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 (with the exception of one short interval) he has remained ever since."[9] The King himself carried from St. Paul's the sacred relics which the Knights Templars had given him twenty years before, and deposited them behind the shrine, where Henry the Fifth's Chantry now stands.