as re-building and re-embellishing the Abbey of St. Denys as a
place of sepulture for the French kings. Henry had also seen the
splendid churches of Amiens, Beauvais, and Reims, in his journeys
through France. His English, his religious, and his artistic instincts
therefore, all combined to fire his imagination with the idea of making
the most glorious shrine for the English king and saint that the world
could see.

Henry's work at Westminster began with his reign. He dedicated the newly
built Lady Chapel at the back of the High Altar, the day before his
coronation; and "the first offering laid upon its altar were the spurs
worn by the King in that ceremony." Then Edward's Abbey, "consecrated by
recollections of the Confessor and the Conqueror," was swept away.
Little remains of it now save the bases of those pillars of which I have
spoken above--the substructures of the Dormitory--and the heavy
low-browed passage leading from the Great Cloister into Little Dean's
Yard and the Little Cloisters. The famous "Chapel of the Pyx," close to
the Chapter House, is still in good preservation. But as it can only be
opened by the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, with seven huge keys,
it is impossible to gain entrance to it--the ancient Treasury of
England. It is now only opened by these officers once in five years for
the "Trial of the Pyx," the Standard Trial Pieces of gold and silver,
used for determining the just weight of the coin of the realm issued at
the Mint.

But now upon the old foundations rose the Abbey we all know and love. In
every smallest detail the new church was to be incomparable in beauty.
Foreign painters and sculptors expended on it all their cunning. Peter
of Rome set to work on the Confessor's Shrine, where you may still read
his name, and made it glow with gold, mosaics and enamels, the like of
which could not be found in England. And when the wondrous
building--"the most lovely and lovable thing in Christendom"[8]--was
finished, the Confessor's body was translated on October 13, 1269, from
its tomb in front of the High Altar to the splendid shrine prepared for
it. The king, now growing old, had gathered his family about him for
the last time. Edward, his eldest son, was just on the eve of departure
with his wife Eleanor for Palestine to join St. Louis in the Crusades.
He, his brother Edmund, and his uncle Richard, king of Germany,
"supported the coffin of the Confessor, and laid him in the spot where