Episode notes
Westminster Abbey began on Thorny Island, a marshy gravel bank in the Thames, where a fisherman claimed a vision of St. Peter. The Fishmongers' Company still presents the Abbey with a salmon every year. St. Dunstan and King Edgar settled Benedictine monks there around 959, and in the 1040s Edward the Confessor rebuilt it as England's first cruciform church. It was consecrated in December 1065, and Edward was buried there days later in January 1066. When his tomb was opened in 1103 his body was found preserved, and he was canonized in 1161. From 1245 Henry III rebuilt the church in French Gothic style, with flying buttresses, the highest Gothic nave in England at over 100 feet, Purbeck marble, and a central open space called the theater for coronations.
Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries hit an institution earning 3,000 pounds a year in 1535. Agents melted down the gold around Edward's coffin, but monks hid his bones. When the short-lived Diocese of Westminster was dissolved, its revenue went to St. Paul's, the origin of robbing Peter to pay Paul. In 1560 Elizabeth I made the Abbey a royal peculiar, answerable only to the sovereign. More than 3,300 people are now buried or commemorated there, which William Morris called the National Valhalla.
- The Cosmati pavement of 1268, made from nearly 30,000 fragments by Roman craftsmen, lies under every coronation since
- Isaac Newton's 1727 state funeral opened burial to scientists, later including Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking
- Oliver Cromwell was dug up after the Restoration, hung at Tyburn, and beheaded
- Chaplain David Railton proposed the Grave of the Unknown Warrior, the one grave no one may walk on
- Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon left her wedding bouquet there in 1923, a custom most royal brides have followed