The House of Commons was born within these grey walls nearly five and a half centuries ago, when the Commons were told to go to “leur ancienne place en la maison du Chapitre de l’Abbeye de Westminster.” The members met here till they moved to the Chapel of St. Stephen, within the walls of Westminster Palace, in 1547.
Turn your back on the ugly cases of the seals
POETS’ CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY
and charters that should have been removed to the Record Office with the rest of the public records that were stored here since Elizabethan days, and look instead at the faint fourteenth-century mural decoration of Christ surrounded by the Christian virtues. Even the unsightly cases cannot destroy the sense of the lovely proportions of the shaft-supported roof and the arcaded walls with the six noble windows, filled with glass none the less beautiful because it happens to be modern, and all the more interesting because it honours the memory of that great lover of Westminster, Dean Stanley.
When Edward the Confessor about 1050 built the first round Chapter House on this spot for his Benedictine monks to transact the business of their monastery, they little thought to what varied uses it would be put. The present octagonal room has seen the age-long struggle of the people for their liberties. It was damaged in the Civil Wars and suffered from repairs in the eighteenth century. It has had its painted walls concealed by unsightly cupboards, when the public records were stored there. It has housed the Domesday Book till it and the records were removed in 1862, and now that it has been restored as nearly as possible to its old beauty, it exists, spacious and dignified as ever, to remind the passing visitor of the value of tradition and the history of a great nation.
A few steps farther along the cloister is another less well-known corner, the Chapel of the Pyx—not so ecclesiastical a chamber as it sounds, “pyx” meaning only a chest or box where the standard of references for testing the coins of the realm used to be kept. Nowadays they make these tests at the hall of the ancient Company of Goldsmiths, at the corner of Foster Lane and Gresham Street.
Long ago the king’s treasure was kept here, and only the king and my Lord Chancellor and the Abbot of Westminster had the keys, a fact that was very inconvenient when a robbery occurred, as at least one abbot found to his cost. He and forty of his monks saw the inside of the Tower in consequence, but punishment was not always so light, as the pieces of human skin still to be seen nailed to the door will show.