The Abbey Part 1 (Alan Bennett, Presenter/Writer)

[Music] [Music] it looks such a straightforward place from the outside to much so for me really a bit plain and it seems that way inside too to begin with you walk through the nave which is quite short because when it was built there were few people who used it only visitors and on lookers the real business of the Abbey the worship and glorification of God done elsewhere through these gates [Music] this is the choir and ahead is the sanctuary in the high altar but beyond that there seems to be another chapel and some sort of ramparts beyond that [Music] unlike the nave the choir is long as it had to be to accommodate the whole of the monastic community with seven or eight times a day gathered here to sing and worship this was the hub of Westminster Abbey [Music] there's no going up the altar steps when instead one goes around the side where there are more gates and tombs at every turn a cemetery in fact [Applause] [Music] though it's also not unlike walking around the outside deck of a liner the high altar the sanctuary and the shrine like the bridge in the engine room somewhere in the middle until you come up these unexpected steps and past yet more elaborate gates into the prow of the Abbey and its tremendous surprise the Lady Chapel the Chapel of Henry the seventh [Music] it was finished around 1512 the last great flowering of medieval Christianity and seeing it now gray as a shinbone it's hard to imagine that then every inch of it was painted and gilded and the windows bright with colored glass scarcely had the builders carted away their rubble and the paint has taken down their scaffolding when the medieval church was split apart the Reformation had begun and Abbey's such as this face ruin within a few years Henry the Eighth had closed down the monasteries taken over their lands carted away the furniture and fittings and the remains were left to decay and gather dust today we think the destruction the Reformation was shocking criminal but I don't know the secular side of the Reformation and certainly the dissolution of the monasteries or to be more readily understandable to us in the 1990s than at any time in the last 400 years what happened to the monasteries after all was simply a process of privatization their lands and assets sold off at a quick short-term profit for the government the beneficiaries largely those who are well disposed to the regime and the monks the employees most of them made redundant well more or less what happens today and had the abbey been anywhere else but at Westminster Henry the eighth's commissioners would have come in taken away the gold and precious stones stripped the lead off the roof and left the rest of nature and market forces which is after all what happened at Fountains Abbey in Kirkstall Reaver but then they weren't the burial place of kings [Music] [Music] [Music] Queen Victoria sat in the chair twice firstly in 1837 in her crown and all her regalia at the coronation and fifty years later at her Jubilee in her little white bonnet and black dress anybody could sit here in the 18th century provided they tip the Verger and they could also we led with the third seven-foot sword of state which used to stand beside it while not quite stripped pine it suits our present-day fad for natural services but when it was first made around 1300 it was wholly gilded and painted and covered in semi-precious stones and beads and must have looked as much fair ground as gothic believing a bit common what has brought it down to its present tasteful state is time and a series of terrible indignities a suffragettes bomb that exploded at the back of it the brief theft of the stone in 1950 by Scottish nationalists George the fourth sawed off all the Crockett's and the Victorians varnished it so heavily that most of the original paintwork was destroyed generations of Westminster schoolboys have carved their names on it including one boy who slept in it 119 1800 and left a message on the seat to say so it was someone in Victorian times who added the Lions but they needn't have bothered it's such a familiar stick of national furniture battered and handed down and the monarchy nowadays so anxious not to be remote they could have dispensed with the Lions just put it on rockers [Applause] once upon a time the monks would rise at 3:00 to say prime the first office of the day these oceans nowadays begin at 7:00 with half an hour silent prayers and faith Chapel followed by the saying of merchants well anyone may come to this service its most frequently attended by those who work in and around the abbey the abbey family when I first heard the Dean used this phrase I cynically took it as one of those wishful sentiments we use nowadays in an attempt to cause if I the world I was quite wrong they dressed him in purple plotting a crown of forms places on his head then they began to salute him hail the abbey family has been an active notion for fifty years now and the more one sees of this place and the people who work here clergy guides builders electricians it seems just a statement of fact it is a family they're using the revised English Bible and not the old authorized version which ought not to matter to me but does a bit though who am I to say I'm just an eavesdropper across the passers-by wagged their heads and jeered at him brother this so you