Read the book: «Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century»
CORONATION
FROM THE 8TH
TO THE 21ST CENTURY
ROY STRONG
TO
THE DEAN AND CHAPTER
OF
WESTMINSTER
FROM
THEIR
HIGH BAILIFF
AND
SEARCHER OF THE SANCTUARY
2005
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
PREFACE
Prologue 1953
1 The Lord’s Anointed
2 King and Priest
3 Kingship and Consent
4 Sacred Monarchy
5 Crown Imperial
6 From Divinity to Destruction
7 From Reaction to Revolution
8 Insubstantial Pageants
9 Imperial Epiphanies
Epilogue 2005
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
CHRONOLOGY
Also by the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
This book is a direct consequence of having the honour of holding the post of High Bailiff and Searcher of the Sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. It is a position lost in the mists of the medieval past when its orbit of activity was practical. Today the post, along with that of High Steward, is purely an honorary one – but not without purpose, for it enables the Dean and Chapter to draw into the Abbey’s service those who might bear witness to the faith it upholds and the ideals of the nation that it has come to epitomise. This book is my contribution.
It is a remarkable fact that the history of the English Coronation, particularly in the modern period, remains such a neglected field of study. The pioneer work remains Percy Schramm’s still magisterial study published in English in 1937. To that we must add the recent monumental and definitive catalogue of the Crown Jewels in two vast volumes in a limited edition and hence inaccessible to the general public. The present book sets out to remedy that lack by providing both for the general and more specialised reader the first overall documented history of the Coronation in a single volume.
The need for such a publication is an urgent one as another Coronation will sooner or later take place. In researching and writing this book I have been struck by the widespread ignorance as to the nature of this ancient rite, au fond a foundation stone of the British state and a bulwark against its total secularisation. It is no empty pageant but one that, like so many other historic customs and institutions under attack today which some wish cheerfully to sweep away, has proved itself amazingly flexible over the centuries. Any nation calls for rites of passage and the Coronation, with its central concept of setting a single human being apart by dint of anointing with holy oil as the embodiment of both crown and nation, is the greatest of them all.
I began my scholarly life almost half a century ago working under the late Dame Frances Yates on Elizabethan court pageantry. At the time I confess to finding Coronations dull and, I thought, merely repetitious. How wrong I was! Researching this book has been one long revelation as the ceremonial inaugurating a new reign gradually revealed its ability to respond to and reflect every theological, political, social and cultural nuance over the centuries.
I do not claim to have written the last word on this subject. Who could? But I have opened up a topic that in some areas has already attracted fine scholarly contributions. My debt to those scholars, particularly those working on the early and medieval periods, I acknowledge with gratitude. One of the problems of working on this subject is the sheer quantity of the manuscript and printed material, so much that inevitably at some point a line firmly had to be drawn or else the book would never have been finished and the result would have been unwieldly. What is new is the attempt throughout to draw the camera’s lens back and place what can all too easily become an antiquarian account of a series of isolated pageants into the wider perspective of what those involved at the time were setting out to achieve.
Coronation could not have been written without recourse to manuscript material. In the case of the early, medieval and Tudor periods that has been fairly fully explored. It is the material for the modern period which has largely gone without investigation and it is that which in the main has preoccupied me. I cannot express my gratitude enough for the graciousness extended to me at all the archives explored to write this book: the College of Arms, the British Library, Westminster Abbey Muniments, Lambeth Palace Library, St John’s College, Cambridge and the Public Record Office. In the case of the last I am grateful to R. W. O’Hara who, under my direction, worked through the material there. From the outset, thanks to the enthusiastic support of Garter King of Arms, I was given unfettered access to the huge collections in the College. Robert Yorke, their librarian, saw that, each time I went, everything I asked for was to hand. Equally Dr Richard Mortimer and Dr Tony Trowles saw that I was fed with the plethora which exists in the Abbey. At St John’s College, Cambridge, I was looked after by Jonathan Harrison, the Special Collections Librarian.
The advent of the information technology revolution truly also facilitates far speedier research. The ability to consult the British Library catalogue online and so much of its manuscript holdings remains a constant source of wonder to me. What has also speeded research is that splendid British Library resource, Articles Direct, from their supply centre at Boston Spa.
I cannot list nor remember now everyone who has helped me on my way but I record my gratitude to the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Luce, who welcomed this project which meant that, with the gracious permission of Her Majesty The Queen, I was given free access to all the material at the College of Arms, in particularly that connected with 1953. Amongst others who have assisted I record: Dr Andrew Hughes (University of Toronto), Dr Simon Thurley (English Heritage), John M. Burton (Surveyor of the Fabric of Westminster Abbey), Professor David Sturdy (University of Ulster), Dr Pamela Tudor-Craig, Clare Browne (Victoria & Albert Museum), Dr Richard Barber, Daniel McDowell, The Hon. Lady Roberts (Royal Archives, Windsor Castle), and Anna Keay (English Heritage). Particular gratitude is owed to the Very Revd Dr Wesley Carr, Dean of Westminster, for reading the closing chapters and making several pertinent suggestions.
I am one of those authors who rather depends on an inspired and committed editor who is prepared, which is unusual, to read what I write as I go along. In Arabella Pike I had just that. Once finished a book passes into the hands of the publication team whom I would like also to thank, in particular the designer Vera Brice. She has had to cope with the decision, a welcome one, that this book should incorporate what in effect is the largest visual archive on the topic.
ROY STRONG
The Laskett
June 2005
PROLOGUE 1953
On my dressing table rests a small leather box with a lid embossed in gold with a stylised crown and below it the date 1953. The graphics are unmistakably of the period we associate with the Festival of Britain, which indeed opened only two years before. At the time I was coming up to being seventeen and in the sixth form of Edmonton County Grammar School sited on the fastnesses of the North Circular Road. The box was a gift to every boy in the school on the occasion of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In it we were to keep our shirt studs, a fact which immediately dates the object to a now vanished sartorial era. The object is as fresh as the day on which I received it and I keep it to hand to remind me of my earliest memory of real spectacle, as I was one of the two young people from my school selected to be bussed into central London on the great day to stand on the Victoria Embankment and watch the great procession make its way to Westminster Abbey. The date was 2 June 1953.
The fact that it was the forward and not the return procession that I saw turned out to be a stroke of luck, for it enabled me to return home in time to watch most of the coronation on television. The arrival of that in the sitting room of the north London terraced house in which I grew up was another major event. But to return to the morning. That I recall as being a grey one, but then at that age just about everything I could remember had been grey, for the coronation was just eight years on from the end of the war, one which had reduced the country to penury. The capital still visibly wore the monochrome robes of that conflict, enlivened on the day by the splashes of colour of the street decorations and by the tiny red, white and blue Union flags which we clutched and waved.
It was a long wait and, as I was not tall, my chances of seeing anything were not that great. Nonetheless, there was the thrill of anticipation as a military band was heard from afar and then the great procession unfolded. I do not think that I ever saw more than the top half of a horse and rider. No matter, for two images stick in mind, ones shared at the time by millions of others. The first was an open carriage over which the capacious figure of Queen Salote of Tonga presided, beaming and waving to everyone in a manner which won all hearts. The second, of course, was the encrusted golden coach in which the Queen rode with the Duke of Edinburgh. It must have been lit from within for the Queen’s smiling features and the glitter of her diamonds remain firmly fixed in my memory.
Subsequent to that there were the pictures on the tiny television screen, hypnotic, like some dream or apparition, certainly images enough to haunt a stage-struck and historically inclined youth for the rest of his life. But I add to that the subsequent film of the coronation, for there it was on the large screen in colour, never to be forgotten, glittering, glamorous, effulgent. This was the England I fell in love with, a country proud of its great traditions and springing to life again in a pageant that seemed to inaugurate a second Elizabethan age. This was a masque of hope, a vision to uplift the mind after years of drear deprivation.
In retrospect I had seen part of what is now recognised to have been the greatest public spectacle of the twentieth century. What I was not to know was that this impoverished child in his dreary navy-blue blazer, cheap grey flannel trousers and black and gold school tie was to stand, half a century on, resplendent in scarlet and black in my role as High Bailiff and Searcher of the Sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, along with the whole college, to welcome the Queen at the great service which commemorated her coronation.
It is now all so long ago that most readers may well ask what is a coronation? Where did such an extraordinary ceremonial come from? What formed and shaped it over the centuries? And how can such a pageant ever have any relevance to the Britain of the twenty-first century? When I last visited the crown jewels in the Tower of London, part of that display was a projection of the film of the coronation. Looking at it, I could not believe that such a thing had been staged in the second half of the twentieth century and, equally, I could not help wondering whether one would ever be staged again. But then that was a viewpoint which sprang from ignorance, unaware of the rich resonances of the ritual or its deep significance in terms of the committal of the monarch to the people. It was questions like these that prompted me to write this book, launching me on a voyage that proved to be one of constant surprise. Amongst many other things it was to reveal the coronation as the perfect microcosm of a country that has always opted for evolution and not revolution. But I must begin at the beginning, and that takes us back not just centuries but no less than a thousand years.
1 The Lord’s Anointed
THE EARLIEST ACCOUNT of an English Coronation comes in a life of St Oswald, Archbishop of York, by a monk of Ramsay, written about the year 1000.1 He describes how, in the year 973, Edgar (959–75) ‘convoked all the archbishops, bishops, all great abbots and religious abbesses, all dukes, prefects and judges, and all who had claim to rank and dignity from east to west and north to south over wide lands’ to assemble in Bath. They gathered, we are told, not to expel or plot against the king ‘as the wretched Jews had once treated the kind Jesus’, but rather ‘that the most reverent bishops might bless, anoint, consecrate him, by Christ’s leave, from whom and by whom the blessed unction of highest blessing and holy religion has proceeded’. The text refers to the King as imperator, emperor, for by that date he was not only ruler of Mercia but also of Northumbria and of the West Saxons. Edgar had assumed the imperial style by 964, by which time his several kingdoms also included parts of Scandinavia and Ireland. This was a king who had come to the throne at the age of sixteen and was to die at 32. His reign was Anglo-Saxon England at its zenith, an age of peace and an era when, under the aegis of great churchmen, headed by Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, a radical reform of the Church was achieved. Bath, the Roman Aquae Sulis, the place chosen for the King’s Coronation, even in the tenth century and in spite of all the barbarian depredations, would still have been a city which retained overtones of its past imperial grandeur, a setting fit for its revival by a great Saxon King.
