The chief works of Henry III. were the building of a magnificent Palace at Westminster in place of the ruder structure of the earlier Norman kings; the reconstruction of Westminster Abbey, and the providing for the body of Edward the Confessor a great shrine of pure gold, richly studded with jewels of enormous value. A long and interesting series of accounts of these and other lavish expenditures of money still exist in the Record Office[100]. _Wall-paintings at Westminster._ A magnificent series of wall-paintings, with subjects from sacred and profane history and from the Apocryphal books of the Old Testament, were executed by various artists, both monks and laymen, on the walls of the chief rooms in the new Palace of Westminster. In style these paintings were very like the miniatures in an illuminated manuscript of the time; they were simply designed, flat in treatment, and executed with the most minute and delicate detail. Great richness of effect was produced by the use of wooden stamps with which delicate diapers and other patterns were stamped over the backgrounds of the pictures on the thin coat of _gesso_ which covered the stone wall. These minutely executed reliefs were then thickly gilt, forming rich gold backgrounds, such as are so commonly used in the manuscripts of the Anglo-Norman school; see fig. 23, p. 130. _Paintings copied from MSS._ The close connection between these magnificent wall paintings and the illuminated miniatures in manuscripts is borne witness to by an interesting record that, in the year 1250, the King ordered Richard de Sanford, Master of the Knights Templars, to lend an illuminated manuscript in French of "_The Gestes of Antioch and the History of the Crusades_" to the painter Edward of Westminster, so that he might copy the miniatures, using the designs to paint the walls of "the Queen's low room in the new Palace of Westminster" with a series of historical pictures. From these paintings of "the Gestes of Antioch" the Queen's room was thenceforth known as "the Antioch chamber[101]". _The Painted Chamber._ The largest of the halls in the Westminster Palace, decorated with a marvellous series of exquisitely finished paintings, was known as "the Painted Chamber" _par excellence_ from its great size and the immense number of pictures which covered its walls. The system of decoration adopted in the thirteenth century was not to paint large pictures in a large hall, but simply to multiply the number of small ones, keeping the figures as delicate in execution and small in scale as if the room had been of the most limited dimensions.