are the man who all down the temple and rebuild it in three days save yourself and come down from the cross [Music] we're just try that again we could hit bang in the middle of the nose [Music] let's look at that first verse I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help now what does that second line really mean any ideas I don't know the boys age I probably thought that the hills were where to look for the arrival of the u.s. cavalry [Music] [Music] holy holy holy Lord God of His heaven and earth are full of thy glory glory be to thee O Lord misfire they can't eat this in remembrance of Christ died view and feed on him in your heart [Music] all right gel for the-- it's very tempting to put an extra little note in there let's go from the end of the top second line and we'll just see if we can get that right that's why we rehearse it isn't it sometimes so it's nice to the mistakes then rather than later open it the last bar of second line three four [Music] it's only half the state between the chapel of the pigs the Dean is already taking the second service of the day our Eucharist the body the body of Christ the abbey is what is called a royal peculiar set apart by charter from the ordinary jurisdiction of the Church of England with the Dean answerable not to the Archbishop of Canterbury but directly to the sovereign so this is the Queen's parish church but it's also the Chapel of Westminster School and three times a week before they're open to visitors the choir and transepts fill up with boys and girls for the school's morning chapel [Music] good morning there will be complan this evening if you want to go to it meet me under littles arch at 5:00 to 9:00 we begin this act of worship with him number 372 he who would valiant be 372 boring hymns except if they're lucky they'll remember them all their lives [Music] [Music] and on discouraged tadam relenting in they come the tribes of Nike and Adidas and Reebok to college please let's talk about the screen the next one was by the owner good why that yes Trafalgar Square like you let's move clean the sugar just to your left on the table you know this is very enterprising well I'm not sure Jesus would have approved Russell squeeze we've been all around that where's mark suspense to the tenth chapter xxiii verse and Jesus looked round about and saith unto his disciples how hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God and the disciples were astonished at his words but Jesus answereth again and saith unto them children how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God [Music] when they're old will they remember these morning's in the Abbey scanning the stalls for a particular face will hymns bring it back or the smell of cold stone and the voluntary [Music] as the tourists wait to droop in the school troops out even at 9:15 in the morning these Westminster boys and girls armored in their careful Langer what was all that I have the needle stuff didn't apply to our students no in any way we are clever [Music] [Music] well as I say Westminster Abbey is a royal peculiar Church and it is run by the Dean and chapter and it's the D now who's the present Dean is the Reverend Michael main he's very sort of important Dean because he's our chable to one person and that's the visitor of the Queen but this being a special and a royal peculiar Church it's entirely self-funding we rely very much of course on yourselves coming here because it costs around about four million pounds to run one needs to remember that like Venice the abbey has always been a venue for tourists in its earliest days pilgrims would come to look at the Confessor shrine and view the relics and pilgrims are after all simply tourists on their knees three thousand people buried in this church there are 400 monuments in here as well so we bury our kings and queens at Windsor we've also had a number of royal weddings here gain an embarrassing subject but only married she's still with Prince Philip so that wedding was in here and just very briefly tell you a little bit about the history of this church there has actually been a church on this site since the 7th century I want to have like a shoal of fish so they don't bury people here in Westminster Abbey anymore all they do now is in turn - is here and the ashes are Laurence Olivier's I think about the last ashes to be turd right in Westminster Abbey are we all met just about I brought you into the nave of the church whose history goes back probably to the early part of the seventh century the early 600 the first church of any real importance here was under a king of England when we used to have seven kings and seven kingdoms King offer who actually endowed a church here in 785 but the first truly important church was after the last anglo-saxon King neither Saxons what we were before the Battle of Hastings in the invasion of William of Normandy and that King was called King Edward the Confessor because he was a very pious religious man who prayed a lot as a royal burial place Westminster is unique the only comparable spot the abbey of soundin II in Paris where the French king's are buried the French Revolution put paid to that 50 royal tombs broken up in as many hours two days to destroy the work of twelve centuries nothing comparable happened here and when Henry the eighth's commissioners went into the monasteries and stripped