The day chosen for the event was Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. Edgar, crowned with a rich diadem and holding a sceptre, awaited the arrival of a huge ecclesiastical procession, all in white vestments: clergy, bishops, abbots, abbesses and nuns, along with those described as aged and reverend priests. The King was led by hand to the church by two bishops, probably ones representing the northern and southern extremities of his realm, the bishops of Chester-le-Street (later to become the mighty palatine see of Durham) and of Wells. In the church the great lay magnates were already assembled. As the splendid procession wound its way from exterior secular and into interior sacred space the anthem Firmetur manus tua was sung: ‘Let thy hand be strengthened, and thy right hand be exalted, Let justice and judgement be the preparation of thy seat, and mercy and truth go before thy face.’ Here in the open air had already begun that great series of incantations to the heavens to endue this man with the virtues necessary for the right exercise of kingship.
On entering the church Edgar doffed his crown and prostrated himself before the altar while the Archbishop of Canterbury, St Dunstan, perhaps the greatest figure in the history of the Anglo-Saxon church, intoned the Te Deum, that majestic hymn of praise to God in which ‘all angels cry aloud, the heavens and all the powers therein’ and in which petition is made to ‘save thy people and bless thine heritage. Govern them and lift them up for ever.’ That prostration was an act of self-obliteration, for what was enacted before those assembled was the ‘death’ and ‘rebirth’ of a man who was to leave the church fully sanctified and endowed with grace by Holy Church as a king fit to rule. St Dunstan was so moved by the king’s action that he wept tears of joy at his humility. But such a rebirth is not bestowed without conditions, and so the great ceremonial opened with an action which was to set the English Coronation apart from any other and also account for its extraordinary longevity.
The promissio regis, the Coronation oath, consisted of what were known as the tria praecepta, three pledges by the King to God. First, ‘that the Church of God and all Christian people preserve peace at all times’, secondly, ‘that he forbid rapacity and all iniquities to all degrees’ and, finally, ‘that in all judgments he enjoin equity and mercy …’ These came in the form of a written document, whether in Latin or the vernacular is unknown, which was delivered to the King by Dunstan and then placed on the altar. The archbishop then administered the oath to the King seated. We do not know whether the oath was sworn aloud by the King to the assembled clergy and lay magnates. Logic would suggest that this happened. The placing of the tria praecepta at the opening of the Coronation service remained through the centuries one of the defining documents as to the nature of the monarchy. Monarchy in England never became, as it did in France, absolute. It always remained conditional upon being faithful to the three pledges given in the oath, to maintain peace, administer justice and exercise equity and mercy.2
That done, the action moved on to the bestowal of unction, the anointing of the King’s head by the bishops (whose identities are not given, but presumably were the Archbishops of Canterbury and York) with holy oil, chrism, a fragrant mixture of oil and balsam, poured from an animal’s horn. In this ritual occurred the sacred moment of rebirth, one accompanied by a succession of prayers invoking the Kings of the Old Testament as exemplars of the virtues to be granted through this action, recalling also those kings, prophets and priests who had been similarly anointed and calling upon the Holy Spirit to descend and sanctify Edgar in the same way. Following this, the most solemn moment of the whole Coronation service, came the anthem Unxerunt Solomonem: ‘Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon King; and they blew the trumpets, and piped the pipes, and rejoiced with great joy, so that the earth rent with the sound of them; and they said, “God save King Solomon. Long live the King, may the King live for ever.”’ All of this, for over a thousand years, has been re-enacted at every Coronation, although ennobled since the eighteenth century by Handel’s radiant and triumphant music. It is extraordinary to grasp that its roots lie as far back as the last quarter of the tenth century. Nor has the ritual of investiture which followed changed that much. Upon Edgar were bestowed the following regalia: the ring, ‘the seal of holy faith’; the sword by which to vanquish his enemies, the foes of Holy Church, and protect the realm; the ‘crown of glory and righteousness’; the sceptre, ‘the sign of kingly power, the rod of the kingdom, the rod of virtue’; and the staff or baculus ‘of virtue and equity’. A Mass followed and, after the whole ceremony was over, those assembled moved again from sacred to secular space where a great feast was held. Edgar, wearing a crown of laurel entwined with roses, sat enthroned, flanked by the two archbishops, presiding over a banquet of the great magnates. Elsewhere his Queen held court over a parallel one for abbots and abbesses. This description in the life of St Oswald is detailed enough to establish that the text or ordo used was that known as the Second Recension, a consideration of which I will come to later in this chapter. That scholars have established this to be the case means that we can deduce that Edgar’s Queen must also have been crowned, although the Monk of Ramsay does not refer to the fact, for the ordo includes prayers for this which permit her to be anointed like her husband but only allow for investiture with two ornaments, a ring and a crown.
So much for what we do know about the 973 Coronation, but there is much that we do not. We do not know where the action was staged or anything about the gestures used, the vestments worn, the appearance of the regalia or the music sung. There is also the puzzling fact that, although Edgar had been a king since 957, he waited until 973 for his Coronation. Some scholars argue that he had undergone an earlier ceremony of blessing and unction and that this one was to mark his ascendancy to imperial status, while others maintain that his humility was such that he deliberately waited until he reached thirty, the canonical age a man could be made a bishop and also about the age when Christ was baptised and began his ministry (Luke 3: 23).
What is in no doubt, however, is that this spectacle was the apogee of his reign, designed to mark Edgar’s imperial status and blaze it abroad both in his own country and on the Continent. Shortly after that he received the homage of his subject kings, who symbolically rowed him from his palace to the church at Chester while he tended the prow. The Coronation was also an outward manifestation of Edgar’s commitment to the reform movement associated with Archbishop Dunstan, which introduced new rules to govern monastic life based on those used on the Continent at the great abbey of Cluny. So the Coronation ordo enshrined a vision of the English monarchy which reflected that role, one which owed its debt to continental exemplars, the king cast as rector et defensor ecclesiae. Time and again this ordo, the Second Recension, draws out, by means of symbolism and doxology, the parallel between kingship and episcopacy. This was emphasised in the choice of the day for the ceremony, one on which the Holy Spirit descended giving the Apostles the grace to carry out their task. What is astonishing to a modern reader is that here already at such a very early date are virtually all the elements of our present Coronation ceremony as it was last enacted in 1953 for Elizabeth II. The fact that these same elements could be used again and again through the centuries and continue to be responsive to the ideas and aspirations of far different eras is a gigantic index as to just how flexible the English Coronation ceremony continues to be. As a consequence, apart from the papacy, no other inauguration ritual can boast such longevity. Such rituals should not be lightly dismissed as so much insubstantial pageantry. They are powerful icons in which a society enshrines its identity and its continuity. The importance of them has been admirably summed up by Meyer Fortes:
The mysterious quality of continuity through time in its organisation and values, which is basic to the self-image of every society, modern, archaic, or primitive, is in some ways congealed in these installation ceremonies … Politics and law, rank and kinship, religious and philosophical concepts and values, the economics of display and hospitality, the aesthetics and symbolism of institutional representation, and last but not least the social psychology of popular participation, all are concentrated in them.3
When Edgar was crowned, such a rite of inauguration in some form had been in existence in Anglo-Saxon England for over a century. How did such a thing come about and whence did it come? To answer that I must widen our camera’s lens to take in the fate of Western Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire, the rise in its place of the barbarian kingdoms and the establishment as a consequence of the role of the Church as the bestower of legitimacy on dynasties by dint of the rite of unction.
THE IDEA OF UNCTION
What is unction and how did it come to occupy such a central position in king-making?4 The first question is a relatively simple one to answer, the second far more complex. Unction was the application to a modern ruler of a ritual recorded in the Old Testament, the anointing of a chosen leader with holy oil. In the First Book of Samuel the elders ask the prophet to choose a king for them who will act both as their judge and their leader in war. Samuel chose Saul. ‘Then Samuel took a vial of oil, and poured it upon his head, and kissed him, and said, Is it not because the Lord hath anointed thee to be captain over his inheritance?’ (I Samuel 10:1).
Later in the same book Samuel is led to choose Saul’s successor and the ritual is re-enacted: ‘Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren: and the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward’ (I Samuel 16:13).
Even more important was the precedent set by David’s son, Solomon, always cast as the ideal king. In the First Book of Kings David summons Zadok the priest, Nathan the prophet and Benaiah, the son of the chief priest, and orders them to mount his son, Solomon, on David’s own mule and bring him down to Gihon: ‘And let Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anoint him there King over Israel: and blow ye with the trumpet, and say, God save King Solomon. Then ye shall come up after him, that he may come and sit upon my throne; for he shall be king in my stead’ (I Kings 1: 34–5).
They did what was commanded of them: ‘And Zadok the priest took an horn of oil out of the tabernacle, and anointed Solomon. And they blew the trumpet; and all the people said, God save King Solomon’ (I Kings 1: 39; I Chronicles 29: 22–3).
In these biblical passages virtually all the elements which were to constitute the early Coronation ceremonies are already there: the selection of a king, his anointing with holy oil by a priest, his acclamation by the people and his enthronement. The Old Testament was equally specific as to the effects of anointing. In the case of Saul, ‘And the Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man’ (I Samuel 10: 6).
In New Testament terms it was an outward action representing an inward descent upon the King of the Holy Spirit. Collectively it was from the application of these texts to the task of king-making in the seventh and eighth centuries that the earliest ordines were to emerge.
But there is a huge time lapse between those Old Testament rulers and the earliest application of unction to the barbarian kings. That bridge can be crossed by the continuing role played by sacred oils in the life of the Early Church. The Old Testament did not only provide precedents for the anointing of kings, it also gave ones for the anointing of priests as well as artefacts connected with worship. God commanded Moses to prepare the holy oil of anointing for hallowing the tabernacle, ark, table, vessels and altar for the ritual of worship and also for anointing Aaron and his sons as priests (Exodus 29:7–8; Leviticus 8:10–12). As a consequence holy oil was used at the consecration of churches and altars and in the ordination of both bishops and priests.
