Westminster Abbey Trivia
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50 free Westminster Abbey trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Westminster Abbey has hosted every English and British coronation since William the Conqueror in 1066, at least sixteen royal weddings, and the burials of more than 3,300 people from Edward the Confessor to Stephen Hawking. This quiz covers the building (Henry III's French-inspired Gothic, the Henry VII Chapel that a Tudor antiquary called 'the wonder of the world', the Cosmati pavement, the 18th-century towers, Britain's oldest door), the ceremonies (the Coronation Chair, the Stone of Scone and its 1950 theft, the Vivat shouted by Westminster School boys) and the graves in Poets' Corner and the scientists' corner. It also digs into the stranger corners of the abbey's story: Oliver Cromwell's body dug up and hanged, a workman's scaffold pole through Edward the Confessor's coffin, Ben Jonson buried upright, the suffragette bomb of 1914, the Blitz, Diana's funeral watched by two billion people and the first monarch's funeral held there in 260 years. Difficulty runs from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the abbey, its chapels and monuments and the people buried there, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our London, British monarchy and Tudors quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is Westminster Abbey's formal title?
The Collegiate Church of Saint Peter
The Collegiate Church of Saint Peter has had no monks since Elizabeth I removed them in 1559, yet everyone still calls it an abbey. Henry VIII even made it a cathedral, and for ten years it had its own bishop.
Q 02Whose coronation on Christmas Day 1066 is the first documented at Westminster Abbey?
William the Conqueror
William the Conqueror's guards outside mistook the shouts of acclamation for an attack and set fire to nearby houses. Smoke filled the abbey and the congregation fled while the clergy finished the service.
Q 03Which medieval work shows Edward the Confessor's body being carried to his newly built Westminster Abbey?
The Bayeux Tapestry
The Bayeux Tapestry shows his church with a central tower, consecrated barely a week before he died. The king who built it had been too ill to attend the ceremony.
Q 04Westminster Abbey's present Gothic church was begun in 1245 on the orders of which king?
Henry III
Henry III wanted a grand shrine for his favourite saint, with room for his own tomb nearby. He died with the work unfinished, and the old Norman nave stayed attached to his far taller church for over a century.
Q 05Westminster Abbey originally stood on an islet in the Thames known as what?
Thorney Island
Thorney Island was cut off from the bank by the branches of a small river. That stream now runs through underground pipes, so the island under the abbey can no longer be seen.
Q 06Westminster Abbey's monks, there from the 10th century until 1559, belonged to which order?
Benedictine
Benedictine monks from Westminster once grew their vegetables in a walled garden that London still calls Covent Garden, from an old form of the word 'convent'.
Q 07Since 1560, Westminster Abbey has answered directly to whom?
The sovereign
The sovereign became its only overseer when Elizabeth I, having removed the last monks, refounded the abbey by charter in 1560. No bishop or archbishop has had any say there since, which makes it a 'royal peculiar'.
Q 08Westminster Abbey's Gothic design is chiefly modelled on churches from which country?
France
France set the fashion: the king wanted to match the great churches rising at Reims, Amiens and Chartres. The rounded east end ringed with chapels is their idea; English churches of the day ended square.
Q 09Westminster Abbey's nave, braced by flying buttresses, holds what distinction among England's Gothic churches?
It is the highest
It is the highest, at about 31 metres, and it looks higher still because the nave is far narrower than any other medieval English church of that height.
Q 10Which former clerk of Christopher Wren designed Westminster Abbey's two west towers, completed in 1745?
Nicholas Hawksmoor
Nicholas Hawksmoor was a leader of the English Baroque, yet he drew the towers to suit the medieval Gothic church. He died in 1736, nine years before they were finished.
Q 11Westminster Abbey's Henry VII Chapel, with its fan-vaulted ceiling, is a celebrated example of which style?
Perpendicular Gothic
Perpendicular Gothic masons hid the ceiling's trick: the stone pendants that seem to hang in mid-air are wedged into arches half-concealed in the vault. A Tudor writer called the chapel the wonder of the world.
Q 12Westminster Abbey's Tudor chapel was built to house the remains of which king its founder wanted canonised?
Henry VI
Henry VI was never made a saint and his body never left Windsor, so the chapel meant for his shrine became the burial place of the king who built it.
Q 13The sculptor of Henry VII's tomb at Westminster Abbey had to leave Florence after breaking whose nose?
Michelangelo
Q 21Who is blamed for the initials and graffiti carved into the Coronation Chair?
