Westminster Abbey Consecrated: Heart of British Royalty

Westminster Abbey was consecrated on December 28, 1065, just eight days before the death of the king who built it and less than a year before the Norman invasion that would redefine its purpose forever. King Edward the Confessor, too ill to attend the ceremony, had spent the final decade of his reign and a tenth of the royal income rebuilding a modest Benedictine monastery on Thorney Island, on the marshy banks of the Thames west of London, into the largest and most ambitious Romanesque church in England. Edward chose the Westminster site deliberately to separate royal ceremonial life from the commercial center of London, establishing a division between the City and the seat of government that persists a thousand years later. The new church, modeled on the Abbey of Jumieges in Normandy where Edward had spent much of his youth in exile, measured over 300 feet long with a central tower, transepts, and a choir, dwarfing every other church in the kingdom. The Bayeux Tapestry depicts the completed building with its distinctive round-arched windows and squat crossing tower. Edward died on January 5, 1066, and was buried before the high altar of his new abbey the following day. Harold Godwinson was crowned king in the same building that same afternoon, establishing the precedent that would make Westminster Abbey the coronation church of English monarchs for the next millennium. William the Conqueror insisted on his own coronation at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066, deliberately linking Norman legitimacy to Edward foundation. Nearly nothing of Edward church survives above ground; Henry III demolished most of it in 1245 to build the Gothic masterpiece that stands today. The abbey has hosted every coronation since 1066, served as burial place for seventeen monarchs, and become the resting place for over 3,300 individuals including Chaucer, Newton, and Darwin. The tradition Edward began endures as the most continuous ceremonial function in British public life.