The most important of all the holy oils was chrism, a mixture of olive oil and balsam which was used in the Early Church in the rite of baptism and confirmation.5 The word chrism itself was a Greek rendering of the Hebrew word for the holy oil of anointing. The exotic fragrance and richness of chrism opened it up to early writers bestowing on it an allegorical significance as embodying the fullness of sacramental grace and the gifts of the Holy Spirit with the sweetness of Christian virtue. Only the pope and the bishops could consecrate holy oils, an event which took place annually at the solemn Mass on Maundy Thursday from at least as early as the fifth century. One oil was without the addition of balsam. This was used for anointing the sick, for extreme unction and for other uses by the faithful. The other was chrism, used at baptism and confirmation. Both forms of oil are integral to the history of the Coronation, for although initially kings were to be anointed with chrism, gradually that right was withheld as the Schoolmen were to argue that chrism was a purely ecclesiastical institution whose use should be confined to the ordination of bishops and priests and not for royal unction.
One final fact. Although oil was native to the Mediterranean cultures, to the Northern barbarian tribes it was a luxury item, rare, costly and exotic. Within this context it is hardly surprising that oil became viewed as a potent substance capable of solving every difficuty. When the pope bestowed unction on the first Carolingian King Pepin in 751 it was done not only in the context of Old Testament exemplars, but also in the light of people’s knowledge of and confidence in the efficacy of holy oil in relation both to the sacraments and to bodily healing.
That a rite of anointing kings with holy oil emerged between the seventh and eighth centuries came directly out of the Christianisation of the barbarian kingdoms.6 With the final dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West in 476 there evolved in its place the imperium christianum presided over by the pope. That spiritual empire was to assume a temporal dimension thanks to the Donation of Constantine, a forgery datable to 752–7, a document which purported to declare Pope Sylvester I (314–5) and his successors rulers not only of Italy but of all the provinces which had once made up the Roman Empire in the West. This, in effect, cast the popes into the role of king-makers, one which they were able to exercise through the introduction of the rite of unction as barbarian kings converted and sought divine sanction for their kingship. As pagans they had claimed descent from the gods. Now they were endowed with a new kind of divinity as ‘the Lord’s anointed’ (I Samuel 26:11), a phrase which was rendered in the Vulgate version of the Bible as Christus Domini, employing the Greek word ‘christos’ meaning anointed, which, in the Middle Ages, was seen as the origin of the name of Christ.
The bestowal of unction was the prerogative of the Church which, although through its role it established a ruler as being sacred and set apart from ordinary mortals, simultaneously demonstrated that that could only be done thanks to their access to supernatural forces. In this way regnum was to be subject to sacerdotium in the medieval scheme of things. It was the pope and bishops who controlled and compiled the anointing rituals or ordines, filling them with prayers framing a vision of monarchy as they conceived it. That is vividly caught in the anointing prayer composed by Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims (c.806–82), Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, for the Coronation of Louis the Stammerer in 877, one which was to be incorporated into virtually every Coronation ordo thereafter: ‘Almighty eternal God … we ask thee to attend to the prayers of our humility and to establish this thy servant in the high rulership of the kingdom, and anoint him with the oil of the grace of thy Holy Spirit wherewith thou hast anointed those priests, kings, prophets, and martyrs who through faith conquered kingdoms, worked justice, and obtained thy promises.’7
In this Holy Church invoked the descent of the Holy Spirit on to the candidate for kingship, making him a new man, transmitting through anointing the divine grace by which alone he would be able to fulfil his royal ministerium as defender of the Church. In this manner kingship became an office within the Church without bestowing on it any priestly status, or at least not at the outset. Only as the rite of Coronation developed and spread would the theocratic priestly view of kingship threaten to shatter this relationship of Church and State.
All of this could be grafted with ease on to any secular ceremony of installation which already existed within the pagan tradition. So the earliest ordines progress without difficulty from unction to the handing over to the King of royal insignia, initially jointly by both principes and pontifices, but soon after by the latter only. These could include items which may well have been part of any pre-Christian installation ceremony, ones like a sceptre or a long rod or baculus. One certain link with the pagan past was the placing of a galea or helmet on the King’s head, which was only replaced by a crown in the tenth century. But the falling into place of all these elements into a common pattern was a gradual process involving several areas of Western Europe: Visigothic Spain, early Capetian France, Anglo-Saxon England and Celtic Ireland. It is to a consideration as to how these various strands eventually came together that we must now turn.
THE ADVENT OF CORONATIONS
One of the earliest references to royal unction comes in a life of the Celtic saint, Columba, written by Abbot Adoman of Iona (679–704).8 The monastery of Iona was the great centre of Celtic Christianity, a major seat of learning with daughter houses in Scotland and the north of England, so its influence spread wide. In his life of the saint the abbot recounts the story of Columba’s anointing of Aidan mac Gabrain as King of Dalriada in the late sixth century:
Concerning an angel of the Lord, who appeared in a vision to Saint Columba, then living in the island of Hinba; and who was sent to bid him ordain Aidan as king.
At one time, while the memorable man was living in the island of Hinba, he saw one night, in a trance of the mind, an angel of the Lord, who had been sent to him, and who had in his hand a glass book of the ordination of kings. And when the venerable man had received it from the hand of the angel, by the angel’s command he began to read it. But when he refused to ordain Aidan as king, according to what was commanded him in the book, because he loved Iogenan, Aidan’s brother, more, the angel suddenly stretched out his hand and struck the holy man with a scourge, the livid scar from which remained on his side all the days of his life. And the angel added these words, saying: ‘Know surely that I am sent to you by God, with the book of glass, in order that, according to what you have read in it, you shall ordain Aidan to the kingship. But if you refuse to obey this command, I shall strike you again.’
So when this angel of the Lord had appeared on three successive nights with the same book of glass in his hand, and had charged him with the same commands of the Lord, for the ordaining of the same king, the holy man submitted to the word of the Lord. He sailed over to the island of Io, and there, as he had been bidden, he ordained as King Aidan, who arrived about that time. And among the words of the ordination he prophesied future things of Aidan’s sons, and grandsons, and great-grandsons. And laying his hand upon Aidan’s head he ordained and blessed him.9
Scholarly debate concludes that such an anointing never actually took place, but, on the other hand, the text can be taken as sure evidence of a strong desire by the abbots of Iona that they should consecrate the Dalriada kings. And in order to achieve that St Columba was cast in retrospect as the reincarnation of the Old Testament prophet Samuel. The text would also indicate that by the close of the seventh century such a book with a rite for unction actually existed. As a whole the episode worked, too, from an important premise: the assertion that the Church had a key role to play in king-making.
Within the Celtic world the next appearance of royal unction is in the Collectio Canonum Hibernensis (c. 690–725), in which there is a chapter headed ‘De ordinatione regis’ with a text which implies that anointing was part of the action. The world of seventh-and eighth-century Ireland was a turbulent one with up to one hundred and fifty kings at any one time and no automatic right of succession. The introduction of unction fulfilled the twofold purpose of increasing the influence of the Church and, at the same time, stabilising disputes over succession.
Much the same motives prompted its introduction in Visigothic Spain in 672. In this case it was the further legitimisation of an elected ruler, Wamba, who received unction in the royal city of Toledo as a sign that his kingdom had been bestowed by God. But by far the most important anointing was that of Pepin, the first Carolingian king of West Francia, in 751. Pepin brought to an end the rule of the Merovingian kings, seeking sanction for his action from the pope. This was a step in terms of power politics both in the interests of the new dynasty and of the papacy during precisely the years when the Donation of Constantine was forged. Unction under the aegis of the pope not only enhanced the mystique of the new dynasty but, by implication, cast the Franks as Israel reborn, the chosen people of God.10
As a consequence the second half of the eighth century saw an ever-escalating interplay between the papacy and the Carolingians. In the winter of 753 Pope Stephen II (752–7) crossed the Alps to reanoint Pepin and anoint his two sons. Charlemagne’s sons were anointed in Rome in 781 and 800. In the former year Pope Adrian I (772–95) made two of Charlemagne’s sons, Carloman King of Italy and Louis King of Aquitaine. But more important than any of these was what took place in Rome on Christmas Day 800 when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor by placing a crown on his head. With that act arrived the second central symbolic action of any Coronation, the bestowal of a crown.11
Arguments about that Coronation and what it signified continue, but no one demurs from the fact that by crowning Charlemagne the pope was introducing a rite which was associated with the Byzantine emperors. It was also one, like anointing, with a firm biblical basis. In the Second Book of Samuel an Amalekite brings David the crown and bracelet of Saul: ‘and I took the crown that was upon his head, and the bracelet that was on his arm, and have brought them hither unto my lord’ (II Samuel 1:10). Even more graphic is the account of the crowning of Joash by the chief priest: ‘And he brought forth the king’s son, and put the crown upon him, and gave him the testimony; and they made him king, and anointed him; and they clapped their hands, and said, God save the King’ (II Kings 11: 12).
Crowns had no role in barbarian installation ceremonies which could involve instead, as did the Anglo-Saxon ritual, the placing of a galea or helmet on the elected ruler’s head. In the Eastern Empire, however, the crown had been adopted as early as the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century as a symbol of his regality and vice-regency of Christ on earth. The first Byzantine emperor to be crowned by a patriarch was Leo I in 457 and the first to be crowned in a church was Phocas (602–10), but only from the second half of the seventh century did all this come to rest in the great church of Hagia Sophia.12 In 800, therefore, the pope did what had become the norm for the patriarch, crown an emperor, only this time one of the West. The people present all acclaimed Charlemagne as ‘Augustus, crowned by God, Emperor of the Romans’. Thereafter crowns, in the case of the Holy Roman Emperors as often as not donated by the popes themselves, ousted helmets as Kings in the West opted for the style a Deo coronatus. In 816 yet another pope crossed the Alps, this time to crown Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, emperor in a ceremony which, for the very first time, brought together unction and crowning within a single ritual.
All of this represented the redefinition in the West of kingship as an office, one whose remit was defined by the Christian Church and its clergy. It was they who composed the rituals which turned king-making into a liturgical rite in which the central act was anointing, preceded by an agreement of conditions formulated in an oath and followed by investiture with regalia and enthronement. That this development gained momentum was due to two factors. One was that primogeniture was unknown at that date. The most suitable candidate for ruler was chosen from within a royal family by a process of election by the principes. This secular side of king-making did not suddenly vanish with the advent of Coronation rites. Each Coronation was always prefaced by certain rituals which took place in secular space, generally in the palace. It usually involved election and an enthronement. We know little about such happenings because, unlike the Coronation in church, there was no tradition of compiling an ordo. The second reason why clerics came to play such a key role was that it was precisely during this period that they began to occupy a major part in the running of any state. In England, for instance, from as early as the reign of Athelstan (924–39) the king’s council had at its core a group of bishops who were in constant attendance on the king and were crucial players in both the legislative and administrative process.
