Westminster Abbey - Westminster Abbey: a thousand years of national pageantry

Jenkyns elegant account is embellished with a host of human details Independent

A little masterpiece Geographical

Jenkyns writes beautifully, and with keen perception, of a great church whose significance has grown in the past two centuries as the proper home, not just for coronations, but for national commemorations the book is a pleasure to read and laced with wit Jenkyns achieves that rare thing: he combines a shrewd scholars eye with affection Church Times

National cathedral, coronation church, royal mausoleum, burial place of poets, resting place of the great and of the Unknown Warrior, former home of the parliament, backdrop to royal weddings Westminster Abbey unites many functions. Richard Jenkyns book is an ideal introduction to a building often taken for granted. The style is agreeable, the judgments intelligent and the perspective humane Spectator

Jenkyns engaging exploration through this great building is both an appreciation of its architecture and its shifting meanings. We hear the voices of those who have described its forms, moods and ceremonies, from Shakespeare and Voltaire to Dickens and Henry James. A highly original yet entirely entertaining book Church Building

I have gained a new appreciation even of the sepulchre architecture from this wonderful book Daily Telegraph

Richard Jenkyns elegantly concise history reveals much more about this greatest of English churches and goes a long way to explaining its enduring power Ham and High

The enthusiasm of Professor Jenkyns approach and his clear mastery of the detail of this highly complex building will prove infectious Digest

RICHARD JENKYNS was formerly professor of the classical tradition, University of Oxford, and a fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. His previous books include The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Virgils Experience, and A Fine Brush on Ivory: An appreciation of Jane Austen.

WONDERS OF THE WORLD

RICHARD JENKYNS

This revised and updated edition published in 2011

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by

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When Prince Williams engagement to Kate Middleton was announced, Westminster Abbey seemed to be the only possible choice for their wedding; anywhere else was too small or too big, too private or too formal, or loaded with unwelcome associations. When this book was first published in 2004, the most recent royal wedding, that of the Earl and Countess of Wessex, broke with tradition by being held at St Georges Chapel Windsor, which was also to be the place for the service of blessing following the marriage of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. In fact, the tradition of holding royal weddings in Westminster Abbey is less than a century old; before that, no member of the royal family had been married there since the Middle Ages. It is one example, among many, of how the Abbeys functions have changed over the centuries to match changing needs.

The Abbey acts as a barometer of royal popularity. The return of a royal wedding to within its walls is a sign of public pleasure and confidence in the couples future. As this book documents, two recent Prime Ministers tried to use the Abbey for party political advantage. The decision to mark Prince Williams marriage with a bank holiday is political in a broader and better sense: it expresses the hope that the nation will come together in a shared celebration. Westminster Abbey is well suited to be the centrepiece of such an event. As that shrewd American observer Nathaniel Hawthorne said, it is a mighty sympathiser, which unites the public and the personal. The tomb of the Unknown Warrior, in the nave of the Abbey, is a national but also an individual monument; everyone may feel that the Unknown stands for their own father, son or husband. A wedding even one that is watched by hundreds of millions of people is a personal act as well as a public commitment, and just as the Abbey brings together the private and the universal in an act of mourning at the Unknown Warriors grave, so it will do in rejoicing on 29 April, 2011. For all its size and beauty, Westminster Abbey is not only an exalted space but also a humane and even intimate one. This book tries to explain how, through its form and history, it has come to be so.

Richard Jenkyns

London, 2011

Westminster Abbey is the most complex church in the world in terms of its history, functions and memories perhaps the most complex building of any kind. It has been an abbey and a cathedral and is now a collegiate church and a royal peculiar. It is the coronation church, a royal mausoleum, a Valhalla for the tombs of the great, a national cathedral and the site of the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior; in France, by contrast, these functions are divided among five separate monuments. Westminster Abbey is one of the high places of Anglicanism, but it houses the shrine of a saint of the Roman calendar, and the principles of Presbyterianism were hammered out within its walls. Its chapter house was where the Commons met in the fourteenth century, moving later to the refectory, and the treasury was in the chapter houses crypt, so that the building was Capitol and Fort Knox rolled into one. The Abbey has witnessed many strange sights: Blake saw a vision of angels in it, and Pepys used it as a place to pick up women. It is the first cemetery of the world: more of the great whether measured by rank, office or genius have been buried here, across a longer period, than anywhere else. It has been called the finest sculpture gallery in Britain or even in Europe. Certainly, it contains statuary from eight centuries, and in at least four periods the thirteenth, fourteenth, early sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the sculpture at Westminster ranks among the best anywhere.

But in other respects the Abbey is not superlative. It is a large church, but not quite as large and lofty as the French cathedrals on which it is modelled. Beautiful though it is, the best French cathedrals surpass it in architectural quality also. Only Henry VIIs Chapel has been recognised, almost always, as nonpareil: the antiquarian John Leland called it