This chapel of St. Stephen's was very beautiful, more beautiful, we are told, than St. George's Chapel at Windsor. But no traces remain of it or of its cloisters and its chantry except the crypt. In the reign of Henry VIII. Westminster Palace was seriously destroyed by fire, and the chapel was then altered, turned from its original use, and given over to the House of Commons as their Parliament House, another link, you see, between the Palace, the Church, and the People.
In the year 1349 the Black Death, that most terrible plague, swept over England, killing nearly one half of the people; fifty thousand of its victims were buried in London, and the Abbey was not spared, for the Abbot and twenty-six of the monks caught it and died. They were buried in one grave in the south cloister, covered by a large stone, which you will easily find, although it has a wrong name, that of Gervase de Blois, carved upon it; and that vast stone, says Dean Stanley, "is the footmark left in the Abbey by the greatest plague which ever swept over Europe."
Abbot Bircheston, who thus died, had not been very satisfactory. "It is well of this place that he continued no longer," says the chronicler severely; "for he ran the house into a great deal of debt, being himself extravagant and his relations being wasteful people." His successor was that remarkable man Simon Langham, the only Abbot of Westminster who ever became Archbishop of Canterbury, and he did such great things for the monastery that he won for himself the name of the second founder. Not only did he pay off the debts of his predecessors, but he managed with great prudence all the estates and revenues under his care, saved large sums of money by his frugality, and, perhaps most difficult task of all, brought the house once more into excellent discipline. This is what Plete, himself a monk at Westminster, has to say of Abbot Langham: "He rectified many abuses which had crept in, truly a service as it is most useful to any place, so commonly is it the most difficult also; and accordingly it cost him a great deal of study, pains, and resolution to effect it, as having many ill tempers to deal with, some being indolent, others odd and particular, some extravagant, and others perverse."