The abbey and palace upstream from London where Edward the Confessor was buried and William the Conqueror crowned, where the Exchequer and the royal courts settled, and where medieval Parliaments met: the working seat of English kingship and government.
Westminster lies about two miles upstream from the City of London, on what was once Thorney Island, a gravel bank between channels of the Tyburn stream where it met the Thames. In the Middle Ages it was not a city in its own right but a royal abbey, a royal palace and the small town that served them. From the eleventh century it was where English kings were crowned and buried, where their treasury and law courts sat, and where Parliament met.
The pairing of abbey and palace began with Edward the Confessor, who rebuilt the abbey as his burial church and lived beside it. Almost every English coronation since 1066 has taken place in the abbey, and by the fourteenth century the Exchequer, the Court of Common Pleas and Parliament had all settled in the palace.
A community of monks was living on Thorney Island by the late tenth century; tradition credits Dunstan and Edgar the Peaceful with settling Benedictines there in about 959. Its name, the west minster, distinguished it from St Paul's in the City.
Edward the Confessor rebuilt the abbey from about 1050 on a scale no English church had attempted, as a long Romanesque church on a cross-shaped plan, probably modelled on Norman abbeys such as Jumièges, and he built a palace beside it. The church was consecrated on 28 December 1065 while Edward lay dying. He died on 5 January 1066 and was buried before its high altar the next day, and Harold Godwinson was probably crowned there on the same day.
William the Conqueror was crowned in the abbey on Christmas Day 1066. According to the chronicler Orderic Vitalis, when the congregation shouted its acclamation in English and French, the Norman guards outside thought an attack had begun and set fire to nearby houses, and the service was finished by trembling clergy in an emptying church.
His son William II of England built Westminster Hall between 1097 and 1099, a hall about 240 feet long that was among the largest in Europe, and held court in it at Whitsun 1099. Under Henry I of England and Henry II of England the Exchequer, the office that audited the sheriffs' accounts twice a year on a chequered cloth, settled into buildings beside the hall, and around 1179 the treasurer Richard fitzNigel described its workings in his Dialogue of the Exchequer.
Magna Carta laid down in 1215 that common pleas, the ordinary lawsuits between subjects, should be heard in a fixed place instead of following the king, and that place became Westminster Hall. The Court of Common Pleas sat in the hall, joined in the fifteenth century by the King's Bench and the Chancery, so that litigants from all over England travelled to it.
Henry III of England, who revered the Confessor above all other saints, pulled down the eastern half of the Norman abbey in 1245 and rebuilt it in the French Gothic style of Reims, with the highest nave vault in England. He spent perhaps £50,000 on the work, including heavy levies on England's Jews. The new church was consecrated on 13 October 1269, when Edward's relics were moved to a gilded shrine behind the high altar, and Henry was buried beside the shrine in 1272.
Henry also rebuilt the palace. His Painted Chamber, a great bedchamber with a mural of the Confessor's coronation above the bed, was used for councils and later for parliaments, and Edward I of England began a new St Stephen's Chapel in 1292 to rival the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.
The assemblies that became Parliament met at Westminster more often than anywhere else. In January 1265 Simon de Montfort, who then held Henry III captive, summoned there two knights from every shire and representatives of selected towns as well as barons and bishops, and in November 1295 Edward I summoned to the palace the assembly later called the Model Parliament. From the fourteenth century the Commons usually sat apart in the abbey's chapter house or refectory, while the Lords met in the palace.
Westminster was also where Parliament first turned on the king's ministers. In the Good Parliament of 1376 the Commons chose Sir Peter de la Mare to speak for them and impeached the chamberlain Lord Latimer and the London merchant Richard Lyons for corruption, the first impeachments in English history. On 30 September 1399 an assembly in Westminster Hall heard the renunciation of Richard II of England and accepted the claim of his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke, who was crowned in the abbey as Henry IV of England on 13 October.
Edward I turned the abbey into a monument to his family and his wars. His queen, Eleanor of Castile, was buried there in December 1290 after a funeral journey marked by twelve stone crosses, the last at Charing on the road into Westminster. He brought the Stone of Scone from Scotland in 1296 and had the oak Coronation Chair made to hold it, and in August 1305 William Wallace was tried in Westminster Hall and condemned to death the same day.
Edward, the Black Prince died in the palace on 8 June 1376 while the Good Parliament was sitting. Richard II of England ordered the great hammerbeam roof of Westminster Hall from his carpenter Hugh Herland in 1393. Henry IV of England collapsed while praying at the Confessor's shrine and died in the abbot's Jerusalem Chamber on 20 March 1413, fulfilling, the chroniclers said, a prophecy that he would die in Jerusalem, and his son Henry V of England was buried in the abbey in 1422 beneath a chantry chapel.
The abbey's right of sanctuary sheltered other residents. In 1470, when Edward IV was driven from the throne, his queen Elizabeth Woodville took refuge in the abbot's house and gave birth there to the future Edward V. Geoffrey Chaucer leased a house in the abbey garden in 1399 and was buried in the abbey in 1400, and in 1476 William Caxton set up England's first printing press in the abbey precinct.