them of their assets Westminster largely survived preserved because so many royal dead lie around the most remarkable survival is the shrine itself and you need just about here the body of Edward the Confessor st. founder of the Abbey the last of the Saxon Kings who died in 1066 other shrines were not so lucky Henry the eighth's destroyed virtually all of them including some couplets at Durham he chucked out the body and stripped the place to Albans and the richest shrine of all that of thomas a becket at canterbury but not Edward the Confessor and here the robbed of all its finery is his battered stone box still now why well not because he was a saint obviously no it was because he was a king and Henry the eighth was a king and there's a trade union of Kings injure one you injure them all st. us in a Catholic or Protestant kings and queens stick together so when with the death of the young Edward the six and the accession of Mary Catholicism was briefly reestablished the shrine - most of its accoutrements was rebuilt the lower part still has Henry the third had built it in the twelve 60s the upper part dating from Mary's time three hundred years later here in these niches hollowed out by 500 years of knees pilgrims would pray and touch the stone some even lying here all through the night - most Anglican certainly the idea of a shrine is strange and exotic and there is something not altogether English about it even now after 600 years the upper stage is looking somehow Greek or like an elaborate doll's house and right until the end of the 18th century a strange almost unbelievable fact the area around the shrine was swept daily and the sweeping sent off with whatever sacred dust they contained to Catholic Spain and Portugal we pass to the north aisle I have a year ahead of you metal in the women here we go this way is north forehead anyways but this used to be the boiled burial place there were 2,000 people buried in this church they're like sardines side by side don't look so worried I'm not going to tell you about all of them but we have to go right back in the year 600 when a church was first built on this site there were no other buildings around here whatsoever we were just on a little island called Forney Island space or prime space near the altar or the shrine has always been at a premium and there's something of an old garden about it sometimes nobody keeping an accurate record of who's being planted we're so quite often someone has been dug out four had to be relocated there's no plan or patent a burial in the Abbey you elbowed your way in where you could and some of the side chapels in particular a bit of a jumble rather like some specialized left-luggage office to shoved in like trunks waiting to be redeemed at the resurrection and space was always limited and even when you bagged a place you weren't sure of hanging on to it in this tomb as some of the children of Henry the 3rd and Edward the first they were nicely tucked up in a spot in the shrine and then found themselves booted out and put down here because richard ii found it the same spot for the tomb of his wife sorry change of plan hope you don't mind I'm putting you in the spare room worrying about that man so naturally the Pope wouldn't have it king was most annoyed and promptly divorce himself from the Pope instead he made himself the head of the Church of England good isn't it you could do anything he liked he did he divorced Catherine and married and Berliner and ever since that day that King and now the Queen of England is the head of the Church of England and she appoints the Dean and a chapter to this church only answer directly to the Queen of England not via inhibitions the Dean of Westminster Abbey is a very powerful man Fiona's ancestor to the Queen and the Almighty and please don't ask me what order I've had a little came from a Roman Catholic Church in Zimbabwe actually so they're both the confessors and they've written to us because that church is falling down wanting some money with lots of photographs and things and you can see in some of these that in fact there are quite bad cracks in the church here and and down here and again it's very clear so they're very they obviously are worried it's something to do with land erosion which has happened brother Parker I think good morning I don't like Church is charging or even shaming visitors into making supposedly voluntary offerings but at least at Westminster it has the sanction of history the monks were charging pilgrims to see the shrine in the tombs in the 15th century and besides the Church of England gives the Abbey no income it's okay Luke for those founding the Metropolitan Police weeks at that time they were nicknamed the peelers after his surname and today we sometimes referred to police's bobbies that is why it's from his name Robert the next Chaplin will be very old steer in solemn is william ewart gladstone he was Prime Minister four times in the last century he wasn't a bundle of laughs in fact every Tuesday our prime minister goes and has a meeting with the Queen the same thing happened in the last century he wasn't very good at dealing with the ladies Gladstone well some of us have that problem don't we well maybe you don't I do I'm afraid but glad stir when he went to see the Queen if she invited him to sit down he couldíve he was so nervous and I'll just