Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey* by Esther Singleton is a comprehensive historical and descriptive study of one of England's most storied ecclesiastical buildings, tracing its origins, architectural evolution, and the rich accumulation of royal, religious, and cultural significance embedded within its walls. Singleton begins by establishing the Abbey's foundational mythology and early history, examining the legend that a church was first erected on Thorney Island—a marshy spit of land beside the Thames—long before the Norman Conquest. She surveys the pre-Conquest Abbey associated with King Edward the Confessor, who rebuilt and endowed the church on a grand scale and whose devotion to it became inseparable from the building's identity. Edward's burial there in 1066 consecrated the Abbey as a royal mausoleum and set the pattern for centuries of monarchical association. The work moves through the Norman and Plantagenet periods with particular attention to Henry III, who undertook the most transformative rebuilding of the Abbey in the thirteenth century, replacing the Romanesque structure with the soaring Gothic edifice that forms the core of what survives today. Singleton examines Henry's ambition to create a shrine worthy of the recently canonized Edward the Confessor, and she details the resulting architecture—the high nave, the French Gothic proportions, the elaborate stone carving—alongside the craftsmen and artistic traditions that shaped it. She discusses the Cosmati pavement before the high altar, the shrine of Edward the Confessor at the heart of the chapel, and the layering of chapels and chantries added by successive monarchs. Singleton devotes sustained attention to the individual chapels, each treated as a distinct architectural and historical unit. Henry VII's Lady Chapel at the east end receives extended treatment as a masterpiece of late Perpendicular Gothic, its fan-vaulted ceiling, elaborate bronze tomb screen, and the effigies of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York within constituting one of the finest ensembles of Tudor art in existence. Singleton situates this chapel within the broader Tudor project of dynastic legitimation, connecting the architecture to the political uses of royal burial and commemoration. The tombs and monuments throughout the Abbey receive careful, systematic description. Singleton catalogs the medieval royal burials—Edward I, Eleanor of Castile, Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, Henry V—examining both the physical tombs and their iconographic programs. She moves into the Tudor and Stuart periods, discussing the monument to Mary Queen of Scots erected by her son James I, the Cromwellian disruption of the Abbey's traditions, the Restoration, and the proliferation of monuments to statesmen, soldiers, poets, and scientists that gradually transformed the building from a purely royal and ecclesiastical space into a national pantheon. Poets' Corner is treated as a subject in its own right. Singleton traces the gradual accumulation of literary memorials, from the early burial of Geoffrey Chaucer in 1400—which established the southeast transept as a gathering place for poetic commemoration—through the subsequent burials and monuments to Spenser, Dryden, Ben Jonson (whose famously upright burial is noted), and later figures including Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and the nineteenth-century additions. She examines the tension between the Abbey's religious function and its role as a secular hall of fame, and notes the inconsistency of who was included and excluded. Singleton also covers the Abbey's role in English coronations, explaining the significance of the Coronation Chair enclosing the Stone of Scone, the ceremonial arrangements of the choir and sanctuary, and the ritual continuity that made Westminster Abbey the site of every English and British coronation since William the Conqueror in 1066. She discusses the regalia, the Abbey's relationship to the monarchy as an institution, and the ways in which successive coronations reinforced and elaborated the building's symbolic function. The Chapter House, the cloisters, and the ancillary buildings of the monastic complex receive attention alongside the main church. Singleton describes the Chapter House as among the finest examples of thirteenth-century English Gothic, noting its original use as a meeting place of the King's Parliament as well as of the monastic chapter. She surveys the surviving medieval wall paintings, the floor tiles, and the architectural ingenuity of its vaulted interior. Throughout, Singleton integrates architectural description with narrative history, biographical sketches of notable figures buried or commemorated in the Abbey, and broader reflections on the building's meaning as a repository of English national memory. Her method is essentially antiquarian and descriptive rather than analytical, and the book functions both as a guided tour and as a reference work, moving from space to space with thoroughness and evident affection for her subject.
By Esther Singleton · Genre: History, Architectural History, Cultural History