The church and the surrounding monastery buildings were finished during the reigns of the early Norman kings, and William the Conqueror confirmed the charters granted to the Abbey by the Confessor, and bestowed yet more lands upon it. We must now pass over nearly two hundred years, and speak of the time of King Henry III. In the year 1220, Henry III began to build a very beautiful chapel, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, at the eastern end of the Abbey church. It was just about this time that some of the grand cathedrals of France, such as those of Amiens, Reims, and Chartres, were being built in that lovely and graceful pointed style which is called Gothic, but which really comes from France. Henry III, when visiting his brother-in-law, St. Louis, King of France, had no doubt seen some of these glorious new churches, and was very anxious to build one like them in honour of King Edward the Confessor, for whom he had a great reverence. [Illustration: _Photo W. Rice, F.R.P.S._ _Allen & Co (London) Ltd Sc_ _The Norman Cloister._ ] Accordingly, in 1245, he began to have the Confessor’s Norman church pulled down, and in its stead he built the splendid church we now see, a church which has been called “the most lovely and lovable thing in Christendom.” The choir and transepts, the Chapter-House, and some of the cloisters were built during Henry’s reign. The monks sang service in the new choir and transepts for the first time on 13th October 1269, when the body of Edward the Confessor was placed in the magnificent new shrine made for it by Henry III. Some of the nave was then gone on with, but it was not built to its present length until the reign of Henry V. The first time it was used for a procession was when the Te Deum was sung in thanksgiving after the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. The money for building this part of the Abbey was given into the care of a man named Dick Whittington, whom some people think to have been the famous Lord Mayor of that name. This, however, is doubtful. The church built by Henry III is very different from a Norman church. Instead of round arches, it has very pointed ones; the windows are long and pointed; the pillars are tall, slender, and graceful. The wonder seems to be how such a building can have stood for all these hundreds of years. And indeed it would not stand, if it were not for the beautiful flying buttresses which support it on the outside. In the reigns of Edward III and Richard II the cloisters were finished, and Abbot Litlington built the celebrated rooms known as the Jerusalem Chamber and the College Hall. A very fine North Porch, called “Solomon’s Porch,” was built in Richard II’s reign, but unhappily none of it now remains.