Westminster Abbey may look like a cathedral, but that is not the case. It was originally established as a monastery. Go back at least a thousand years and the area where you are standing was an island – Thorn Ea, the ‘island of brambles’ – formed where two branches of a small river flowed down into the Thames. In around 960AD Dunstan – later canonised as St. Dunstan – established a Benedictine monastery here, headed by an abbot. It was then still an isolated place, around two miles from the City of London, and the abbey became known as the ‘minster to the west’. King Cnut soon built a royal palace beside the abbey. Later monarchs ruled the kingdom from Westminster, thus forever linking religion, royalty and government in this place. 

In 1066 King Harold II was the first monarch to be crowned at Westminster Abbey and since then it has been the venue for every coronation of an English king or queen. Thirty kings and queens are also buried in the abbey. The building you now see was largely constructed during the 13th century, with notable additions in the early 16th century. In 1540 the abbey, like all monasteries in England, was dissolved by King Henry VIII. In the reign of his daughter, Elizabeth I, Westminster Abbey became a ‘royal peculiar’, meaning that it has ever since been accountable directly to the monarch instead of an archbishop.