www.timesonline.co.uk A battered old storeroom door at Westminster Abbey that thousands of visitors walk past each day without a second glance has been identified as the oldest known door in Britain.
Scientific tests have proved that the oak door, which is near the Cloisters, dates from the 1050s and is the country’s only surviving Anglo-Saxon door.
It was part of the great abbey constructed during the reign of Edward the Confessor, who was born 1,000 years ago. It might even have been the original entrance door to the former King of England’s own Chapter House.
The door is in the octagonal Chapter House’s outer vestibule, where monks met for prayers in the 13th century and where Parliament resided in the 14th century before transferring to the Palace of Westminster.
Warwick Rodwell, the Abbey’s consultant archaeologist, said: “Not only is this the oldest door in Britain, but it is the only one assignable to the Anglo-Saxon period. We can therefore say confidently that this was a major door belonging to the great abbey constructed by Edward the Confessor.â€Â
English Heritage conducted a dendrochronology test to date the timber. The test established that the single tree used for the door’s five vertical planks was felled between 1032AD and 1064AD.
The ring-pattern revealed that the tree grew in eastern England, almost certainly in the extensive woodland owned by the abbey, possibly in Essex.
Dr Rodwell’s interest wasinspired by the late Cecil Hewett, a timber expert who had suggested in the 1970s that the door could have been “very earlyâ€Â.
Dr Rodwell said: “I thought that there was great potential for it being an Anglo-Saxon door as it has a unique construction. It’s not like Norman and later doors, of which there are quite a few around the country. I realised, just as Cecil Hewett had done, that it was unique, but thought that it may be an odd medieval construction of which there is no other example.â€Â
The abbey was consecrated during the reign of Edward the Confessor, last of the Anglo-Saxon kings. The present Gothic structure was begun by Henry III in 1245, added to in the 16th century by Henry VII, who built the Lady Chapel with its vaulted ceiling, and completed in the 18th century with additions to the west front and towers.
The door’s size (6½ ft by 4 ft) and its double-sided form suggest that it was one of the major doors of the Saxon abbey. Daniel Miles, of the Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory, which conducted the tests, said: “Henry (III) greatly revered Edward the Confessor, rebuilding the abbey church and creating a sumptuous shrine in his honour. No expense was spared, and thus the adaptation and reuse of this ancient door must have been a symbolic act to preserve a ritually important element of the Saxon abbey.â€Â
1,000 YEARS OF ABBEY HISTORY
Edward the Confessor built what is now the abbey between 1045 and 1065 for Benedictine monks
It became known as “west minster†to distinguish it from St Paul’s Cathedral, which was “the east minsterâ€Â. The Abbey’s formal title is The Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster. Westminster Abbey is still used, though there have been no monks since the 16th century St Edward the Confessor’s bones still lie behind the High Altar but the relics of other saints disappeared at the dissolution of the monasteries in 1540
It became England’s coronation church in 1066. Over a millennium 38 monarchs have been crowned there |