, fabric, and function, and the Coronation Chair and the rite it serves are documented in the standard accounts of the English coronation liturgy from the medieval ordines to the order used in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

→ Related: Middle Ages · Apophatic Theology · Monasticism · Benedict Of Nursia · Dunstan · Anointing · Consecration · Sacrament · Holy Water · Isaac Newton · Reims Cathedral · Canterbury Cathedral · Aachen Cathedral · Classical Antiquity