London fishmongers still give Westminster Abbey a salmon every year
Legend says a young Thames fisherman saw Saint Peter near the spot where Westminster Abbey now stands. The Fishmongers' Company still presents a salmon each year in honour of that tale. The abbey itself has hosted 40 coronations since 1066 and holds the remains of more than 3,300 people.
The church's beginnings are hazy. Stories credit the Saxon king Sæberht of Essex or a mythical second-century British king called Lucius. Historians generally date it to about 959, when Dunstan and King Edgar settled Benedictine monks on what was then Thorney Island in the Thames; archaeologists have found pottery and foundations from that era.
Edward the Confessor rebuilt it between 1042 and 1052 as his own burial church, in Romanesque style and on a cross-shaped plan, the first of its kind in England. It was consecrated on 28 December 1065, barely a week before he died on 5 January 1066, and he was buried there days later. Harold Godwinson was probably crowned in it, though the first recorded coronation is William the Conqueror's that same year. The Bayeux Tapestry holds the only surviving picture of Edward's church. When his tomb was opened in 1103 his body was said to be uncorrupted, taken as proof of sanctity, and he was made a saint in 1161.
Henry III began the present building in 1245, largely inspired by thirteenth-century French and English Gothic. Its Henry VII Chapel is a showpiece of Perpendicular Gothic that the antiquarian John Leland called the wonder of the world. Elizabeth I made it a royal peculiar, answerable directly to the monarch, after the monastery was dissolved in 1559.
Beyond coronations, the abbey has seen at least 16 royal weddings since 1100 and is the resting place of 18 monarchs, along with prime ministers, poets laureate, scientists, musicians and the Unknown Warrior. William Morris called it a National Valhalla. UNESCO added it to its heritage list in 1987, jointly with the Palace of Westminster and St Margaret's Church.
Source: Westminster Abbey
