Westminster Abbey has hosted the coronation of the English and then British monarch at every accession since William the Conqueror was crowned there on Christmas Day 1066, with the sole exceptions of Edward V and Edward VIII, who were never crowned at all. The rite is built around the Coronation Chair, made around 1300 on the order of Edward I to enclose the Stone of Scone he had seized from Scotland. Monarchs are anointed and crowned while seated in it, and the chair itself, though scarred by centuries of graffiti carved by choristers and visitors, still holds that role. The abbey's status as a royal peculiar, a church answerable directly to the sovereign rather than to a diocesan bishop, is the specific legal mechanism that allows a coronation, an act of state as much as a religious rite, to take place inside it rather than in a cathedral under a bishop's jurisdiction.
The building is also a mausoleum. Edward the Confessor, whose eleventh century foundation the present church replaced, is buried in a shrine that still stands behind the high altar, and generations of monarchs from Henry III onward were interred near him, alongside consorts, medieval nobility, and later a widening circle of scientists, poets, and statesmen granted burial or memorial there. The tomb clusters read almost as a chronological map of the English and British monarchy in stone, and the abbey's custodians have continued to add new memorials into the present day, extending a practice of state commemoration that has run for close to a thousand years without a real interruption.