The Story of Westminster Abbey

by Violet Brooke-Hunt

It is for giving us this most lovable thing that we owe to Henry III. a deep measure of gratitude, and yet heavy was the price paid for it at the time by those who, being weak and defenceless, were powerless to resist the heavy taxes laid on them. The new Abbey was paid for by the people: sometimes money was cruelly extorted from them; sometimes a great fair was arranged in the fields near Westminster, and all the shops in the neighbourhood were commanded to be closed for many days, so that the crowds would be forced to flock round the Abbey and spend their money there; sometimes large sums were extorted from the Jews; sometimes the king was driven as a last resource to pawning the Abbey jewels and treasures. At all costs money had to be found, and money in abundance, for Henry's ideas were all on the most lavish scale, and could not be carried out with less than £500,000 of our money.

So, in every sense of the word, the Abbey is the church of the nation, built with the gold of the people. And there is another striking fact to remember. Gradually the clear-headed and patriotic among the Barons were beginning to realise that though they had made the king swear to observe the Great Charter, they had no power of putting into laws which had to be observed the different provisions of that Charter; and though Henry was neither cruel nor tyrannical by nature, as his father had been, he was weak, impulsive, changeable, and extravagant. His idea of power lay in the carrying out of his magnificent ideas at Westminster, regardless of the cost, till, says Matthew of Paris severely, "Oh shame! his folly, by frequent repetition, came to be looked on as a matter of course."

This is not the place to tell you at length how one of the barons, Simon de Montfort by name, fought the good fight by means of which the Charter became a living power in the land; you must read of him in other books, and learn how he came to be called the father of English Parliaments. What I want you to remember now is that it was he who determined to check the unjust taxation which was being imposed by Henry in his efforts to raise the money for the building of the Abbey. "Let the king," he said, "call together the barons and citizens, and let him tell them how much money it is that he wants, and what he wants it for, and then it will be for the barons and people to say how much money they will give, and how it shall be collected. If the king asks what is right and just, then what he asks will be given to him."

There was only one way by which king and people could thus come face to face—Henry must summon to Westminster a Parliament to discuss those matters with him, and it must be a Parliament not made up of bishops and barons only; all England must be represented.

So in the year 1265 the first real Parliament assembled at Westminster—twenty-three barons, a hundred and twenty churchmen, two knights from every county, and two burgesses from every town.

To-day the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey stand side by side, a truly wondrous group of carved grey stone; but as you look at them, I want you to remember how it was through the building of the Abbey that the first Parliament which at all represented the people of England came into being.

Can you not imagine some of the scenes which took place round Westminster during those days? Can you not fancy the interest and anxiety with which those knights and burghers, many of them perhaps in London for the first time, walked around the nearly completed building, struck with amazement that so fair a thing could be fashioned out of stone? How closely they must have watched the workmen, some of them foreigners of great skill, but many of them entirely English, masons, carpenters, builders, carvers, all doing their part, all carrying out the designs of that unknown architect, now held to be an English master of the work, who had been sent by the king of France to learn there the new style. How eagerly they must have chatted with the monks, who during this rebuilding were living in the most uncomfortable manner, but who nevertheless would be ready enough to take the strangers inside, and point out to them one beauty after another. How their eyes must have been dazzled by the wealth of colour and the exquisite carvings in marble, stone, and oak. How they must have marvelled at the fairy lightness of those arches, the delicate tracery of the windows, the glint and glitter of the glass mosaic, the soft colours of the marble.

For in very truth this building of King Henry's exceeded everything they had dreamt of or imagined. In every way the new Abbey was far larger than the old, though a limit was set on its length by the Lady Chapel of Abbot Humez, which is now known to you as the Chapel of Henry VII. The old form of the Cross was kept, but a ring of chapels encircled the east end, while transepts, aisles, and cloisters were all made longer and far loftier. But the central point of magnificence was the shrine of Edward the Confessor, which lay immediately behind the high altar, made to stand even higher than the altar by a mound of earth said to have been brought all the way from the Holy Land.

On the 13th of October 1269, the choir and east end being all complete, the coffin of King Edward, which had been kept during the rebuilding, first in the "quire where the monks do sing," and then in the Palace of Westminster, was solemnly carried back to the Abbey by the king and his brother, his two sons and many nobles, followed by a vast procession of clergy and citizens, and placed with great pomp and ceremony in the newly-made shrine.

The next time you go into Edward the Confessor's Chapel, you must wander back in imagination for more than six hundred years, and picture to yourself that solemn service of the "Translation of St. Edward."