The chapel of St Stephen was the most important place of worship in the medieval palace of Westminster, recorded by name from the early thirteenth century. Beginning in 1292, it was rebuilt with great magnificence by three kings of England, Edwards I–III, in a project that lasted a remarkable seventy years (fig. 1a–b). Like other palace chapels, including earlier English examples and the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, this one was constructed on two storeys, dominating views of Westminster from the river Thames (fig. 1c). Building work also included accommodation for the community that served St Stephen’s. In 1348, Edward III established a new college of canons, replacing the previous royal chaplains. Work continued on the provision of houses and facilities for them until 1396, in the reign of Richard II. After the dissolution of St Stephen's college in 1548 its buildings (including the chapel) were put to new uses, and the upper chapel became the meeting place for the House of Commons. In 1834 a great fire swept through the Houses of Parliament, destroying many of the medieval buildings, including the old Commons chamber. Today, only parts of the lower chapel and the canons’ cloister survive, buried within the fabric of the modern palace of Westminster.

This great royal foundation may be lost, but the accounts for the construction and furnishing of it survive, preserved today among the records of English medieval royal government in The National Archives at Kew. Beginning in 1292 and ending in 1396, this is one of the richest collections of fabric accounts for a single building to survive from medieval Europe. It is these accounts that are published here, comprising over sixty documents. They survive as rolls of different kinds, all being products of the system of accounting at the Exchequer, constituting a case study in the functioning of the king's works during the long fourteenth century. Some rolls are concerned solely with work on St Stephen’s, whereas others include only a few entries that are relevant to the building campaigns. Read alongside surviving antiquarian and other visual sources for St Stephen’s, the accounts bring to life not only the character of this major lost building, in its architecture and the remarkable richness of its decoration, but also the process of its creation.