It was inevitable that sooner or later these new king-making ceremonies would call for being codified in written form. Special ordines first emerge during the eighth century in West Francia, the result of two personalities, Charles the Bald (823–77), King of West Francia and subsequently Holy Roman Emperor, and Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims (845–82), his principal councillor. The latter is generally acknowledged as being responsible for the compilation of the four earliest ordines, including those for the 13-year-old Judith on her marriage to Æthelwulf, King of Wessex, in 856 and for Charles’s son Louis the Stammerer as King of Lotharingia in 869. These Frankish ordines were to be heavily drawn upon by those who compiled the ones for the Anglo-Saxon kings.
ANGLO-SAXON CORONATIONS
The Anglo-Saxons were made up of a mixture of tribes who came from an area of the Continent stretching from between the mouths of the rivers Rhine and Elbe. They began first to attack England from the third century on and then, by the middle of the fifth, decided to settle. By the close of the following century they had carved the country up into a series of petty kingdoms, each with its own royal family. The Anglo-Saxons were pagan, but during the seventh century were Christianised in the aftermath of Pope Gregory the Great’s mission of 597 to Kent. A golden age of Christian civilisation followed, which was only disrupted by a fresh wave of invasions in the form of the Vikings. It was those which precipitated the rise to dominance of the royal house of Wessex, first under Alfred and then under his descendants throughout the tenth century. They were the first kings of a united England and it is with Alfred’s descendants that we arrive for the first time on firmer ground that they inaugurated their reigns with the rite of unction.
In common with the other Germanic tribes, kingship was central to the Anglo-Saxons. A ruler was elected from among the members of a royal race or dynasty, the stirps regia, who were descendants of the god, Woden. The making of a new king involved some kind of enthronement, investiture with weapons or regalia, the mounting of an ancestral burial mound, even a symbolic marriage with the earth-goddess. Such installation rites would certainly have included a feast and conceivably also, after the election but before any form of enthronement, some kind of ancestor of the Coronation oath. Insignia included a pagan spear or long staff (baculus), a helmet (galea) and a standard or banner, all three items connected with leadership in battle. To these customs the Vikings were to add, in the ninth century, an early form of throne, a stone or high seat, to which the king was conducted to the acclamation of the people.”13
None of these presented any problems when the ceremony was Christianised, the only victim being the standard or banner. Otherwise everything was taken over into the Christian rite, even the helmet which only gave way to a crown in the tenth century. The earliest representation of a King of England wearing a crown is on the charter of the New Minster at Winchester, dated 966, which depicts Edgar wearing one adorned with fleurons. In 1052 Edward the Confessor was to order an imperial crown and he is depicted, as indeed is Harold, the last Saxon King, wearing one with fleurons in the Bayeux Tapestry. The spear or long staff was easily accommodated within the Christian scheme of things by references to the Rod of Aaron and that of Moses, descendants of the wooden staffs borne by kings and judges in ancient civilisations.14
All of these items from the pagan past were redeployed in what was a Christian liturgy. What little we know about early Coronation ceremonies stems in the main from the surviving liturgical texts known as ordines or recensions. There are four major ones in the history of the English Coronation. The first two pre-date the Norman Conquest in 1066 and together form perhaps the most complicated documents in the entire history of the ceremony. Amongst both medievalists and liturgical scholars they have been and still remain subjects of lively debate, often of a highly complex and technical nature. In what follows I have attempted to superimpose some degree of clarity and, inevitably, simplification upon what is a highly contentious field of study, bearing in mind, too, that most people’s knowledge of liturgy in the twenty-first century tends to be minimal. An ordo comprises a liturgical sequence of prayers and blessings by which various actions are given sacramental significance, in particular by invoking divine sanction, blessings and the descent of the gifts of the Holy Spirit upon the person chosen as king. The fact that such rituals could only be performed by clergy, bishops in fact, means that the ordines for them came to appear in the service books of cathedrals, especially in what are called pontificals, that is a body of texts for ceremonies which can only be performed by a bishop. In many ways what these texts provide the reader with is something akin to the words of a Shakespeare play minus any stage directions or, to use ecclesiastical parlance, rubrics. If the latter existed at all – and it is likely that they did – they would have been in a separate book which would have told those involved what they should do. As a consequence of their absence we know nothing of the arrangement of the setting, the form taken by symbolic gestures like prostration and genuflection, the details of the dress worn or the music sung.
None of the surviving texts of these first two recensions can be dated as having been written before the year 900. What is certain is that, although they were written down much later, they record the format of rituals as they were performed at much earlier dates. Much scholarly attention has been focused upon the interconnexion of these texts and, although everyone agrees that they go back to earlier lost texts, there is little agreement as to exactly how much earlier. The issue is further clouded by the fact that what does survive can only be a fragment of what once existed, items which have defied the hand of time and wanton destruction. Nonetheless as documents they tell us a great deal about the nature of kingship in pre-Conquest England and about the relationship of Church and State.15
The First Recension exists in three manuscripts, of which the earliest is the Leofric Missal, written about the year 900 at the Abbey of St Vaast near Arras and brought to England about 1042 by Bishop Leofric of Exeter. Views at to what this text is range from it never having actually been used at all to being the normal rite used for the inauguration of the Kings of West Sussex from before 856, perhaps for the Coronation of Egbert in 839 or even earlier, at the close of the eighth century. In the academic argument over that, much hangs upon whether the ordo drawn up by Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims, in 856 for the marriage of the West Frankish princess, Judith, to the Anglo-Saxon King Æthelwulf was a wholly West Frankish compilation of his own or whether Hincmar was merely adapting his rite from what was an ancient Anglo-Saxon norm. If the latter is the case then the First Recension is a very old rite indeed.16
The two other manuscripts of the First Recension contain rubrics pointing to a date not earlier than the tenth century. The texts they contain are identical to the one in the Leofric Missal, except for the addition of two prayers from the ordo for Judith. The two manuscripts are the Pontifical of Egbert, Archbishop of York, datable to around 1000, and the ‘Lanalet’ Pontifical, which has been variously dated from the late tenth century to the 1030s.
Putting all of these together we emerge with a Coronation service which was in use a long time before 900, but, as I indicated, just how long before and for whom it was used is open to debate. The texts are headed ‘Blessings on a newly elected king’ and ‘The Mass for kings on the day of their hallowing’. In the case of the various recensions I propose to present them in list form with the intention of giving the reader a clear idea of each ceremony’s exact structure and sequence:
1 The service opens with an anthem: ‘Righteous art thou, O Lord, and true is thy judgement’ (Psalm 119: 137) and a psalm: ‘Blessed are those that are undefiled in the way’ (Psalm 119:1).
2 A prayer that the King ‘may with wisdom foster his power and might …’
3 An Old Testament reading from Leviticus (26: 6–9) with God’s promise of peace, the defeat of enemies and the multiplication of people.
4 The gradual from Psalm 86: 2: ‘Save thy servant’ and the versicle ‘Ponder my words, O Lord’ (Psalm 5:1). The Alleluia. ‘The King shall rejoice in thy strength, O Lord)’ (Psalm 21: 1) or ‘Thou has set a crown of pure gold’ (Psalm 21: 3).
5 Gospel reading from Matthew (22: 15–22) with the passage in which Christ calls for them to show him the tribute money and says: ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.’
6 Three prayers invoking the attributes God should bestow on the King: the grace of truth, goodness, the spirit of wisdom and government and, finally: ‘In his days let justice and equity arise … that … he may show to the whole people a pattern of life well-pleasing to thee … And so joining prudence with counsel, may he find with peace and wisdom means to rule his people …’
7 ‘Here shall the bishop pour oil from the horn over the King’s head with this anthem: ‘Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet …’ (I Kings 1: 45) and the psalm ‘The King shall rejoice in thy strength, O Lord’ (Psalm 21:1). Unction is accompanied by a collect recalling ‘thy servant Aaron a priest, by the anointing of oil and afterwards by the effusion of oil, didst make the Kings and prophets to govern thy people Israel …’
8 The investiture: ‘Here all the bishops, with the nobles give the sceptre into his hand’, an action followed by a long series of short prayers calling down blessings and regal attributes. Then, ‘Here shall the staff [baculus] be given into his hand’, followed by a further prayer invoking the descent of blessings. Finally, ‘Here all the bishops shall take the helmet and put it on the King’s head’ with a last invocation of blessings. After this ‘All the people shall say three times with the bishops and priests, May King N. live for ever. Amen. Amen. Amen. Then shall the whole people come to kiss the prince and be strengthened with a blessing.’
9 The Mass.
10 At the conclusion comes the promissio regis in the form of the tria praecepta: ‘that the Church of God and all Christian people preserve the peace at all times’, ‘that he forbid rapacity and all iniquities to all degrees’ and, lastly, ‘that in all judgements he enjoin equity and mercy …’
We have no idea when and for whom this ordo was used. The earliest reference to unction being administered is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle quite suddenly under the year 787 when it states that Ecgferth, the son of Offa, King of Mercia, was ‘consecrated king’.17 Presumably this was a means to ensure his succession to the throne. Then follows a complete silence until 4 September 925 when Athelstan was anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Athelstan, along with Edward the Elder and Edgar, was one of the three great tenth-century Anglo-Saxon kings. In 937, he would rout an alliance of the Danes and rebel subject princes at the battle of Brunanburh. The location for his Coronation was Kingston upon Thames and it was followed by a great feast:
With festive treat the court abounds; Foams the brisk wine, the hall resounds: The pages run, the servants haste, And food and verse regale the taste. The minstrels sing, the guests commend, While in praise to Christ contend. 18
Kingston first appears in 835 or 836 as a meeting place for Egbert and Coelnorth, Archbishop of Canterbury. Edward the Elder, son of Alfred, and likewise a warrior who laid low the Danes, was crowned there in 901. Athelstan’s brother, Edmund, was also crowned at Kingston in 940 and his brother, Eadred, in 946 and Edmund’s son, Eadwig, in 955 or 956.19 Once again we get an unexpected glimpse of what could be the reality of such an occasion. Eadwig is recorded as getting up during the Coronation feast and going to his chamber. Dunstan, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop of Lichfield were sent to fetch him back. What they saw was the unedifying sight of the new King with two women, Athelgifu and her daughter, Elfgifu, to whom the King was uncanonically married, and the crown, ‘which shone with the various glitter of gold, silver and precious stones’, tossed on to the floor. Unsavoury though the episode was it provides the earliest evidence that we have that the Kings now wore crowns.20
With the mention of Dunstan we can move on to a consideration of that other vexed document, the Second Recension. Everyone agrees that it was used under Dunstan’s aegis for the great Coronation of Edgar in 973 and also that it was still in use in 1101. As it refers to a king crowned ‘of the Angles and the Saxons’ and to the person concerned as a successor to a glorious father, that could only mean Edward the Elder crowned on 8 June 901 or Athelstan, his son, crowned on 4 September 925. That at least provides some options for possible dating. What is also certain is that this ordo represents a revision of the First Recension, bringing it into line with developments on the Continent.21
There are at least five versions of this text, of which the most important is that known as the Claudius Pontifical, which evidence indicates was written for and at Christ Church, Canterbury. The ordo is a fusion of insular with continental elements drawing on the Leofric and Egbert versions of the First Recension and marrying into them items drawn from Hincmar of Reims’ ordo of Metz (869), the West Frankish ordo of c.900 (the Erdmann ordo) and what was called the ordo of Stavelot (the ordo of the Seven Forms). The resulting recension surpasses all of those upon which it was based in terms of clarity, structure and power of expression and language.
