Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century

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.

All of this worked in the long run in favour of Canterbury, but in the meantime it had a fatal flaw as the pope failed to inform Henry II that he had revoked his letter of 1161. In Becket’s eyes Canterbury’s right of bestowing unction gave any archbishop control over who succeeded to the throne. The result was that in spite of the existence of the pope’s letters of revocation Henry II went ahead and had his son crowned by the Archbishop of York. In retaliation Becket got the pope not only to excommunicate the bishops who had taken part but to lay England under an interdict. However, before news of the papal actions had reached England Henry II offered to make peace with his troublesome archbishop. That happened on 22 July 1170, a settlement which included provision for the younger Henry and his wife to be recrowned by Becket. In this way the six-year exile of the archbishop was brought to its end.

Just before Becket set sail for England he excommunicated, on apostolic authority, the Archbishop of York together with the bishops of London and Salisbury, who had taken part in the Coronation. The bishops bitterly protested and Becket offered to absolve them, but added that only the pope could exculpate the Archbishop of York. The bishops complained to the king who, in his anger, is said to have cried, ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ Four knights responded to Henry’s plea and murdered Becket in his own cathedral. The supremacy of Canterbury was now sealed by the shedding of a martyr’s blood in the cause of Holy Church.

Becket was right in that the role of the archbishop in the king-making process was an important one. In the period before primogeniture he took a leading part in the formal election of a new king by the assembled magnates. William I had nominated his second son, William Rufus. On his death the crown passed to his younger brother, Henry I, and from thence to his cousin, Stephen of Blois, after which it descended to Henry II, son of Henry I’s daughter, the Empress Matilda, by Geoffrey of Anjou. By Henry’s death primogeniture was taking over, reflected in the king’s crowning of his eldest son, who was, in fact, to predecease him. In the event, the crown was to pass to the younger brothers, first Richard I and then John. Few of these successions were entirely automatic, involving anything from a coup d’état to a civil war.

The Archbishop of Canterbury played a crucial role not only as one of the greatest magnates in the realm but also as the man who could bestow unction, transforming a candidate from being merely Dominus to being Rex Dei Gratia. He also played a crucial role in the recognitio which remained of importance even as late as 1199. Matthew Paris provides a vivid picture of what happened on that occasion. Before the archbishop, Hubert Walter, proceeded to the anointing of John he addressed the assembled bishops, earls and barons: ‘Hear, all of you, and be it known that no one has an antecedent right to succeed another in the kingdom, unless he shall have been unanimously elected, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.’

The archbishop went on to remind them of the example of Saul, ‘the first anointed king’, pointing out that if anyone else of the royal dynasty excelled John ‘in merit’ he should be elected instead. Later in the reign Hubert Walter was asked why he had acted in such a manner: ‘he replied that he knew John would one day or other bring the kingdom into great confusion, wherefore he determined that he should owe his elevation to election and not to hereditary right’.19

In this episode we also catch something else, that it is one thing to follow a recension as it appears on the page of a pontifical and quite another to square it with what could happen on the day.

The archbishop was also the person who administered to the new king the Coronation oath, and that was to assume a place of major importance in defining the role and duties of the medieval English king.20 The oath was not an empty ritual to be gone through, for its contents were studied both by the clerics and by the great magnates involved in the king-making process. The oath was a sacred contract administered by the archbishop with the assistance of the clergy in the presence of the lay magnates of the kingdom. In feudal society it formed the linchpin by which that society was held together. It assumed a place of even greater significance after 1066 than before it.

Although our information about the actual wording of the oaths taken by eleventh-and twelfth-century kings is scanty, there is no doubting their importance, as we have already seen in the Coronation of 1066. An account of the Coronation of Henry the Younger in 1170 describes him swearing with both his hands on the altar, on which lay not only the Gospels but relics of the saints. On that occasion, in the light of the struggle with Becket, he swore to maintain the liberty and the dignity of the Church. The oath which had begun its life under the Anglo-Saxon kings as the promissio regis, under the Normans and Angevins developed into a sacred pledge. Oaths in a feudal society were inviolate.

