LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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