Although there are variations between the surviving manuscripts, once again I present the recension as a list, pointing up what had changed. The Second Recension, thanks to the inclusion of rubrics, paints a far fuller picture of the action than the first:
1 The ordo opens with the King discovered amidst his seniores, the ealdormen who have elected him.
2 Two bishops lead the King to the church while the choir chants the anthem, Firmetur manus tua: ‘Let thy hand be strengthened, and thy right hand be exulted …’, invoking the regal qualities of strength, justice, mercy and truth.
3 ‘When the King is come to the church, he shall lie prostrate before the altar: and then shall the hymn Te Deum laudamus be sung to the end.’
4 ‘After which he shall arise from the ground: and the King chosen by the bishops and people shall promise to observe these three things.’ Then follow the tria praecepta as in the First Recension.
5 Prayers follow, including a long one invoking in plenitude biblical precedents, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David and Solomon, as exemplars of truth, mildness, courage, humility and wisdom. It petitions that the King may serve God, walk in the way of justice, and cherish the Church and his people, protecting both from their enemies. It calls for him to triumph over his enemies protected by the helmet of God’s protection and His invincible shield. It asks that the King reign with honour and be anointed with the grace of the Holy Spirit.
6 The anointing, during which is sung in some versions Unxerunt Salomonem (‘Zadok the Priest’) as the anthem and in others a special anthem with the text: ‘O people of England, thou hast not been forgotten in the sight of the Lord: for in thee may the King that rules the English people of God be exulted, may he be anointed with the oil of gladness and confirmed by God’s strength.’
7 Investiture by the bishops with a multiplication of regalia: the ring, the sword, the crown, the sceptre and the rod. Each item is presented with prayers outlining their symbolic significance as I have already described at Edgar’s Coronation. Some versions add to these a red regal mantle, ‘the garment of chiefest honour, the mantle of royal dignity’.
8 A series of blessings calls upon God, the Virgin Mary, the saints and angels to guard and watch over the King.
9 He is then enthroned with the prayer Sta et retine: ‘Stand and hold fast from henceforth that place whereof hitherto thou hast been heir, by the succession of thy forefathers, being now delivered unto thee by the authority of Almighty God, and by the hand of us, and all the bishops and servants of God …’
10 A series of further blessings.
11 The Queen is then consecrated and anointed and ‘she must be adorned with the ring for the integrity of her faith, and with a crown for the glory of eternity’.
12 The Mass.
In what way does this ordo differ from its predecessor? In the first place it is the first one with clear sections: election, oath, consecration, unction, investiture and blessing. In the second, the role of the laity is reduced, the delivery of the regalia no longer being at the hands of both principes and pontifices but of the pontifices only. In short, anything which suggests that power might have been conferred from below has been eliminated. There is no act of allegiance or indeed of acclamation. This is an ordo whose fundamental driving force is theological, represented in the opening act of prostration by the candidate on entering the church. Prostration in early liturgies was an expression beyond that of mere humility, contrition and supplication. What it signalled was an annihilation of the initiate’s former self in preparation for a ‘rebirth’ into a new status. That rebirth was, however, to be conditional upon the promissio regis, now significantly moved to the front from its place in the First Recension at the very end. This new siting had huge constitutional repercussions. In it were spelt out the obligations of late Anglo-Saxon kingship: ‘The duty of a hallowed king is that he judge no man unrighteously, and that he defend and protect widows and orphans and strangers, that he forbid thefts … feed the needy with alms, and have old and wise men for counsellors, and set righteous men for stewards …’22
The Second Recension recast the nature, context and function of kingship. Much of that is caught in the new items of regalia. The ring, which makes its first appearance in the ordination of bishops, is given as a symbol of faith. The sword, for which there is also no pagan precedent, is girded upon the king for the defence of both the Church and his own people.23 The recension also integrates the Queen into the Coronation ritual, casting her in the role of a virtuous helpmate. She, too, was anointed with chrism, an index of high status and that her role was seen as important and not subsidiary to that of the king.24
Apart from the unusually full account of the Second Recension in action for Edgar in 973 little if anything is known about the Coronations of later kings. Indeed, it is not known whether Canute, the Danish king who succeeded to England by conquest, was even crowned at all. Chaos followed his demise in 1035 until, seven years later in 1042, Canute’s stepson, Edward the Confessor, succeeded. By that date the place of crowning was still not fixed, for Edward’s took place at Winchester in 1043. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provides us with a crumb about that event, one which shows that the importance of the promissio regis was fully understood, for we are told that Eadsige, Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘gave him [Edward] good instruction before all the people, and admonished him well for his own sake and for the sake of all the people’.25 If the Second Recension was a perfect mirror of ideal Anglo-Saxon kingship, what replaced it after the Norman Conquest was to reflect a far more assertive and controversial vision of the monarchy in what was to be an age of conflict between Church and State. There is a striking representation of the last Saxon Coronation in the Bayeux Tapestry. On 6 January 1066 Harold was crowned King in Edward the Confessor’s new Abbey Church of Westminster, which had been consecrated only nine days before. His claim to the throne was tenuous, his mother being a Norse princess and his sister, the Confessor’s Queen. The Coronation took place the day after the Confessor’s death, so that any preparations must have been minimal. The tapestry is accepted as having been made in England in about 1075 and its English origins mean that the scene is as it would have been envisaged by those within the native tradition. But the storyline is that of the Norman conquerors, for what is depicted is what, in their eyes, was a usurpation and, although no doubt both the archbishops of Canterbury and York took part following the Second Recension ordo, York is omitted in favour of including the tainted Stigand of Canterbury, already under a cloud and deposed from the see in 1070.
Such an image is, of course, not reportage but symbolic. Nonetheless it evokes more vividly than the dead texts of the ordines something of the atmosphere of such an event as well as giving an indication of the visual spectacle. It suggests that the royal throne had advanced from the primitive bench on which Edward the Confessor sits in the tapestry to being something more akin to an elevated seat or chair with an approach by way of steps. Harold wears the familiar late Anglo-Saxon crown with fleurons on his head and also sports a royal mantle, suggesting, perhaps, as some versions of the ordines say, that this may have been part of the regalia by 1066. To his right there are two principes, one of whom lifts high what may be the sword with which the king was girded during the ceremony. In his right hand he supports a long foliated rod, a baculus, and, in his left, something new, an orb surmounted by a cross. The orb is an imperial attribute, first certainly adopted by the Holy Roman Emperors very early in the eleventh century and appropriated shortly after by the Dane Canute (1016–35). An orb and sceptre appear on Edward the Confessor’s seal, lifted unchanged from the Ottonian rulers of Germany. Perhaps an orb also, by the year of the Conquest, had become part of the coronation regalia. In this tableau we have brought together for the first time a coronation and what was to become its immemorial setting, Westminster Abbey, along with the potent memory of its founder, the man who was to further sanctify the royal family, this time as heirs and descendants of a saint.26
2 King and Priest
IN THE AFTERMATH of the battle of Hastings the defeated Anglo-Saxon magnates came to make their submission to Duke William of Normandy at Berkhamsted. This was succession not by election but by force of arms, for William was only Edward the Confessor’s second cousin once removed. Although he was later to embroider on to the train of events that Edward had promised him the crown, the truth of the matter is that England was the victim of the explosive vitality of the Normans, a vitality which was also to conquer southern Italy and Sicily and, during the First Crusade, much of the Holy Land.
The Anglo-Saxon magnates had little choice in the autumn of 1066, therefore, other than to petition him to accept the crown of England on the grounds that they were accustomed to a king as their lord. Many of the Normans spoke against William accepting, fully conscious of the duke’s consequent elevation in status that such an acceptance would bestow and the implication of it for them. But the duke was not slow to realise the advantage of being seen to be the rightful heir of Edward the Confessor claiming his kingdom. In this manner what was conquest could be dressed up in the robes of legitimacy. And, although William had wished to wait for the arrival of his wife, the urgency was such, after this decision, that the Coronation took place on Christmas Day 1066.1
Over this Coronation more academic ink has been spilt than almost any other, excepting that of Edward II in 1308. And, as in the case of Anglo-Saxon Coronations, we are up against paucity of material and the fact that what evidence we do have is patchy and not always compatible. With the Conquest we also enter the age of the chronicles, but what they produced can range from eyewitness accounts to something secondhand or, even worse, fabricated. What can be pieced together about Christmas Day 1066, therefore, is a synthesis of the evidence from the chroniclers together with the one unique eyewitness account by a Norman cleric, Guy, Bishop of Amiens. He wrote a Latin poem on the battle of Hastings, the Carmen de Hastingae proelio, which culminates with the Coronation. The poem was written almost certainly to celebrate William’s triumphant home-coming to Normandy in Lent 1067, literally weeks after the event.