break off because every hour on the hour we stopped and we say a prayer to remind us this is a house of God it's not simply a museum and that's going to happen now all our visitors to join with us in one minute of stillness silence and prayer eunmi newt to see loss at iroquois mercy we play bitter eine minuta Stila won't go bet i ask you therefore to be still sitting or standing as you prefer while we remembered God to whose glory this great church was built and let us remember also those less fortunate than ourselves we pray for this great Abbey for all who work in it and serve it not only as a tourist attraction over the place of worship prayer and pastoral care [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] the English was Bentley key part of their charm or their lack of it and the burial and memorial customs of the a bit contrived to make them as clicky in death as they are in life the most obvious click being the writers and poets gathered here in Poets Corner but all over the abbey are similar groupings little knots of the like-minded architects in one corner scientists in another engineers musicians even Sir John Franklin the polar explorers found someone similar to keep him warm it's English lacking for clubs and of course it means that when the last Trump sounds and the dead begin to clamber out of their graves won't be any awkward standing about like the race at the start of a party everybody will have subject to torture Henry the third can enjoy a joke with Charles the second Darwin can bring Newton up to date on the latest developments it's all be very relaxed of course a lot of them will be talking sharp but that's the English idea of heaven anyway tenancy malicious peevish medallion a spherical shark it's a shame Britta's famosos Alaric cherishes the mini-sub plaque of commemorative together with the coronation chair on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior who each score is the most famous feature of the Abbey and once upon a time it will be the first glimpse you would get of the interior but in the 19th century visitors came in by this door and it was the door which in 1820 the wretched and rejected drunken and unwashed Queen Caroline was refused admission to the coronation of our husband George before [Music] [Music] the first poet to be buried here was honored not because he was a poet but because he was a civil servant this was Chaucer who've been in the household of John of Gaunt had Richard the second the original tomb of the author of The Canterbury Tales was behind the postcard counter his bones were brought over here in 1556 and put in this splendid tomb which was probably looted from one of the monasteries dissolved by Henry the aides really interior contra el gouna for stance initially was forest Abuelita I'll print Avira las Casas will Parliament [Music] I've got mixed feelings about Poets Corner its associated in my mind with Christopher Robin and the changing of the guard Peter Pan even Pearly Kings and Gor blimey strike alight got tourist board notion of England it's English literature safe from cozy family over here of course we got some more famous names you've got the very famous Charles Dickens buried here on the instructions of Queen Victoria Roger Kipling children's tales Jungle Book etc Thomas Hardy another great name the English prefer their poets dead and respectable and so many of the writers buried or remembered here are safer in death than they ever were in life the Atheist Shelley would be shocked to find himself here in Keats - probably it was Howard Nicholson who was instrumental in getting their Monument put up and he was nervousness it might look like a sausage which she does a bit [Music] Orton like Shelley might find himself a bit uneasy about being here he left England because it was too cold he went to live in America and now here he is commemorated in the obvious coziest corner and here are the first war poets and a pretty odd bunch they are it's only because they're safely dead that you can include on the same stone Julian grin for who thought war was a great big adventure and Wilfred Owen who was well more pessimistic and this is Wordsworth was actually buried in grasmere and is rather less lonely as a cloud in Poets Corner and in some rather odd company Joshua Ward who invented friars balsam the botanist Stephen Hales who also dreamed up the ventilator oh he's lost his pen it's a small act of vandalism and it's comforting to think it was probably committed in the 19th century but this place has always had its share of prying prising fingers scratching and picking and breaking off tomb robbers we associate with ancient Egypt except that here in our own Valley of the Kings there's been a process of patient and persistent larceny that has been going on virtually since the abbey was built the finger broken off here a precious stone dug out there pilgrims have come to see the relics and take away a relic with them these days the worst vandals are acknowledged to be French schoolchildren tadpoles as the Verge's call them French children seem too long to make their mark generally on one of our national monuments probably the most beautiful feature of the south transept which houses Poets Corner at these 13th century wall paintings which were discovered quite by accident during the preparations for the coronation of eight of the eighth which turned into that of George the sixth this is the incredulity of some Thomas put his hand into the side of Christ writers deal in doubts rather than certainties and it's a nice accident that this picture of the most famous of doubters should be revealed as the background to so many memorial to the literary life [Music] on two mornings a week the choristers entertain visitors in the nave with what they call the sing this morning it's literally to the Holy Spirit by Peter Hereford [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] what's moving about a choir is to see boys of nine or ten doing something they can do supremely well with all the seriousness and dedication one thing self is coming with age the doctor minute Oh 8:30 there's only two Dobson and we'll do a physical search at or nine hundred so we won't be clearly every much before life is good now what about royal representatives to Queen and the Prince of Wales and they arrive after the moment of Westminster who rise at 10:15 arrived just before the world man [Music] now let's have a look at the first circle Oh Jay tell me what the first circle is on the instructions radius in one [Music] [Music] you see the wooden social endings Chester hmm the kinnexa truck simply Lester Lester it's up not happy that the City of Leicester will not be for these endless not Westminster and Westminster means the Minster all the church in the West wanted to do with the Romans Romans were never here in Westminster [Music] nine ten where the troops March and so we are known as a royal peculiar and the Archbishop of Canterbury has no say whatsoever about Westminster Abbey and in fact he has to wait for an invitation or ask permission to take a service here and the only time he can come into this Abbey without permission to take a service is when we have a coronation and that's the only time because he as leader of the Church of England has the right to come and crown the heads of the church finger this modern paving stone marks the spot where the playwright Ben Jonson is buried and against the wall is the original gravestone with his name misspelled I don't know much about Ben Jonson except that he was more one of the boys than Shakespeare was they're not so good at the plays even his grave was a bit of a joke as he asked to be buried upright because he couldn't afford a full-length grave so I suppose that means that come the day of judgment he'll just pop straight up like the demon king in the pantomime it isn't fanciful because when they were digging this grave in 18-49 the gravedigger saw two shin bones up right in the sand and Johnson's skull came tumbling down into the grave which is more hamlet than Ben Jonson there wasn't any the 7th Chapel of course the architecture is very different to what you saw while showing the ninth of the church if you look up our your sieving architecture rack drastically changes to the perpendicular to the dingy Henry awesome definite I'll teach you hdtb the teacher solamente seven Inglaterra well done quando in coverage Panamanian are still in glaze fell appendicular got it ceilings and quaint also lamented now the flights here belong to the knights of the old of the bar and honor given to military people and civil servants have done stage their country yes but for all the stalls and banners and helmets it's just a lot of middle-aged men who've done well behind a desk but then those things are nowadays and no ladies of course story behind it is soldiers before I went into battle had a bath first before they were given this very high accolade or decoration but now is an accent of pageantry and there's an installation every four years to install a new evening night you only have to think about the Knights of old in battle cased in armor from the top of their head to the bottom of their feet galloping toward you with a nasty-looking object in their hand heraldry was the one chance you had to extend your life if you were quick and activates there if you get it wrong Chapel is stole here for a living night and above them I just thought times finer and just for the individual living no flights back off the stock IR for each night their coats of arms became the night and although there are several weights there they are a pass knights of the old our Libyan because if anything unfortunate II happens to the Knights the bath between the last insulation and the next one turning 20 Jennings 1998 Chinese one today's selling crops yeah like stay sexy turning crime scene she had to practice on weeks just to hold her head up I think she was very grateful she never had to wear that crown again one minute silence then I come back to you okay I invite you to join with me in just one minute of prayer standing or sitting whichever you find most helpful or convenient but please be quite still as we pray our Father which art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done give us this every hour on the hour visitors are reminded that the Abbey isn't just a museum a peculiar antiquities or a gallery of sculpture but is primarily a house of God's in the hope and the conviction that he doesn't seem in antiquity to thank you at half-past twelve in just a half an hour's time Holy Communion will be celebrated here in the nave of the Abbey Church to join in that sense the abbey certainly in its tombs and monuments is very much a Church of the