So the oath moved centre stage, its centrality reflected in the custom of issuing, after the Coronation, what were in effect its contents in the form of a charter.20 The first of these came from Henry I, who had added to the second of his three promises a vow to rectify the injustices perpetrated during the reign of his brother, William Rufus. That charter, which took out to the country the pledge made in the Coronation oath, was to be evoked by successive generations as a guarantee of the rights of English men and women in respect of the crown. It was confirmed and reissued by Stephen in 1135 or 1136, by Henry II in 1154 and, most famously, in 1215 when Archbishop Stephen Langton cited it as the precedent and model for Magna Carta. The charter’s message was ‘I restore to you the law of King Edward’, that is, the Norman and Angevin kings confirmed the validity of the totality of Anglo-Saxon law as it was in the time of Edward the Confessor.21

That oath was the obverse side of which the reverse was the act of fealty by both clerical and lay magnates. As yet it formed no part of the proceedings in church but, at this period, was a separate event enacted in the great hall of the palace when prelates and nobles rendered homage and fealty to the new ruler. Only in the case of Richard I and John do we know when this was done, in the instance of the former on the second day following the Coronation, and of the latter on the next day.22 Much the same in terms of information applies to the Coronation feast, of which we only gain some kind of picture for that of Richard I.

During this period the Coronation was not the only occasion on which the monarch appeared crowned.23 Circumstances could precipitate second Coronations (but not unctions), particularly on the occasion of a king marrying. In 1141 Stephen was crowned a second time at Canterbury with his wife, Matilda of Boulogne. In 1194 Richard I was crowned again on returning from the Crusade and from his years of imprisonment in Austria. In both those cases a special form of service was drawn up, initially for the crowning of 1141. The king attended by his nobles waited in his chamber for the arrival of the ecclesiastical procession. He then knelt and had the crown placed on his head by the Archbishop of Canterbury while a prayer was said. After this there was a procession to the church, during which an anthem was sung. Prayers were said and the king was led to his throne, after which a Mass was sung and the king communicated. There was a second procession back, in which the magnates carried candles, and a banquet followed.

To these rare events can be added the more regular crown-wearings at Christmas, Easter and Pentecost when the king held court. On those occasions the king and queen were escorted in a great procession to the church, where they sat crowned and enthroned. An elaborate votive Mass was sung by the archbishop during which the Laudes were chanted. Afterwards there was the usual feast, with the magnates assuming the roles of servants such as the butler or pantler or steward.

By the year 1200 the Coronation had become an essential rite of passage whereby someone was made king. That person remained Dominus Anglorum and his queen Domina Anglorum until unction was bestowed, after which they became Rex et Regina Anglorum. The transition was emphasised in the development of the procession in which the royal regalia was now carried to the church by the great nobles. That solemn transportation of crown, sceptre, orb, vestments, chalice and paten was an emphatic statement that he who walked behind them was not yet king. He became so only by a sacred initiation to be gone through at the hands of the clergy in the presence of the magnates. No document captures more vividly this huge transformation since 1066 than the description of the Coronation of Richard I in 1189.

THE CORONATION AND CHIVALRY: RICHARD I

The chronicler Roger of Wendover provides us with what is the fullest description yet of a Coronation, so much so that I quote it in full:

Then the Duke came to London, where had assembled the Archbishops, Bishops, earls and barons, and a large number of knights to meet him; and by whose advice and consent the Duke was consecrated and crowned king of England, at Westminster, on the third of September, being Sunday, the feast of the ordination of Pope St Gregory …

First came the bishops and abbots and many clerks vested in silken copes, with the cross, torch bearers, censers, and holy water going before them, up to the door of the king’s inner chamber; and there they received the said Duke Richard, who was to be crowned, and led him to the high altar of the church of Westminster with an ordered procession and triumphal chanting: and the whole way by which they went, from the door of the king’s chamber to the altar, was covered with woollen cloths.