Everyone agrees that the 1066 Coronation was different, but the problem centres around the degree of difference. In recent years it has been argued that this was the occasion on which a new ordo was introduced, the one we know as the Third Recension. It was probably composed, they argue, by Ealdred, the Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of York, in response to the quite unique set of circumstances which surrounded 1066. It has also been suggested that it was composed even earlier at the behest of Edward the Confessor and had been already used for Harold II. There is no way of settling that debate. What this new ordo does reflect are imperial aspirations of a kind that we know both the Confessor and equally William I had. Ealdred was uniquely qualified to provide an ordo with imperial overtones, for he had been present at the Coronation of the German King Henry IV in 1056 and would have known the continental ordines upon which the Third Recension drew. Edward the Confessor’s vision of imperial status for the kings of England is reflected in the imagery of his coinage, his use of the Byzantine imperial style of basileus and, even more spectacularly, in the construction of Westminster Abbey, which was a building of European status designed to rival the great imperial churches of the Rhineland at Mainz and Speyer. There are equally imperial echoes around the Conqueror, whose crown at the Coronation Guy of Amiens records was ‘Greece inspired’, that is, it was modelled on that of the Byzantine Emperors which had pendologues, detachable strings of pearls alongside the cheeks. It was also studded with twelve precious or semi-precious stones. These related, in terms of biblical symbolism, to the breastplate of the High Priest and appear also as the foundation stones of the Heavenly City in the Book of Revelation. And his choice of Christmas Day for his Coronation would have been made in the full knowledge that both the Byzantine Emperors and the Western Holy Roman Emperors had also chosen it for theirs.2
An opposing case, however, continues to be maintained for the use of the Second Recension, albeit with revisions and additions, on the grounds that it was still in use and that William would not have wished to introduce something new but, rather, use an existing rite to emphasise continuity in his role as the rightful heir to Anglo-Saxon England. That argument depends, of course, on what was used at the Coronation of Harold II. None of this, as I have said, seems to be solvable and it is impossible to do more than piece together what can be gleaned to have happened, highlighting innovations, and leave the reader to draw his own conclusions. Those who opt for the use of the Second Recension in 1066 favour the introduction of the Third Recension during the second quarter of the twelfth century. What is certain is that Harold II’s Coronation was a rushed affair following immediately after Edward the Confessor’s death, allowing no time for preparation, but William I’s had a lead of three months allowing ample time to prepare what was a formidable spectacle.
Both Harold II’s and William I’s Coronations mark the advent of a spacial configuration for royal ceremonial which has lasted down until today, that of the Palace of Westminster and the adjacent Abbey. It is likely that we owe that to Edward the Confessor. Both the economic expansion of the eleventh century and the growing mercantile traffic across the North Sea rendered a royal presence in London highly desirable. Such political and economic practicalities went hand in hand with a dynastic one, a desire to emulate the example of the French monarchy which already had its royal Coronation church of St Denis. Up until Edward the Confessor the royal palace had been in the City of London. Now a new residence was built on the island of Thorney close to a Benedictine Abbey dedicated to St Peter, the guardian of the keys of heaven, for whom the king had a special devotion. Nothing is known about Edward’s palace, but a great deal is known about the Abbey which he embarked on to replace the one he found there.3
This was built to the east of the existing foundation and, by 1066, thanks to his benefactions, Westminster was to be among the richest religious houses in the country. What arose was grander than any church in England and in a new style, the Romanesque as it was practised in Normandy, but far exceeding both in size and splendour any church there. When complete it was to be 320 feet long. By 1066 the east end and transepts must have been up, although the nave and the twin west towers were not to be completed before the middle of the 1080s at the earliest. This was one of the great buildings of early medieval Europe. William’s decision to be crowned there must have been conditioned by a desire to cancel out Harold II’s Coronation and also to be seen to be crowned in the burial church of the Confessor as his rightful heir. It was a precedent which, once established, proved permanent.
There is much in William’s Coronation with which we will be familiar as well as much which could be innovative. It opened, as in the case of Edgar’s at Bath, with a great procession. However, this time it was not only of monks and other clergy headed by a crucifer, but went on to include the great magnates of the realm and the future king led by the two archbishops. That was different from 973 when Edgar was led by the bishops of Durham and of Bath and Wells, an arrangement which was to reappear later. ‘In this manner,’ runs the Carmen, ‘to the chanting of the Laudes, the king sought the church and was conducted to the royal chair.’ What were the Laudes?
The Laudes are a set of jubilant acclamations which invoke God as an all-conquering and victorious commander.4 They open with the resounding salute ‘Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat’, and continue in a splendid descent through the celestial and thence through the terrestrial hierarchy. In these chants the serried ranks of heaven and earth are presented as mirror images of each other, each terrestrial rank being linked to a heavenly intercessor. The ruler, as Christus Domini, the anointed of the Lord, has as his intercessor a group of angelic and archangelic powers. To the queen is assigned a choir of virgins who intercede on her behalf. In sum the Laudes were a unique form of litany addressed solely and triumphantly to the victorious Christ in his divinity as the king of heaven and earth, and the prime exemplar and guarantor of power and prosperity to all rulers who safeguarded the fabric of Christian society. The act of unction, which was shortly to follow this procession, was to turn the Duke of Normandy into a type of Christ on earth and the embodiment of theocratic kingship.
It was customary to chant the Laudes at the great festivals of the Church, including Christmas (which it was), but here, in this procession, we already have a potent statement as to the nature of post-Conquest kingship. They were also to be sung at the solemn Mass which marked the ceremonial crown-wearings that were to become a feature of Norman and Angevin court life, when the magnates of the realm gathered at Christmas, Easter and Pentecost to attend on the king and queen and take part in the service and also in the great feast which followed it. As in the case of the debate over which ordo was used, so it has been argued that crown-wearings pre-date the Conquest. Whether they did or not, the evidence shows a sharp elevation of the monarch to almost semi-divine status.
In this manner William I was conducted to the new Abbey. On entering it there was yet a further deviation from the Second Recension. That opened with the king in the midst of the magnates of the realm who had acclaimed him. This action was now moved into the sacred precincts of the Abbey church, taking place on what the Carmen refers to as a pulpitum. This would appear to mark the first appearance of some kind of stage or elevated dais which lifted some of the action aloft and apart from the assembled dignitaries. If we turn to the reconstructed ground plan of the Abbey, it must have been erected at the crossing beneath the central tower. Its advent in 1066 would surely have been prompted by the need to give emphasis and prominence to an action in which the duke was seen to be ‘elected’ by both the indigenous Anglo-Saxons and the occupying Normans. It began with Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances, addressing the latter in French, asking them: ‘If the king presented please you, declare it to us, for it is fitting that this be done by your free choice.’ In response came applause. The action was repeated for the Anglo-Saxons in their own language by Ealdred of York.
The rite which followed took place in an arena which was to remain unchanged until the Coronation of Edward I. The high altar stood where the present one does. It was sited in an apse which was 26 feet 8 inches wide and with an approach to the altar measuring 14 feet 9 inches. The flanking north and south aisles had upper and lower chapels to which access was had by way of turret staircases. Such staircases may have led up to viewing points for the ceremonial, a feature which was to be repeated in Henry III’s rebuilding in the thirteenth century. The monks’ choir stalls were beneath the tower, so presumably the purpose of the pulpitum was also to lift part of the proceedings above them so that they could be seen.
This innovatory but politically necessary acclamation was to have an unfortunate consequence, for the roar of approval was such that one chronicler records: ‘the armed and mounted men who had been stationed around the Abbey to guard it hearing the tremendous shouting in a language they could not understand, thought that something had gone wrong, and under this misapprehension they set fire to the environs of the city’.5
While events outside the Abbey had taken a nasty turn, those within it went on with the accustomed opening prostration before the altar and thence to the administration of unction with chrism by the Archbishop of York (Canterbury, although present, was tainted and under an ecclesiastical cloud). There was, however, yet another major departure from the Edgar ordo. William took the Coronation oath after and not before he had been anointed. One version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records: ‘And he [William] promised Ealdred on Christ’s book and swore moreover (before Ealdred would place the crown on his head) that he would rule all this people as well as the best of kings before him, if they would be loyal to him.’6
The changed placing must have been designed to reinforce the sanctity of the king’s oath, for it was made by William as a man who had just been sanctified and endowed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Thereafter the ceremony follows what has been argued to be compatible with either the Second or the Third Recensions: investiture with the regalia, enthronement and the Mass.
THE THIRD RECENSION
The Conqueror’s Coronation has provided material for a lively and unresolved academic debate as to when the Third Recension came into use. That debate equally hovers around any consideration of the seven Coronations between 1066 and 1200. The best approach to these is a collective one. The Coronations are:
| William I | Christmas Day 1066 |
| William II | Sunday, 26 September 1087 |
| Henry I | Sunday, 5 August 1100 |
| Stephen | Sunday, 22 December 1135 |
| Henry II | Sunday,19 December 1154 |
| Richard I | Sunday, 3 September 1189 |
| John | Ascension Day, 27 May 1199 |
To these we can add the Coronation of Henry II’s son, Henry the Younger, on 14 June 1170. That is a salutary reminder that the monarchy was still in theory an elective one, albeit from members of the ruling dynasty. The Coronation of Henry the Younger, who was to die before his father, was an attempt to settle the succession in terms of primogeniture during his father’s lifetime.7
The century and a half during which these Coronations happened witnessed huge changes as the Norman Conquest created a new ruling class of those who came over with the Conqueror. That was structured in what we know as the feudal system, a mode of land tenure stretching downwards from the king via the great lay and ecclesiastical magnates who held their estates in return for knight service to the crown. This restructuring of society, in which the oath of fealty of one man was to another as his liege lord, was to have reprecussions on the Coronation, moving, as we shall see, the Coronation oath centre stage. In the case of the ecclesiastical tenants-in-chief it would have even greater repercussions, for the papacy was to assert the superiority of clerical over lay authority and forbid a ceremony in which a priest was seen to be subservient to royal authority. That, too, would affect the Coronation.
At some date, either before or after 1066 and almost certainly by the Coronation of Stephen in 1135, the Third Recension came into use.8 What this represented was a rejection of all but the most important Anglo-Saxon forms in favour of the parallel parts of the great continental Coronation ordo. This was the German one used for the consecration of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Pontificale romanogermanicutn, which was compiled at the Abbey of St Alban’s, Mainz, about the year 961. The introduction of the Third Recension brought insular Anglo-Saxon traditions in line with continental custom, a development typical of the years after 1066. It has been, as I have indicated, attributed to Ealdred, Archbishop of York (d. 1069). It has equally been seen as the work of William’s great reforming Archbishop of Canterbury, Lanfranc (1070–93), and also of Gilbert Crispin, Abbot of Westminster (1085–1117), the friend and ally of Lanfranc’s successor, Anselm. One certain fact is that this ordo was to remain in use until the Coronation of Edward II in 1308.
