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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:

       The age of gold returns The world’s reform draws nigh The rich man new cast down The pauper raised on high. ²⁶

      The chronicle account catches to the full the magnificence of a Coronation by that date, its sense of unfolding spectacle, its choreography, its richness in terms of robes and artefacts, its use of contrasting passages of speech with chant. Much is already familiar but there is also so much that is new. The ecclesiastical procession now fetches the king-elect, or duke as he is resolutely referred to, from his royal chamber. In the procession various dignitaries are assigned roles bearing everything from items of regalia to candlesticks (these never reappear). The royal robes are carried on the board used in the exchequer and the king now proceeds beneath a canopy. Later, after his crowning, he doffs his regalian robes and ornaments, putting on lighter ones along with a lighter crown. As another chronicler so rightly put it, all was done ‘cum pompa magnifica’. Everything was firmly in place for the major transformation which was to occur under the aegis of Henry III.

      But there is a wider context to which this Coronation belongs, for it was the prelude to the king’s departure on the Third Crusade. It was staged in the midst of all the fervour leading up to such an event, when the chivalry of Christendom rallied to rescue and preserve the Holy Land and the Holy Places from the Infidel. When Richard at last set sail a few months later in December he took with him King Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, which he was later to present to Tancred, King of Sicily.²⁷ But the fact that he took it at all indicates some notion of self-identification with the king of legend whose court was the pattern of chivalry. Can it at least be suggested that the Coronation of Richard was in a sense that of Arthur revived? The suggestion, although unprovable, is at least worth the making and a number of factors suggest that this could well have been in the mind of whoever put together the secular ceremonial in 1189.

      I have already referred earlier to the account of the Coronation of King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s seminal Historia Regum Britanniae, compiled during the first half of the twelfth century. The two chapters on Arthur’s Coronation festivities would have been incentive enough to escalate regal spectacle.²⁸ Arthur is conducted to the church by two archbishops with four knights bearing golden swords before him. We are told that there was wonderful music during the procession and at the actual church service, which is not recounted. As they leave for the banquet both Arthur and his queen take off their heavy crowns and put on ‘lighter ornaments’, just as Richard did before the feast. There were, in fact, two banquets, one for the men and the other for the ladies. The English Coronation banquet was also a male preserve like the Arthurian. ‘For the Britons,’ writes Geoffrey, ‘still observed the ancient custom of Troy by which men and women used to celebrate their festivals apart.’ There followed three days of festival with tournaments, archery and other competitive sports and, after this, on the fourth day, ‘all who, upon account of their titles, bore any kind of office at this solemnity, were called upon to receive honours and preferments …’ The scenario for 1189 was exactly the same. Was this an attempt to emulate King Arthur? This was a Coronation staged at precisely the period when the Arthurian romances of chivalry under the aegis of that great innovator of the genre, Chrétien de Troyes, took off as a new ideal of courtly life. Indeed Chrétien’s greatest patron was Richard I’s brother-in-law, Henry of Champagne.²⁹ Was the Coronation of 1189 an attempt to revive the world of Arthur, ‘For at that time Britain had arrived at such a pitch of grandeur, luxury of ornaments, and politeness of inhabitants, it far surpassed all other kingdoms’? It is an hypothesis that is worth the making. What is clear is that we have travelled already a vast distance from the feudal testimony of 1066 and entered the new world of Camelot.

       3 Kingship and Consent

      IN THE SAME YEAR ‘the lord king, inspired by his devotion to St Edward, ordered the church of St Peter at Westminster to be enlarged.’ With these words the chronicler, Matthew Paris, records Henry III’s decision not so much to ‘enlarge’ as to demolish and rebuild the Coronation church.’¹ This was a building project on a scale unparalleled anywhere else in Western Europe at the time. It was not only, however, driven on by the king’s commitment to the cult of his saintly forebear, but equally by a desire to outshine the French king, Louis IX, the builder of the Sainte-Chapelle. In St Edward the Confessor Henry III saw an ideal pattern for his own kingship, one which he set out to imitate and emulate.² The very fact that he was to eclipse the saint by rebuilding his church on an even grander scale is evidence enough of that. Although its role as a royal valhalla and as a meeting place for both the King’s Council and the nascent House of Commons has long since gone, it still retains its place at the heart of the nation as a royal church, what is called a royal peculiar, one which is exempt from episcopal jurisdiction, and as the setting for a proliferation of royal events, of which over seven centuries later the Coronation still remains the greatest.

      The contribution of Henry III to the history of the Coronation, therefore, cannot be overestimated. He was to provide it with its mise-en-scène, a supremely graceful, soaring, many-pinnacled glasshouse, rivalling, if not surpassing, the greatest of the French Gothic cathedrals, which indeed inspired it. In Henry III’s mind Westminster Abbey had above all to eclipse in splendour the French Coronation church of Reims. To achieve that the king employed for the task a man well versed about all that was happening in France, Henry de Reyns. The Gothic style was still relatively new to England when the Abbey arose with a speed which must have astonished contemporaries. Twenty-five years before, the monks had also, it seems likely, taken the decision to rebuild. They began with a Lady chapel sited beyond the existing east end, a project to which Henry III contributed the golden spurs with which he was invested at his Coronation there in 1220. Lack of funds meant that the scheme stagnated until the king suddenly embarked on his own massive project, lavishing on it the equivalent of the crown’s total revenues for two years. In just twenty-four years the east end, transepts, choir and part of the nave were already up, enough for the church to be formally dedicated on 13 October 1269. This was a church built by a man who had a highly elevated concept of the office of kingship. By 1245 the Abbey had established itself as the immutable setting for the crowning of the kings of England. It was, therefore, custom-built from the outset with that ceremony in mind. Henry III had been crowned in haste as a child of nine in Gloucester cathedral with a gold circlet because London was in the hands of the French. But the central role of the Abbey in his eyes is reflected in the fact that he obtained a papal dispensation to be not only crowned but also anointed a second time in the Abbey in 1220. Both Coronations would have been according to the Third Recension.³ But the new dynastic church by its very scale and concept would seem to call for a ceremony to match (although it has been equally argued that it prompted no such development). And, indeed,

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