What Is Westminster Abbey? A Thousand Years of Monks, Kings and Coronations

Westminster Abbey began as a small community of monks beside the Thames, well outside the old City of London. Around 960, St Dunstan, Bishop of London, brought the first twelve Benedictine monks here with the support of King Edgar, and their monastery slowly grew in size, wealth and royal favour over the following century.

The first great church came from Edward the Confessor. He rebuilt the abbey church in stone, and it was consecrated on 28 December 1065. Edward died only days later and was buried in his new church, and once he was made a saint his tomb turned the Abbey into a place of pilgrimage.

A year later the church found the role it has kept ever since. William the Conqueror was crowned here on Christmas Day 1066, choosing Edward's new church to claim the throne he had just won, and almost every English and British monarch since has followed him through the same doors.

The church you see today is mostly Henry III's. Devoted to Edward the Confessor, Henry began rebuilding the Abbey in 1245, with Henry of Reynes as his master mason, to give the saint a grander shrine in the new Gothic style. The new church was consecrated on 13 October 1269.

Its height is the thing to notice. The nave vault rises 102 feet, or 31 metres, the highest Gothic nave of any church in England, and work on the nave carried on long after Henry's death. The eastern end gained another masterpiece in the Tudor period: Henry VII's Lady Chapel, consecrated on 19 February 1516.

The last major addition came almost five centuries after Henry III started. The western towers were completed in 1745 by Nicholas Hawksmoor, designed to blend with the medieval stonework below them, and they give the Abbey the twin-towered west front it is known for.

For six centuries the Abbey was a monastery, housing between 30 and 60 monks at a time. That ended with the Reformation: Henry VIII dissolved the monastery on 16 January 1540, when only 24 monks were left, and the last abbot became the first dean of a new cathedral church.

The monks came back once. Mary I restored a Benedictine community under Abbot Feckenham in 1556, but it lasted only until her death in November 1558, when her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I removed them again. By a charter dated 21 May 1560, Elizabeth created the Collegiate Church of St Peter, still the Abbey's official name.

That settlement is why Westminster Abbey is unusual among English churches. It is a Royal Peculiar, accountable directly to the sovereign rather than to a bishop or archbishop, and although nobody has lived there as a monk for more than four centuries, everyone still calls it an abbey.