The Third Recension is found in seven manuscripts, one of which is French, all the others being English. Out of the six English manuscripts three derive from a pontifical compiled in the great monastery at Christ Church, Canterbury. Some of these manuscripts can be at least approximately dated. The earliest versions cut out the anointing of the king’s head with chrism, indicating a date after the initial clash of Church and State between Henry I and Archbishop Anselm in the years 1100 to 1107, one which included the withdrawal of the use of chrism. Another indicator is the preoccupation with crowns. That probably goes back to Henry I’s daughter, the Empress Matilda, wife of the Emperor Henry V, who was widowed in 1125 and who returned to England bearing the imperial crown of her husband. Henry II was crowned with it in 1154.
There are variations between these manuscripts but, as in the case of the previous two recensions, I present the reader with the overall contents in simple list form:
1 The king is led by two bishops ‘from the assembly of faithful elders’ to the church while the choir sings Firmetur manus tua.
2 The king prostrates himself with the bishops alongside him in front of the altar before which have been spread carpets and cloths.
3 The litany is then sung, after which the bishops arise and raise the king.
4 The king takes the triple oath, to preserve both Church and people in true peace, to forbid all rapacity and iniquity to men of every degree and to ordain the practice of justice and mercy in all matters of judgement.
5 The recognitio. A bishop asks the assembled people whether they are willing ‘to submit themselves to this man as their prince and ruler, and obey his command’. Both clergy and people reply affirming their willingness.
6 The consecration. This opens with prayers recalling exemplars from the Old Testament and calling down blessings. The Archbishop of Canterbury begins by anointing the king’s hands with holy oil ‘that thou mayest be blessed and set up as king in this kingdom over our people that the Lord thy God hath given thee to rule and govern’. Then he anoints his head, breast, shoulders and elbows, with further prayers while the choir sings: ‘Fear God.’
7 The delivery of the regalia. The king is invested by the bishops with the sword, bracelets (armils) and mantle, each with a prayer. The crown is then blessed and placed on the king’s head. Then follows investiture with the ring, sceptre and rod.
8 The king is blessed, after which he kisses the bishops, who lead him to his throne while the choir sings the Te Deum.
9 That finished, the archbishop says the prayer Sta et retine.
10 Then follows the consecration and Coronation of the queen. On entering the church she is greeted by a prayer asking that she ‘may obtain the crown that is next unto virginity’. The consecration opens with a blessing after which, with appropriate prayers, she is anointed with holy oil and then invested with a ring. Her crown is then blessed and she is crowned.
11 The Mass follows.
What does this new Recension mean and why was it necessary? The possible political circumstances that prompted it have already been touched upon, but they need to be placed within a far broader ideological perspective. In one respect there is no doubt that the Third Recension embodies a reaction to the eleventh-century reform movement which found its test case in the rejection of the lay investiture of ecclesiastical dignitaries. On their appointment they were presented by the king with a staff or crozier and a ring, symbols of their office. This act was followed by one of homage in which they received their lands as one of the king’s tenants-in-chief. Although this practice of the lay investiture of clerics had gone unchallenged under William I, it was not to do so under his immediate successors. From the last years of the eleventh century onwards there was a fierce struggle between Church and State, known as the Investiture Contest, during which archbishops of Canterbury were sent into exile and England was laid under interdict by the pope. It was only to be resolved when, on 29 December 1170, Henry II’s Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered in his own cathedral. The Church emerged as victor.
What the reformed papacy was attempting to achieve was a reversal of what the introduction of the rite of unction had led to, a race of priest-kings who were viewed as being somehow almost semi-divine. The Christianisation of the barbarian monarchies which had followed the conversion of the pagan tribes of Northern Europe had exalted rulers, through the bestowal of unction, into beings akin to priest-kings. The use of chrism to consecrate the ruler, which was also used in the ordination of a priest, meant that the two were increasingly viewed as variants of something very similar. The biblical precedent was Melchizedek, who was both priest and king, and rulers were cast as Christus Domini, representatives of God on earth, and mediators, because of their apparent dual nature, between clergy and people.
The papacy, realising the threat this embodied, in the eleventh century began to draw back from the endorsement of theocratic kingship. The sacraments were codified and reduced to being seven in number, with royal unction not among them. The whole pressure was to downgrade the very idea of the priest-king, and early versions of the Third Recension record the withdrawal of the use of chrism for the anointing of the king’s head, replacing it with the anointing of several parts of his body with ordinary holy oil. Chrism was in fact to creep back into use later, but its removal for a period was significant.9
The Third Recension is, therefore, a crucial document in which the Church redrew the boundaries that differentiated the laity from the clergy. The battle which ensued centred, as I have said, on the removal of the king’s right to invest his ecclesiastical dignitaries with office and was to dominate the twelfth century. Under Henry I, one of the most powerful of the Angevin kings, Archbishop Anselm was driven into exile and so, even more famously, was Thomas Becket under the first Plantagenet, Henry II. The struggle between him and the king was to produce the most extreme claims for theocratic kingship, ones which based the royal control of the Church on the anointment of the king with chrism. The significance of that was caught in the royal style. Before the Coronation the king was only Dominus. After, at least from the reign of William II, he was ‘King by the Grace of God’.
The author known as Anonymous of York but probably William Bonne-Ame, later Archbishop of Rouen, who wrote what is referred to as Tract 24a, succinctly sums up how the supporters of the king as Christus Domini saw the monarchy:
kings are consecrated in God’s church before the sacred altar and are anointed with holy oil [he means chrism here] and sacred benediction to exercise ruling power over Christians, the Lord’s people … the Holy Church of God … as one who has been made God and Christ through grace … wherefore he is not called a layman, since he is the anointed of the Lord [Christus Domini] and through grace he is God. He is the supreme-ruler, the chief shepherd, master, defender and instructor of the Holy Church, lord over his brethren and worthy to be ‘adored’ by all, since he is the chief and supreme prelate.10
Such were the breathtaking claims made on behalf of Henry II, stemming from what was enacted at his Coronation as performed according to the Second Recension. This was an appeal back to the mystique and magic of the old pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon monarchy. By the time that this tract was being written theocratic kingship was, in fact, in retreat and Becket’s murder had dealt the final blow.
The investiture controversy and the redefinition of the lay and clerical spheres provide the backcloth prompting the Third Recension. That incorporated several other changes. One was the enhanced status accorded the crown, which was blessed, a ritual derived from one used at the Coronation of the Byzantine emperors. There was also a multiplication of robes and regalia. Armils or bracelets, which had an Old Testament precedent, appear together with a royal mantle whose four corners signify the four corners of the world subject to God. The mantle does appear, in fact, in a late manuscript of the Second Recension but it is universal in the third. In the latter the investiture with the ring and crown is reversed and there are some notable enhancements to the ritual, with the king being blessed after crowning and then solemnly enthroned in state to the splendour of the Te Deum being sung.
There is also a notable enhancement of the status of the queen, delineating clearly the nature of medieval queenship.11 This is the first ordo which works from the premise that her Coronation is an action directly parallel with that of her husband. The queen is twice blessed, first on entering the church and again at the altar. The prayer said over her was taken almost word for word from that said over a newly ordained abbess. Here she is cast as an exemplar of female chastity, as the mistress of the royal household and, as signified in her investiture with a ring as a symbol of faith, a support to the Church, a patron of missionaries and a leader of her household’s spirituality.
The only full account of a Coronation definitely using this ordo before 1200 is that of Richard I in 1189. Of the seven others, including that of Henry the Younger, we know little, although it is clear that the twelfth century saw enormous change and development. When, at last, we do get a full-length eyewitness account it is of a major spectacle of state, which leaves one wondering how far what is described happened earlier during that century. The twelfth century, after all, was one of the greatest eras in the history of the country, and the increasing power and grandeur which surrounded the monarchy is likely to have been reflected in the rite of Coronation. The brilliant if hot-headed Henry II ruled over a vast continental empire, the greatest in Western Europe since Charlemagne. And even though his two sons, Richard I, the crusading troubadour king who was only in England five months out of a ten-year reign, and the feckless John, who opened a chasm between himself and the magnates, threw this inheritance away, there is no doubt that the English monarchy was still regarded as one of the grandest in Western Europe.
CHANGE AND INNOVATION
We can trace that progressive rise in grandeur in several different ways. One is in the development of Westminster as a royal enclosure or preserve. The elements of this were already in place in 1066 but they were to be consolidated during the century and a half which followed.12 Although nothing is known of Edward the Confessor’s palace, in 1097 work was underway on a new great hall for William II, who was to hold his first court there in 1099. That vast hall is still there, exactly the same in size as it was when first built, 240 feet long and 67 feet 6 inches wide, by far the largest hall in England and, probably, in Western Europe at the time. If the Abbey was seen to reflect imperial aspirations surely this was its secular counterpart. It was built deliberately to house the great feasts which followed the Coronation and as the setting for the ritual crown-wearings which punctuated the court year, in which the ruler displayed himself as the image of Christ on earth to his magnates.
Recent research has pointed out that one of the ordo’s prayers of blessing, opening with the word Prospice, includes the following words: ‘Grant that the glorious dignity of the royal hall [palatium] may shine before the eyes of all with greatest splendour of kingly power and that it may seem to glow with the brightest rays and to glitter as if suffused by illumination of the utmost brilliance.’
From the outset this was not a hall of the usual Norman type, for the main entrance was placed at the northern end in order to establish a processional route which was directly to the enthroned monarch at the opposite side. The upper walls were lighted by Romanesque windows set into an arcaded wall gallery. The vast size of this structure demonstrated at a stroke that this was to be the secular ceremonial centre of the Anglo-Norman kingdom. The palace itself continued to expand. In 1167 there is reference to a ‘new hall’, a small one for domestic purposes sited roughly in line with the great one but further east. Jutting out at right angles from that was the great chamber which already, by the twelfth century, was for the king’s private use. The Norman and the Angevin kings contrived to be migratory through their vast English and French domains and it was only gradually that their Westminster palace began to establish its primacy. All through the reign of Henry II the various organs of government, as they became ever more complex, began to find a permanent home amidst this ever-expanding palace. The Court of Audit held its biennial sessions here, and under John the royal treasury ceased to be at Winchester. For over four centuries the palace was to combine the demands of a royal residence with those of the major offices of state. Only in 1512 was this to change when Henry VIII left Westminster eventually for Whitehall.
