Westminster Abbey

Westminster Abbey has hosted the coronation of the English and then British monarch at every accession since William the Conqueror was crowned there on Christmas Day 1066, with the sole exceptions of Edward V and Edward VIII, who were never crowned at all. The rite is built around the Coronation Chair, made around 1300 on the order of Edward I to enclose the Stone of Scone he had seized from Scotland. Monarchs are anointed and crowned while seated in it, and the chair itself, though scarred by centuries of graffiti carved by choristers and visitors, still holds that role. The abbey's status as a royal peculiar, a church answerable directly to the sovereign rather than to a diocesan bishop, is the specific legal mechanism that allows a coronation, an act of state as much as a religious rite, to take place inside it rather than in a cathedral under a bishop's jurisdiction.

The building is also a mausoleum. Edward the Confessor, whose eleventh century foundation the present church replaced, is buried in a shrine that still stands behind the high altar, and generations of monarchs from Henry III onward were interred near him, alongside consorts, medieval nobility, and later a widening circle of scientists, poets, and statesmen granted burial or memorial there. The tomb clusters read almost as a chronological map of the English and British monarchy in stone, and the abbey's custodians have continued to add new memorials into the present day, extending a practice of state commemoration that has run for close to a thousand years without a real interruption.

The church standing today is largely the work of Henry III, who began rebuilding the older Romanesque abbey in 1245 in the French Gothic style he had encountered on the continent, raising the nave to one of the tallest vaults in England. Later additions, including a Tudor Lady Chapel added by Henry VII around 1503 and a pair of west towers designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor in the eighteenth century, did not fundamentally alter that soaring, light-filled character. Before Henry's rebuilding, the site had been a working Benedictine monastery since at least the tenth century, refounded on a grander scale by Edward the Confessor in the eleventh, and it was this monastic community, not a cathedral chapter, that occupied the abbey until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII in 1540.

Rather than falling to ruin like most dissolved English monasteries, the church was refounded as a collegiate church governed by a Dean and Chapter and, from 1560, established permanently as a royal peculiar under Elizabeth I, a status it has held ever since. Today it forms part of a single UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 1987 together with the Palace of Westminster and the adjoining Saint Margaret's Church, recognized as a coherent group of buildings central to English constitutional and religious history. The abbey remains an active church with daily worship and a resident community of clergy and choir, a working institution rather than a preserved monument, even as several million visitors pass through it each year.