London Sightseeing Pass: Westminster Palace and Abbey & St Margaret’s Church August 25, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Air Tickets, Cars, Destination, Hotels, London, Rail Pass, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trip , trackbackIt is at the first sight difficult to imagine any ancient, geomantic mysteries to be present in the teeming modern metropolis that is London. There is no doubt that what may be there is well submerged both actually, beneath accretions of buildings and earth, and metaphorically, beneath layers of time. We have to look to legend, history, archaeological glimpses and the barely discernible lineaments that have survived in the present layout of streets, sites and place-names.
That the area now covered by the sprawl of central London had a prehistory is indicated by numerous if fragmentary archaeological finds of all periods back to the Bronze Age, and even the Neolithic, especially along the Thames. London as a specific community probably emerged only in the late Iron Age, however, and really began as a town with the Romans (the walled area known as ‘The City‘ covers the Roman town) and developed intermittently thereafter in the Romano-British and Anglo- Saxon periods.
Westminster Abbey was built on Thorney Island, a small gravel spur formed next to the Thames by a fork in the River Tyburn. The supposed meaning of the name was ‘Isle of
Thorns’, but Nigel Pennick speculates that ‘it was so-called because the Saxons recognized that it was shaped like the protective rune thorn’.’ Further, Thorney ‘may have been a pagan sanctuary of the Anglo-Saxon god Thu- nor (Thor)’ . The area was marshy, and so firm islets had great importance; the earliest crossing place along this section of the Thames was probably located at Thorney. E. 0. Gordon claimed that there was traditional evidence for a stone circle to have existed on Thorney Island.’ Roman buildings stood on the island, apparently destroyed by an earthquake in the fifth century. It is reputed that one of these structures was dedicated to Apollo, and it is interesting to note that the fifteenth-century monk- historian John Flete, referring to the partial return to paganism in the fifth century, claimed that then ‘were restored the whole abominations. . . . London worships Diana, and the suburbs of Thorney offer incense to Apollo’ (this writer’s emphasis). Westminster is the West Minster as distinct from the East Minster of St Paul’s, and if Flete’s inference is correct, we can look upon Westminster as marking a pre-Christian solar (Apollo) site, and St Paul’s as commemorating a lunar (Diana) location, for the remnants of a Roman temple to Diana were found on Ludgate Hill next to the location of St Paul’s Cathedral. What is more certain is that an ancient mound existed on Thorney. It is recalled in the name of Tothill Street, which aligns to the northern transept of Westminster Abbey, paralleling its axis, and the former Tothill Fields, which was a medieval tournament ground, only a fragment of which now survives as the playing field of Westminster School in Vincent Square. ‘Tot’ or ‘toot’ hills were beacon hills and places of assembly, and were a key feature in Alfred Watkins’ `ley system’. The Thorney Mound may thus have been prehistoric. It was recorded in a late Saxon charter as existing on Thorney, and it was apparently still extant as late as the eighteenth century, for it seems to be depicted on John Rocque’s map of 1746 standing by the bend of Horseferry Road approximately where Regency Place now is.
The first church on the site of Westminster Abbey was erected in the seventh century, `possibly attracted there by the ruins of Roman buildings which offered a good source of materials.” The earliest historical account of the foundation was written between 1076 and 1085 by the Westminster monk Sulcard. It seems that after the founding of St Paul’s Cathedral in 604, King Aethelberht, the first Christian king of Kent, wanted to found a church dedicated to St Peter. An anonymous person offered to build this church, and it was sited on Thorney Island. After Sucard’s time, the tradition grew up that the anonymous individual had been King Saeberht (or Sebert, Segbert) of the East Saxons, Aethelberht’s vassal.
A remarkable legend is attached to the dedication of this Saxon church: the night before it was due to be consecrated by Bishop Mellitus, the building was filled with ‘a multitude of shining lights’. There were angelic singing and ‘celestial odours’. A fisherman, Edric, who had witnessed the strange events, reported them to Bishop Mellitus, along with his belief that he had encountered St Peter himself. This story was given credit as late as the fourteenth century, but it was dismissed as rank superstition at the time of the Reformation. It was observed that legends might contain authentic memory elements if they are not taken too literally. If we remove the St Peter associations with the claimed heavenly consecration, we may be dealing with a genuine recall of odd light phenomena on the site of Westminster Abbey, for, as Nigel Pennick has noted,
More modern thought on ‘earth energies’ interprets the illuminated building in terms of ‘earth lights’. These terrestrial light phenomena have been seen in more recent times in connection with sacred buildings constructed on sites of intense geological activity. The reputed earthquake of the fifth century may indicate this. Other London earthquakes, in 1580, 1692, 1750 and 1884, have been felt at Westminster.
Sounds and smells are frequently reported to accompany earth light phenomena, not to mention phantasmagoria apparently induced in witnesses’ brains by the energy fields surrounding the lights.’
After Aethelberht’s death in 616, there was a restoration of paganism, and a bishopric in London was not established again until the late seventh century.
London continued to develop as a wealthy trading centre, and a new port was established on the Thames between the old Roman city and Thorney Island. But in the ninth century, marauding Danish Vikings sailed up the Thames and succeeded in taking control of London. The city was wrested back under English control by Alfred the Great in 886. After this, the old Roman-walled city became once more the focus of urban development, giving preeminence to St Paul’s Cathedral. Westminster was thus literally ‘outside the pale’ of London, a suburb to the west, and its buildings, which had been damaged, were left in a largerly forlorn condition. In 957, however, St Dunstan arranged for the refounding of Westminster as a Benedictine abbey. In the eleventh century, the abbey was completely rebuilt, marginally to the east of its original spot, by King Edward, the son of Aethelred the Unready and the last king of the old Anglo-Saxon dynasty. It was dedicated in 1065, shortly prior to Edward’s death. He was buried in the Abbey. Edward left no direct successor, and the dispute between his brother-in-law, Earl Harold, and his cousin, Duke William of Normandy, led to the Norman Conquest. William was crowned at Westminster Abbey in 1066, thus starting the great and continuing tradition of coronations there. William went ahead with the completion of the new buildings but only fragments of these survive, as the church was demolished in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to make way for the Gothic edifice, which structure, with later additions, survives today.
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