Now the order of the procession was as follows: at the head came the clerks in vestments carrying holy water, crosses, torches and censers. Then came the priors, then the abbots; next came the bishops and in the midst of them went four barons carrying four golden candlesticks. Then came Godfrey de Lucy carrying the king’s coif, and John Marshal by him carrying two great and weighty golden spurs. Next came William Marshal, Earl of Strigul, carrying the royal sceptre, on the top of which was a golden cross, and William de Patyrick, Earl of Salisbury, by his side, bearing a golden rod with a golden dove on the top. Then came David, brother to the king of Scotland, Earl of Huntingdon, and John, Earl of Moreton, brother of the Duke, and Robert, Earl of Leicester, carrying three royal swords taken from the king’s treasury, and their scabbards were wholly covered with gold: and the Earl of Moreton went in the midst. Then came six earls and barons carrying on their shoulders a very large board on which were placed the royal ensigns and vestments. Then came William de Mandeville, Earl of Albemarle, carrying a golden crown great and heavy, and adorned on all sides with precious stones. Then came Richard, Duke of Normandy, and Hugh, Bishop of Durham, went on his right hand, and Reginald, Bishop of Bath, on his left: and four barons carried over them a silken canopy on four tall lances: and the whole crowd of earls, barons, knights and others, clerk and lay, followed up to the door of the church, and they came and were brought with the Duke into the choir.

Now when the Duke came to the altar he swore in the presence of the Archbishops, Bishops, clergy and people, on his knees before the altar, and the most holy gospels laid thereon, and the relics of any saints, that he would keep peace, honour and duty towards God and holy church and her customs all the days of his life. Secondly, he swore that he would exercise right justice and equity among the people committed to his charge. Thirdly, he swore that he would annul any evil laws and customs that might have been introduced into the realm and make good laws and keep them without fraud or evil intent. Then they stripped him altogether, except his shirt and breeches, and his shirt was torn apart at the shoulders. Then they shod him with buskins worked with gold. Then Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, poured the holy oil on his head and, with prayers appointed for this purpose, anointed him king in three places, to wit, his head, his breast, and his arms, which signifies glory, courage and knowledge.

Next the Archbishops placed on his consecrated head a linen cloth, and above it the coif which Godfrey de Lucy had carried. Then they clothed him with the royal vestments: first, that is, with the tunic, then with the dalmatic; then the Archbishop gave him the sword of the realm wherewith he was to repress the evildoers against the church. Then two earls put upon him the spurs which John Marshal had carried. Then he was vested with the mantle. After that he was led to the altar, and there the said Archbishop forbad him by Almighty God to take this great office upon him, unless he intended to keep inviolate the oaths above mentioned and the vows he had made. And he replied that by the help of God he would keep all the above without deceit.

Then he himself took the crown from the altar, and gave it to the Archbishop, and the Archbishop set it on his head, and two earls held it up on account of its weight.

Then the Archbishop put the royal sceptre into his right hand and the royal rod into his left, and thus crowned the king was led to his seat, by the aforesaid Bishops of Durham and Bath, preceded by torch bearers and the said three swords.

Then was the Mass of Sunday begun; and when they came to the offertory the aforesaid Bishops led him to the altar, and he offered a mark of the purest gold (for this is the offering which a king must make at every one of his Coronations) and the same Bishops led him back again to his seat.

Now when the Mass had been celebrated and everything duly finished the same two Bishops, one on the right and the other on the left, led him back crowned and carrying the sceptre in his right hand and the rod in his left, from the church to his chamber, with the ordered procession going before them as above.

Then the procession returned to the choir, and the lord king laid aside his royal crown and royal vestments, and put on lighter crowns and vestments, and so crowned he came to breakfast. And the Archbishops and Bishops sat with him at table each according to his degree and rank; and the earls and barons served in the king’s house as their ranks demanded. And the citizens of London served in the butlery, and the citizens of Winchester in the kitchen … Now the second day after his Coronation, Richard, King of England, received the homage and fealty of the Bishops, earls and barons of England …24

What can be added? Other sources tell us that the Coronation was followed by three days of festival and that the king bestowed lavish gifts on the magnates. It was also the occasion when there were Jews in the crowd, some of whom tried to enter the Abbey, triggering a riot during which houses were set on fire. When the king was told about this at the feast he sent Ranulf de Glanville to quell it. But so far out of hand had it got that he was driven back into the feast by threats.25 This is also the first feast about which we know any details. It called for at least 5, 050 dishes, 1, 770 pitchers and 900 cups on and in which to serve the food and drink. To this can be added the first piece of music likely to have been composed for the occasion in honour of a monarch. The words are in Latin but in translation they read: