Ns and Charles Dickins But she argues that we have forgotten how much we owed Henry the 8 and his court and from the very center of the Abbey we'll be talking to Richard Harris the former Bishop of Oxford about Christianity in our times as it's been reflected through the writings of poets and novelists from Dostoyevsky to Elliot Samuel Beckett to Philip Pullman 1st however the Abbey itself may seem so massive and familiar as to be part of the landscape but it's also in some ways a lucky survivor the historian David Cameron Dines been editing a huge and beautiful new book on its history David we're standing together in the chapter house which is this extraordinary mediæval octagonal space with beautiful paintings all the remnants of beautiful paintings from medieval times now Westminster Abbey is the center of secular and political power in Britain and this chapter house explains why. This chapter house was built during the reign of Henry the 3rd in the middle of the 13th century Henry the 3rd was the greatest architectural patron of the Abbey and that of itself is exactly Andrew to your point because it's the monarch who is the person who comes up with the money and has the vision to create this extraordinary Abbey building so that's $1.00 of the ways in which a secular building but also a sacred building as well and you refer to it as the Abbey but this is a strange place is not a cathedral and it's not a place where the Church of England has any jurisdiction it is a royal peculiar it is indeed a royal peculiar she's worn and peculiarly royal That means that from the reign of the 1st Queen Elizabeth on the person with supreme power over the Abbey is the monarch the Archbishop of Canterbury and the hierarchy of the Church of England have no jurisdiction here there is no bishop as a result of that the Abbey is run by the Dean and Chapter and they are only responsible to the monarch and the monarch is the boss now I've spent most of my career reporting on politics this is also the place where the House of Commons started to sit itself yes one of the ways in which the Abbey is this extraordinary building where church and state are so mixed up is this was of course the place where the monks met but it was also the place in late medieval known in modern times where the House of Commons met and later on it was the place where the public records of this country was stored before being put in the purpose built public records office says this building the chapter house absolutely exemplifies this extraordinary joint attribute of the Abbey of being both secular and sacred the place where church and state come together David were about to go and do the rest of the program recording in the library of the Abbey passing the oldest door in Britain which goes back well before the Norman Conquest. That's a very good walk to make and it's worth saying that the library and the munitions house one of the greatest and longest running archives and collections of documents in the whole of the Western world. David we're now sitting in the oldest Library in London round the corner from where we were let's talk about the very very early history of Westminster Abbey It starts on the island it starts on thorny island and allegedly the 1st monastic community was in a Common Era 6 so for that very little is known about that or indeed the 1st buildings that the monks of that time may have put up and so the history with which we are more familiar is really one which begins in the 12th century with Edward the Confessor Edward the Confessor was the monarch who decided that Westminster should be both the place of government for England as it then was and therefore also it being a very religious age that there should be an appropriately grand church and so Edward the Confessor is the person who fixes on Westminster as the center of government and also as a major ecclesiastical center and that's really when the history of the Abbey that we can recognise actually begins he builds a stone Romanesque kind of church we must assume images of it in the bay or tapestry and at this point still it's a quite a small gathering of monks on the island London itself is a distant haze of smoke to the east and it's called Westminster because because it was still is to the west of East Minster which was another name for sin pause and so really it's in Paul's ought to be East Minster cathedral to balance Westminster Abbey here on the other side of London and then the Normans coming in very very important nor the Conqueror himself chooses to be crowned here that's when the tradition begins that all English and then British monarchs except to a crown in the Abbey it's probably the case that King Harold who comes after Edward the Confessor and before William the Conqueror was crowned here as well but it's that possible coronation and William the Conqueror is definite coronation on Christmas day. In 66 which starts the tradition that ever After all English and then British monarchs with 2 exceptions have been crowned here in the Abbey and that in a sense is the closest exemplification of this extraordinary link between church and state Ok I have to ask you about the 2 exceptions who were there and why the 2 exceptions were Edward the 5th and Edward the 8th right who didn't make it with the it's not yet he'd resigned or abdicated by the time he's cornered you say they used the coronation for his brother that's right yes that the the the coronation of Edward the 8th walls of course fully planned as then he rather inconsiderately abdicates And so then the coronation was reworked for George the 6th and his wife Queen Elizabeth it was of course a rather different carnation because unlike it with the 8th George the 6 was married let's turn to the the other great great patron you mention him already of the of the Abbey the building we're in really goes back to the mid 12 fifties That's right and the great architectural patron was Henry the 3rd and much of the Abbey that we see today was the result of his determination to create an even grander church than that which Edward the Confessor had created previously and so with the exception of the glorious Lady Chapel which Henry the 7th built at the East End and the 2 hawks more towers of the 18th century the West and the majority of this building was in fact constructed at the behest of Henry the 3rd and so we need to think of the fact that this building was originally an intention part of Catholic European Christianity that we think of it now as a bastion of English national Protestantism but that wasn't what it was built for and to what extent were its original builders consciously looking south at the great French cathedrals and saying we're going to do better there isn't any doubt that the architectural and decorative inspiration for Henry the 3rd building was in fact a European Christendom and in particular French Christendom so for it. Ample the Eastend here is absolutely all that's to say there's a curve at the end it's not a straight line and that's a very French architectural feature so here we have this building seen by many people is the epitome of Englishness which in architectural terms because of when it was put up is actually a very European building now I said earlier on that it was in some ways a lucky survivor I'm really referring I suppose to the Reformation because an awful lot of the monasteries a lot of the cathedrals of Catholic England vanished but this one doesn't because it's got royal patronage behind it that's right and the chewed period is the pivotal time in the history of the Abbey when it ceases to be a major outwork of European Catholic Christendom and becomes instead a Protestant English Church but that's not a foregone conclusion of course that 10 mediates view but then under Queen Mary it goes back to being a Catholic monastery again and it's only under Queen Elizabeth later that it does establish itself as a Protestant church and as a Protestant church under the jurisdiction of a Protestant monitor Richard Harris for Bishop of Oxford David one of the most fascinating rooms in the n.b.a. Is the Jerusalem chamber isn't it where the translators or 2 of the commission that did the translation of the great King James Bible worked and produced a work of 16 of them tell us about that fascinating room well that is indeed one of the most extraordinary rooms in the Abbey and it has many in the church itself but of course around the the a ray of buildings that gather around the at the and the Jerusalem Chamber is one of the many rooms of particular historical significance and of course that episode of the translation of the Bible is another example of this extraordinary connection between church and state that if you wish to promote the Protestant religion you need an appropriate translation of the Bible and that was undertaken here and also to wonderful connection with literary figures with Poets Corner with people like General many Elliott Orton c.s. Lewis all. With memorialise there are lots more buried that that's a wonderful connection with British culture isn't it thinking about the sort of joint secular and religious nature to what extent do we think that the secular aspects the sense that it is a national center to offer all the best poets and the best architects and the best this and the best that and the sight of many many royal occasions undermines the spirituality of the building I think it depends when you visit the Abbey and while you come to visit it is its fundamental purpose its original purpose was to be a place for the worship of God and the worship of God of course still goes on day by day and many instances hour by hour and that remains in some ways its fundamental purpose even as millions of tourists come to look at the royal tombs the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and so on and even as these great occasions where church and state meet especially in the form of coronations are carried on so it's a multipurpose building that's part of the Multan is a purpose is secular and to do with the state and the monarchy another part of that support this is deeply religious I think with Prince Rabbitohs very well because as soon as you go into Westminster Abbey you see 2 wonderful I comes there with candles burning before they read it it brings you up against the spirituality of it and then there's a chapel just outside of that for private prayer and there chaplains one wandering around and I think they do well in emphasizing that soon as you go in the other thing that you know she's very very quickly is indeed the tube of the Unknown Warrior and that seems to me to be the moment where when with Westminster Abbey becomes more of a People's Church or a people's Abbey rather than just a royal one very very important moment in the 920 s. Can we talk a little bit about how that came about the transformative figure in many ways in the 20 century history was Dean rial Ryle has the idea or the ideas put to him by someone else and he takes it up to bring to the Abbey the body of an unknown. Soldier from the Western Front dug up from the mud no one knows no one knows who's who he or I suppose it could possibly be she is and it's buried here in the early 1920 s. And it becomes an extraordinary place of veneration and pilgrimage for ordinary people so whereas previously the Abbey had been thought of as a house of kings and monarchs are buried here in Grand tombs it's this very understated grave of an ordinary unknown person which becomes in a sense the abbe's most iconic 20th century aspect and it was idea to do that and the point I suppose is that everybody who had lost her husband or a son or a cousin or whatever it was in in Flanders who'd come here and imagine that the Unknown Warrior is their child that's right and that was part of the purpose of doing it to that it was thought to be a way off providing people with some sense of catharsis or closure if they themselves had lost a relative in the war what's also of course interesting is even at the time that there is this celebration of anonymous ordinariness which is what the Tomb of the unknown the grave of the onion warrior does at the same time royal weddings were brought back to Westminster Abbey in the early 1920 s. Which were of course at the other end of the spectrum grandiose splendid and in their own ways utterly unlike the ordinariness of the grave of the owner and warrior and that combination of those 2 things the ordinary and the grand it's that recipe which gives the Abbey off to the 1st World War a kind of particular resonance in the life of the nation and the English speaking world beyond that no other church not even simples quite has and that it still retains to this day write a gentle turn in our conversation with 2 days away from Christmas and we have to imagine Westminster and the Abbey itself in the run up to the Christmas surrounded by kind of feasting and West sailing songs we tend to think Lucy Worsley of Christmas as being a Victorian invention in the way that we experience it but. you believe that wrong with it we are under rating the the impact of henry the 8 scored in particular well i was set this in challenge recreated tutor christmas and i fall well it's an ease can be nothing they'll be no christmas tree they'll be no christmas cards in it crackers no you know wraps up presence being exchanged left right and center because we think the victorians invented all of this and they did they invented the consumer version of christmas which is all about making things and making money out of something them to other people but a call to the religious festival was there before and having explored that a little bit there's a little of strange echo use of things that still still go on to day i mean was really giving of presents was very important didn't in henry's court for incident eve was but it was sort of less fun than you think about it of it today because it was ferry ritualized is a strange echo do you keep a list of the people that you sent christmas cards to last you are well yes they did have yeah 8 at you could go to the national archives at you could still see here's a lists of what he got and what he was given but what he really preferred was money that was the best gifts to give henry on all dad what went down moost have fairly with him although you know amblin how to good line him present stew she gave him bourse be is for his favorite sports or 100 in borns i think what are you that they have or sissy as of all as yes they had this whole sort of hunting chasing sort of parts of theft court ship ritual in terms of loving was going on lots of feasting and you had the delightful experience of it or of eating more less the kind of thing that henry and his chord be eating at christmas i was thinking about this i have read that the the the conception of discussed right discussed is an invention of the 17th century because discussed is a reaction of plenty isn't it is when we've got enough to eat and drink that we can afford to find something's disgusting say if you a chewed a person resources were scarcer you would deep more disgusting things quite happily and i was real The challenge by the concept of eating the bull's head which had been prepared for me with great joy and panache by this whole team of feature stories they were delighted they said that whatever let's make the Bull's Head This involves taking all of the brains out and filling it with some sort of cat food and then stealing it in line and cooking it for hours and hours and hours and then the Bull's Head was presented with the special bull's head Carol and they said would you like the nostrils all the. What you go for. And lots of people quaking at home like a robbery I braced myself to nibble on a sliver of ear and I had never to do so again the other thing the shooters did was they imported that great great luxury sugar and there's a lot of candid and sure good food as well was there not as yes you would have been familiar with honey and meat and that sort of thing but a really important part of life at court was the consumption of sugar much better refining sugar and particularly as part of what's called the banquets which is like an extra course at the end of the meal which is super sweet and sugar has to be constructed in order to make it a feast for the eyes into strange shapes and we should explain this is before of course the sugar islands and in the West Indies when Sugar becomes relatively common it's very very rare and alongside that lots of things like cinnamon that we also still associate with Christmas and not make it that's becoming available to the very rich that you just were eating the world it's amazing they had spices and Java from Africa that people tend to sort of forget about and that's something that's still with us that spicy scent of Christmas and mung wine and Christmas cake that but that's something that uses explosives all the way back finally the lords of misrule the Lord of Misrule seems to be somehow connected to the Father Christmas story this is such an excellent job title isn't it heavy they are and you know other people like archbishops may well have employed Lord of Misrule to oversee the production of Christmas the music the feasting what have you and sometimes things got out of hand a lot of missiles. And then back in again so he was he was sometimes referred to as Prince Christmas or old Christmas and that's what leads people to think that I have see was the origin of Father Christmas should have you see can you tell us a little bit more about the carols which was sung them when are there any carols which were sung then which is sung today apart from the boss had one Richard already being mentioned so I'm going to not try to convert others any others that have lasted Yes Yes Well it's what's great about scallops is that they're sort of federal full of music I think and they have lives of their own that genuinely popular and some today callous which would have been sung in an ecclesiastical setting because cals were secular music then include the Coventry Carol which is for the slaughter the Holy Innocents one of the 12 Days of Christmas and that's the is fantastically moving and poignant is about the death of your children. I suppose it's important to stress that even the tutor Christmas is itself an invention building on something earlier because of course there are a whole set of pagan festivals about winter because winter is dark and winter is cold and so you need light and you need cheering up and in a sense it's off the back of that the shooter Christmas Eve Also in it's off the back of that as Lucy's already said that the Dickensian and current commercial Christmas evolved I suppose my other question to Lucy or my question to Lucy would be we have this notion of a kind of monolithic shooter Christmas but presumably Christmas under Henry the 8th is one of the Christmas under Queen Mary is perhaps something different and Christmas under Queen Elizabeth is something different again after all the tutor period is extraordinarily contested and contentious and controversial in religious matters and that must have flowed across into different ways of celebrating Christmas in the 16th century you're quite right there's a sense of something ending with Henry the 8th Christmas which is that really ancient Greek various Do you mean by the Christians to co-opt this existing pre-Christian festival in the middle of winter but. I mean the 8th notoriously diet a Catholic he had set in motion events that would lead to the Reformation and would in the reign of Edward and then again in the 17th century lead to a Puritan Protestant covenants in the church which was less keen on the the fun site of questioning in the letter the feasting in the fun a well known factoid is the parliamentarians banned Christmas in the sentence and they did