establishment the rich the powerful the famous but there's always been an alternative tradition here in Poets Corner there a milton Shelley and Blake none of them creatures of the establishment and here is Charles James Fox dissolute a gambler a Republican the fight of the abolition of the slave trade and a darling of the public who paid his debts twice over he is at Lee Ernest Bevin and over there Archbishop juice to blunt the opponent of apartheid all of them in their different ways members of the awkward squad and worthy a beer on as the country is run they would not get a mention here for this thank God is an independent place conformity will not get you in Nam honest nor bullying it is indeed a peculiar if you'd like the cameras on the home of Jared man in Watkins he was correcting their head wasn't to you honestly that's a pathetic life well he had such a ghost a time with them them Catholic Church probably would have let him write that but he he didn't have to join them did me no but I think he was I mean I think perhaps it is Henry James totally mad at the end he thought he was Napoleon yes but lost their what a bit become them if you examine understand yes well I mean you know I think these June geniuses they're just a little bit creative but anytime you a lien quite well he was soon boom that's what Virginia Woolf said he's a sort of pinstripe magazine yes he really was against but what would you know of actually said was here comes Tom Eliot in his four piece suit ladies and gentlemen may I just have your attention for a moment particularly those of you who are our visitors this morning we are about to make a wreath on the tomb of Alfred Lord Tennyson and I know that members of the Tennyson Society would be only too pleased if you wanted to join us here in Paris corner this is stored even though studied item Godot is Paul's illegally on Hulu is allowed to law school family not ours Daniel Jana busy manual that was someone Kotori buttress that Ezra garlic which are two thousand thousand I call on Lord Tennessee to lay the wreath on the tomb of Alfred Lord hence whoops wrong grave I just said how normally proud I am of our great-grandfather the person he made so very many people so very happy with his wonderful poems I want to say also that I'm so very proud of the Tennyson society who formed the major part of this dear congregation thank you all for coming and God bless you all so nicely it's a village area where it's been abducted long ago you see I mean if I was Belinda mission my grandmother was sick so anti-jewish is you know her and yes I'm on the fence agency really fun another just been yet we go to fresh waters when I grandmother lived at the poor she now the wonderful thing is Adam the long where's this course you'll notice for watching so you're going off to have a lunch now I'm not actually I'm going to one of my colleagues his wife just had a baby had been baptized and just brown-forman just so there's a there's a lunch for the new member of the early family well that's always exciting so on this September morning when in this place of tombs the Abbi family has a new baby we come to what is the most famous tomb of all there's not much democracy in the Abbey which is above all a place of names most of them the names of the great and the powerful but the most famous and the most emulated grave is if someone who has no name at all the notion of the tomb of an unknown worry was that of David Railton an army chaplain in first war and it was taken up enthusiastically by the then Dean of Westminster Dean rile though there were some misgivings in high places the body was brought from France with elaborate precautions to ensure its anonymity and buried here just inside the West door on November the 11th 1920 no one else had ever been buried at this spot and digging down they came straightaway to the sand and gravel of thorny island then the coffin was put in and filled with soil that had been brought from the various battlefields in France a precise reversal of the Rupert Brooke poem would be some corner of a foreign field that will be forever England the corner of the foreign field is here [Music] the burial itself was not auspicious crowd leaders the stone itself is crowded with obvious dignitaries and a touch of those generals and field marshals whose boneheaded nurse had probably helped to put this soldier in the grave in the first place but in time such a cretians fell away and though this is a routine stopping point for heads of state its associations have always been popular in Pacific the notion of the Unknown Warrior retaining its power simply because he could be anybody unlike the Cenotaph which is just up the road which is and means an empty tomb just come to house our conflicting attitudes to war the services at the Senate are under the cold eyes of Earl Haig somehow seeming to celebrate what they also deplore the morning here though is unambiguous and bedded down behind his little hedge this soldier outranks whoever else is buried here this is the most honored grave in the Abbey all other graves can be walked over but not his [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Christopher T.

Views: 13,985

Rating: 4.8926172 out of 5

Keywords: Alan Bennett, Westminster Abbey

Id: ArVxdqoR_0Y

Length: 55min 47sec (3347 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 12 2019