The Abbey’s rise was to be far slower.13 Although kings were crowned there, royal interest thereafter ceased, preferring to favour their own foundations and choosing also to be buried elsewhere. In the years immediately after 1066 there was no attempt by the monks to exploit their connexion with the vanquished Anglo-Saxon royal house. That only came to be of advantage at the turn of the eleventh to the twelfth century. Henry I’s Coronation charter placed voluntary restraints on his use of the royal prerogative, citing in three clauses the laws of Edward the Confessor, by which was meant the whole body of Anglo-Saxon law before the Conquest. In doing this Henry was exploiting what the monks of Westminster Abbey had already embarked upon, capitalising on its role as the resting place of a king on his way to beatification. That can be traced in the series of lives of Edward the Confessor which record the steady upward curve to canonisation: the Vita Ædwardi Regis by an anonymous writer about 1067; the Prior Osbert de Clare’s Vita Beati Ædwardi Regis Anglorum, completed by 1138 to accompany the first petition to the pope for his canonisation; and, finally, Ailred de Rievaulx’s Vita Sancti Edwardi Regis, written after the king’s canonisation in 1161 and in time for the translation of his body to a new shrine in 1163.
The driving force behind this came not initially from the crown but the Abbey, setting out to defend its territorial rights by upping its royal associations. In this they were helped by Abbot Baldwin of Bury St Edmunds (1065–97), a monk from St Denis, who was all too familiar with how to exploit such a royal foundation. That was achieved through a whole series of forged charters by a monk, Guerno of St Augustine’s, Canterbury. St Augustine’s had remained a bulwark of pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon Christianity and is the most likely source of the design of the Bayeux Tapestry in which Edward the Confessor is depicted as a saintly bearded patriarch.
The key figure in the canonisation campaign was Prior Osbert de Clare during whose time a whole series of forged charters was produced, including ones in the names of Popes Nicholas II and Paschal II confirming the Abbey’s claim to be both the permanent setting for the Coronation and also the place where St Edward’s regalia (to which I will come) were kept. By the twelfth century the papacy claimed the sole right to proclaim saints, and in 1139 Innocent II declined Westminster’s petition to canonise the king on the grounds of insufficient support within the realm. Otherwise the moment was propitious, the prior being the king’s illegitimate kinsman and having the endorsement of the king, Stephen, and his brother, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester. The real reason for the pope’s refusal was probably the king’s arrest of the Bishop of Salisbury in the same year. After this failure royal interest in the Abbey went into abeyance until Henry II, who made much of his Anglo-Saxon ancestry, saw the potential of having a royal saint in his battle with the Church. On this occasion it worked. Edward was canonised and his remains translated amidst splendour on 13 October 1163 in a ceremony designed to impress the pope, just as the battle against Becket was about to reach its zenith. For Henry II, St Edward the Confessor enhanced the charismatic character of his kingly rule and the sacred nature of English kingship. Neither of his successors, Richard I or John, were to take any interest in the new royal saint and his cult was not to go into the ascendant again until the reign of Henry III.
The fact that the Abbey cast itself as the custodian of St Edward’s regalia means that items recognised as constituting them must have existed. The early history of the regalia is shrouded in mystery, not helped by the fact that they were all deliberately destroyed under the Commonwealth. Recent scholarship, however, has come down in favour of a nucleus of royal ornaments which can be argued to have been deposited by Edward the Confessor either for safekeeping or indeed as regalia to be used by the future kings of England.14 If the latter was, indeed, the case they constituted what was the earliest set of royal regalia in Western Europe. These items were always royal property and the Abbey’s role was never other than as custodian.
By about 1200, of what did these regalia consist? There was St Edward’s Crown, which evidence indicates is likely to have been the work of a Byzantine craftsman working in England. It was a circlet with four fleurons and possibly four crosses arising from it, above which rose a double arch, on the crossing of which there was a cross with bells that tinkled when the wearer moved. The indications are that Edward, with his pretensions as Basileus Anglorum, abandoned the earlier open crown of the late Anglo-Saxon kings in favour of one modelled on that worn by Eastern Emperors. To the crown can be added two sceptres and what was known as St Edward’s staff. One of the sceptres again betrayed Byzantine influence, having four pendant pearls and a gold cross at the top. The second one was made of iron with a fleur-de-lys at the summit. The use of iron was probably due to a biblical precedent, Psalm 2, which speaks of the awaited Messiah as coming to rule with a rod of iron (virga ferrea). Sceptres such as these were symbols of command, but St Edward’s staff was topped with a dove, the emblem of peace, and spoke of a king’s pastoral care for his people. It had a spike at the other end. Finally come liturgical items. One was the crux natans, said to have been rescued by the Confessor from the sea on what would have been his return journey to England in 1041, and therefore likely to have been acquired by him in Normandy. The descriptions indicate a wooden cross covered at the front with gold plate set with jewels in mounts on which there was a figure of the crucified Christ, probably in ivory. Inventory descriptions of St Edward’s chalice, later known as the regal, indicate that it was a large and richly carved late antique cup, of a type eagerly sought after in the tenth and eleventh centuries, to which gold mounts had been added. The gold paten which accompanied it was of enamelled Anglo-Saxon work. An ivory comb, also assigned to St Edward, could be Anglo-Saxon, but its use is uncertain. When it came to vestments everything is far more problematic, although it is possible that a mantle and possibly a supertunic could have been part of the original regalia. The mantle was adorned with golden eagles and was of a type worn by the Eastern emperors.
William of Sudbury, a learned monk of Westminster, wrote a tract for Richard II on the regalia arguing that they were even older, that they had been the gift of Pope Leo to Alfred the Great on the occasion of his ‘Coronation’ in Rome. That at least can be dismissed as later embroidery, but it is likely that these items do go back to the Confessor. Indeed, the earliest reference to what could be items of regalia comes in 1138 when the monks threatened to sell off his ornaments. None of them as described by later medieval inventories are likely to be items removed from the saint’s grave at any of successive openings. The only occasion when that happened was in 1163 at the translation. The prior recorded as having taken from the tomb cloth to be made into embroidered copes along with the ring which, according to legend, was the one recovered from John the Evangelist in paradise.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries kingly robes, in response to the role of Christus Domini, were deliberately priestly in character, although not Mass vestments. Royal robes looked to those worn by bishops, and both in turn looked to those recorded in the Old Testament as having been worn by priests and kings. In this way the tunicle, the dalmatic and the cope became regal robes.15 In such robes and vestments, especially those in which a king received unction, monarchs began to be buried. Henry the Younger was buried at Rouen in 1183 and both Matthew Paris and Ralph de Diceto record that he lay upon the bier attired in the linen vestments in which he was anointed and still showing traces of chrism. It was during this period that the custom arose of putting a linen coif on the anointed’s head which was only removed at a later date (the details we learn from later Coronations). Such interment in the Coronation robes was probably a twelfth-century innovation, fully reflective of claims to theocratic kingship. It was certainly done in the case of Richard I, and the fact that tomb effigies of both Henry II and John depict them in their Coronation robes suggest that they too were buried wearing them. The tradition continued into the first quarter of the fourteenth century.16
In the twelfth century the items called for by the Coronation ritual were not only housed in the Abbey but also in the king’s Jewel House. Each king had his own items of personal regalia quite separate from what became regarded as sacred relics in the Abbey. Such personal regalia included crowns and sceptres and ceremonial swords. By 1200 the number of swords used in the ceremony had multiplied and the king was also invested with golden spurs. All of this indicates that we have arrived at the age of chivalry, the spurs being an artefact which formed an integral part of the ritual of knighthood. From the mid-twelfth century onwards the ceremony of knighting became the pivotal moment in a knight’s life. It could be a relatively simple affair and it could equally be staged as a grand spectacle. The girding on of a sword was already part of the action in the Second Recension, one which would have had far greater resonances in the era of chivalry. The Church during this period attempted to adopt knighthood as an order of a quasi-religious nature, assigning it a role as the secular arm of Holy Church, for its protection and for the defence of the weak. The addition of spurs to the regalia emphasised the knightly ideal of kingship even more forcefully in a period enlivened by the Crusades. It is to be recalled that Richard I was England’s crusading king.17
The sword was an intensely personal item of equipment, one which symbolised a man’s ability to demonstrate his physical strength and skill. In the Coronation ceremony, to the king as defender of the Church and the country’s leader in war was now added the vision of him as the personification of ideal knighthood. The sword quite early on came to symbolise the royal presence, and sword-bearing before the monarch became a mark of signal honour. As early as 1099 the King of Scotland carried the sword before William Rufus when he held court in London. At the Coronation of Richard I in 1189 no fewer than three swords were borne before him suggesting that by that date chivalrous romance was impinging upon reality. The twelfth century was the golden age of Arthurian legend for which the Angevin kings had a passion. King Arthur’s grave was even ‘discovered’ at Glastonbury in 1190 and swords believed to have been used by the Knights of the Round Table became collector’s items. The swords in the chansons de geste became almost personalities in their own right, bearing names and being endowed with quasi-magical powers. King John, for instance, had the sword of Tristram. This had been Ogier’s sword which had been shortened in his fight with Morhaut, champion of Ireland. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, a myth-laden history of Britain written in the reign of Stephen, four swords were carried before King Arthur, each one representing one of his kingdoms. Could the three which preceded Richard I in 1189 have stood for England, Anjou and Normandy over which he ruled?
While the historic mise-en-scène as well as the ornaments became increasingly grander and more complex, other aspects of the Coronation at the same time began to assume a pattern which we would recognise today. It was, for example, only in the twelfth century that the Archbishop of Canterbury finally attained his role as the chief officiant.18 That, too, was an offshoot of the investiture struggle. Although the archbishops of Canterbury had crowned the Anglo-Saxon kings, the situation was a far from immutable one. Stigand did not crown William I, and Henry I was crowned by the Bishop of London (albeit as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s ‘vicar’). The resolution in favour of Canterbury only came in 1170 when Henry II wanted his son crowned within his own lifetime.
A letter had been sent from Pope Alexander III to the king as long ago as 1161 saying that the young prince could be crowned by any of the bishops. Five years later the pope, under pressure from the exiled Becket, rescinded his decision. In two letters the claim of Canterbury was spelt out, the first stating ‘it has come to our hearing that the Coronation and anointing of the kings of the English belongs to the Archbishop of Canterbury by the ancient custom and dignity of his church …’ The second reiterates ‘this dignity and privilege of old’. To add to the king’s difficulties, the Archbishop of York was specifically forbidden by the pope to crown anyone.
The free sample has ended.