Tourists, choirboys and schoolboys
Tourists, choirboys and schoolboys all left their names in the 1700s and 1800s, when visitors could sit in the chair. One of them carved that he had slept in it overnight in July 1800.
Q 22In 1914 the Coronation Chair was damaged by a bomb thought to have been planted by whom?
Suffragettes
Suffragettes are thought to have planted it during their campaign for the vote. The blast blew a corner off the 600-year-old chair, yet nobody in the abbey was seriously hurt.
Q 23Where did the Stone of Scone turn up in April 1951, months after students took it from Westminster Abbey?
Michelangelo carried the flattened nose for the rest of his life. Pietro Torrigiano, the fellow student who punched him, went on to make the gilt bronze effigies of the Tudor king and queen.
Q 14With the Garter based at Windsor, which order of chivalry has its home in Westminster Abbey's Henry VII Chapel?
The Bath
The Bath has more knights than the chapel has stalls, so some wait many years to be installed beneath their own banner. The chapel has been the order's church since 1725.
Q 15Westminster Abbey's Cosmati pavement, on which monarchs are crowned, was laid by craftsmen brought from which city?
Rome
Rome supplied both the craftsmen and the stone: the abbot himself brought workmen and purple porphyry home from the city. A brass inscription set into the floor calculates when the world will end.
Q 16In the 14th century, which body held meetings in the monks' chapter house at Westminster Abbey?
The House of Commons
The House of Commons used the monks' meeting room for a few years, then moved on to their dining hall. After the monks left, the chapter house stored state records for three centuries.
Q 17Tree-ring dating showed that Britain's oldest door, at Westminster Abbey, was made in which period?
Anglo-Saxon
Anglo-Saxon carpenters made it in the 1050s for the church that stood here before. When the abbey was rebuilt two centuries later the door was kept, cut down to fit and hung again.
Q 18Westminster Abbey's Pyx Chamber is named after the wooden boxes that once held what there?
Newly minted coins
Newly minted coins were locked in the boxes until a jury tested their metal at the Trial of the Pyx. The medieval ceremony is still held every year, and it still puts the Royal Mint in the dock.
Q 19Which king had the Coronation Chair made around the Stone of Scone he had seized from the Scots?
Edward I
Edward I first ordered the chair in bronze, then changed his mind and had it made of oak, painted and gilded. It has served at coronations for seven centuries.
Q 20Which queen sat in the Coronation Chair a second time, at her Golden Jubilee service in Westminster Abbey?
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria wore her widow's black instead of coronation robes for the 1887 service, and the medieval chair was given a dark coat for the day.
Arbroath
Arbroath was a pointed choice: the Declaration of Arbroath, Scotland's assertion of nationhood in 1320, carries its name. The four students who took the stone on Christmas Day 1950 left it at the abbey's altar.
Q 24Where was the Stone of Scone kept from 1996?
Edinburgh Castle
Edinburgh Castle kept it beside the Scottish crown jewels until 2024, when it moved to a museum in Perth. It still travels south for coronations, as it did in 2023.
Q 25The pupils of Westminster School have the duty of shouting what during a coronation?
Vivat Rex or Vivat Regina
Vivat Rex or Vivat Regina, Latin for 'long live the King' or 'Queen', is shouted as the monarch walks through the choir. The scholars' cries are written into the entrance anthem, 'I was glad'.
Q 26What happened in 1661 to Oliver Cromwell's body, buried in Westminster Abbey?
It was dug up and hanged at Tyburn
It was dug up and hanged at Tyburn on the anniversary of Charles I's execution. The head was then cut off and stuck on a spike at Westminster Hall, where it stayed for more than twenty years.
Q 27Scaffolding put up for which king's 1685 coronation knocked a hole in Edward the Confessor's coffin?
James II
James II was handed a gold crucifix and chain that a member of the abbey choir fished out through the hole. Nobody knows where the cross is today.
Q 28Who was the last monarch to be buried in Westminster Abbey?
George II
George II asked for the facing sides of his coffin and his wife Caroline's to be removed so that their dust could mingle. The monarchs after him chose to be buried at Windsor.
Q 29Who was the first poet buried in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner, around 1400?
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer probably owed the grave to his royal service and his house in the abbey grounds, not to his verse. Only when Edmund Spenser was buried beside him two centuries later did a poets' corner begin.
Q 30Which writer's statue reached Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner 124 years after his death?
Shakespeare
Shakespeare stayed in his Stratford-upon-Avon grave, though there was talk soon after his death of moving him to the abbey. Benefit performances of his plays at two London theatres helped to pay for the statue.