Photo W. Rice, F.R.P.S. Allen & Co (London) Ltd Sc
The Norman Cloister.
Accordingly, in 1245, he began to have the Confessor’s Norman church pulled down, and in its stead he built the splendid church we now see, a church which has been called “the most lovely and lovable thing in Christendom.”
The choir and transepts, the Chapter-House, and some of the cloisters were built during Henry’s reign. The monks sang service in the new choir and transepts for the first time on 13th October 1269, when the body of Edward the Confessor was placed in the magnificent new shrine made for it by Henry III.
Some of the nave was then gone on with, but it was not built to its present length until the reign of Henry V. The first time it was used for a procession was when the Te Deum was sung in thanksgiving after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. The money for building this part of the Abbey was given into the care of a man named Dick Whittington, whom some people think to have been the famous Lord Mayor of that name. This, however, is doubtful.
The church built by Henry III is very different from a Norman church. Instead of round arches, it has very pointed ones; the windows are long and pointed; the pillars are tall, slender, and graceful. The wonder seems to be how such a building can have stood for all these hundreds of years. And indeed it would not stand, if it were not for the beautiful flying buttresses which support it on the outside.
In the reigns of Edward III and Richard II the cloisters were finished, and Abbot Litlington built the celebrated rooms known as the Jerusalem Chamber and the College Hall. A very fine North Porch, called “Solomon’s Porch,” was built in Richard II’s reign, but unhappily none of it now remains.
In the year 1503, King Henry VII began the chapel which is known by his name, and which is so famous for its beauty. It stands on the place where Henry III’s Lady Chapel stood, but it is much larger than the older chapel, and some houses had to be pulled down to make room for it, among them being the house where the poet Chaucer is said to have lived. Henry VII’s chapel is too elaborate to describe here. The decoration is so rich and so delicate that it looks almost like lace-work, and the badges carved on the walls, the Tudor roses, the Beaufort portcullis, and the fleur-de-lys are a kind of history lesson in themselves. The fan-tracery vault is most wonderful, both in its lovely design and splendid masonry work.
We have now come almost to an end of the story of the actual building of the Abbey,—at any rate of the chief parts of it. The tracery of the great west window was put up in the year 1498, in Abbot Esteney’s time, but the glass in it dates only from the reign of George II. The western towers, which were begun long before, were finished in 1739 or 1740, from a design made by a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren.
In 1540, King Henry VIII made great changes in the monasteries all over England. The monks were sent away from Westminster, and their place was taken by a Dean and twelve prebendaries. For just ten years, from 1540 to 1550, the Abbey was made into a cathedral, or church where a bishop has his throne. During these years there was a Bishop of Westminster, but when the bishop resigned, in 1550, his diocese was joined once more to the See of London.