Westminster Abbey, Westminster, Greater London

Photograph taken 1870 - 1900 © Historic England Archive ref: CC97/00511

There has been a building on this site since Roman times. Legend says there was a Christian church in 184AD. St Dunstan founded a Benedictine Abbey here in 959. Edward the Confessor rebuilt the abbey on a grand scale in 1065 and made it the royal church of England. That church was pulled down and Henry III started to rebuild it in 1245. The Abbey was dissolved in January 1540 when it was the richest monastery in England. Henry VIII converted the abbey into one of the new cathedrals of Reformation England. In 1556 Elizabeth I made it into the Collegiate church of St Peter which it still is.

Location

Greater London Westminster

Period

Medieval (Middle Ages) (1066 - 1484)

Themes

A nunnery was first documented here in 603. A monastery was founded during the abbacy of Aldhelm (c675-705). It became Benedictine in the reign of Edgar (959–975) and remained so until dissolved in 1539. The final Abbey Church was built circa 1160-70 and had 13th/14th and 15th century additions. The 431 feet (131 m) tall spire, collapsed in a storm around 1500. The west tower fell around 1550. As a result of these two collapses, less than half of the original building stands today. The abbey was closed at the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539 by Henry VIII. It was sold, with all its lands, to William Stumpe, a rich merchant. He gave the abbey church to the town for continuing use as a parish church, and filled the abbey buildings with twenty looms for his cloth-weaving enterprise.
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Westminster Abbey, Westminster, Greater London

Location

Period

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