In the fourteenth century Westminster Abbey fulfilled the double function of coronation church and mausoleum for the kings of England, a combination rare among the royal churches of medieval Europe. By tradition, the two functions had been combined from a very early period, even from the Abbey’s distant origins. ‘From the era of its first foundation’, claimed Prior John Flete in the fifteenth century, ‘this has been the place of royal consecration, the burial place of kings [regum sepultura], and the repository of the royal insignia.’ In fact, however, the systematic combination of functions came much later than Flete implied. Coronations were held there almost without exception from 1066, but it was not until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that it became the usual regum sepultura. Why was this? How far did it represent a royal cult of the Confessor, and how far the growing importance of London-Westminster as a capital? And once the tradition was established, why were some monarchs buried elsewhere, whether through choice or circumstance? The royal connections with the Abbey have been extensively discussed, most recently and helpfully by Emma Mason, Paul Binski and David Carpenter, but there is more to be said on the wider issues raised by royal choices of burial places.

Between 1066 and 1216 there was apparently no close relationship between Abbey and monarchy, despite the fact that the Confessor had rebuilt it as his mausoleum church. The successive coronations of Harold II (probably) and William I in the newly completed Abbey were surely intended to emphasise their respective legitimacy as heirs to the Confessor’s throne rather than any special regard for his cult or foundation; and both kings chose to be buried elsewhere in churches they had founded or patronised. This was, indeed, the pattern with all the Anglo-Norman kings: ‘each founder intended to be buried alone or, at most, with the immediate members of his family, perhaps in order to ensure an exclusive concentration of monastic intercessions’. No members of the royal family seem to have copied Edward in being buried at Westminster except for his widow Edith and Henry I’s first queen, Matilda, neither of whom may have intended burial there.