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a ring which had been taken from the tomb when the saint’s body was translated.⁹

      Sometime about 1245 the queen was presented with La Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei, a highly mythologising account of the Confessor’s life and miracles which has as its subtext a parallel between Edward and her husband. In it the Saxon king has a vision of a royal Coronation church:

       And then let the king be consecrated Enthroned and crowned, And there be the regalia preserved In sure and certain protection. ¹⁰

      This life epitomised what was to be the courtly cult of the royal saint, for it never took off in terms of popular appeal. And what happens during the thirteenth century is a wish fulfilment of precisely these verses. The Fourth Recension works from the premise of the existence of sacred saintly relics in the safe keeping of the Abbey, the ‘royal ornaments of St Edward’, relics so precious that the king must be divested of most of them before he leaves the church after his Coronation. If he retains some of the items at his feast then they must be returned immediately after to the abbot who holds them ‘as of right’. The result of this was that by the middle of the fourteenth century a motley and confusing collection of crowns, sceptres, rods and assorted royal vestments was assigned to St Edward. These were to be deliberately destroyed by the Parliamentarians in the middle of the seventeenth century. All later antiquarians have been able to do since is to try to make sense out of what the various inventories list, and match the descriptions to any surviving pictorial evidence. The results of this exercise so far cannot be described as anything other than unsatisfactory.

      What adds to the confused history of the old regalia is that there would always have been two sets, one the royal ornaments of St Edward and the other personal to the king. Out of the former the only item to survive today is a late twelfth-century spoon, silver gilt with four pearls, later additions, inset into the broadest part of its handle, its bowl engraved with elegant arabesques. This is listed among the secular regalia in 1349 as ‘Item i coclear antique forme’ (Item, one spoon of ancient form). It has the unique feature of a double-lobed bowl and is probably the work of a major late Romanesque goldsmith working in London. Such a spoon was made for a specific ceremonial purpose, the double bowl sustaining the notion that it was used for the holy oil during unction, the archbishop dipping two of his fingers into it. Medieval depictions of regal unction, however, cannot support its use in this way, for spoons only appear either in connexion with incense boats or as chalice spoons for mixing a little water with the communion wine. If it was used for either of these purposes, that had been forgotten by the middle of the fourteenth century when it was listed with the secular plate as not for liturgical use. Nonetheless what has survived is an object made for Henry II, Richard I or even John and the only piece of goldsmith’s work executed for an English royal patron to come down to us from the twelfth century.”¹¹

      The personal regalia of both the king and the queen were kept in the Tower and only add to the complications. Edward II, for example, had no fewer than ten crowns, and we might well puzzle over the origin and exact status of another crown which appears in the wardrobe accounts of his father, Edward I, in 1279: ‘a great crown of gold with square balas-rubies (or spinels), emeralds, eastern sapphires, rubies and great eastern pearls … which is appointed to be carried over the head of the Kings of England when they go from the church to the banquet on the day of their Coronation’.¹²

      All of this is deeply reflective of a new richness, an expansiveness of a kind we have already seen anticipated in the description of Richard I’s Coronation. The symbolic overtones implicit in that were to develop and flourish in the two centuries that followed. But in order to do so it demanded a new ordo in tune with what were in effect new concepts of kingship and new notions as to the relationship of a ruler to his people. To accommodate the changed nuances called for a vastly expanded ceremonial, one which simultaneously elevated the wearer of the crown and, at the same time, spelt out his new obligations. The success of the Fourth Recension in meeting these demands can be measured by the fact that it has provided a framework for every Coronation since.

      THE FOURTH RECENSION

      What is extraordinary about the Fourth Recension is that no one seems able exactly to pinpoint the date of its compilation.¹³ In that respect it shares an attribute of its predecessors over whose dating and first use generations of scholars have argued and still argue. What everyone does accept is that it was used in 1308 for Edward II and that, although it was certainly modified for the event, the ordo was already in existence. So it pre-dates 1308, but by how much? The discovery of a mid-thirteenth-century fragmentary rubric for a Coronation related to the Fourth Recension texts in a manuscript by one William de Hasele (d. 1283) is a strong pointer that the fourth ordo may go back quite a way.¹⁴ What the rubric spells out is not a particular Coronation but one in abstract, describing but not naming the various officers present and their role at some future event. This memorandum is likely to have been inserted into this manuscript shortly after 1266, which should mean that some version of the Fourth Recension was in existence by that date.

      It is difficult surely to accept that Henry III could have rebuilt Westminster Abbey without having something in his mind concerning the Coronation, particularly when one is aware of his keen interest in the activities of the French monarchy, and that so much of the fourth ordo echoes what was done at the French Coronation. The king was now to be anointed in five places like his French counterpart, and two anthems and three benedictions of the sword and ring were inserted, these last lifted virtually verbatim from the French Coronation ordo. In both we see the ruler cast as hero undergoing a rite of passage in which there is a careful balance struck between the actions of the monarch and those of the clergy, of royal as against ecclesiastical power.¹⁵ There is moreover in the English ordo a carefully observed balance between the parts played by the monarch and the magnates as embodiments of royal power and of its limitations. In that there is a parting of the ways, for the focus of the French Coronation was always to be on the sacre, the basis of absolutist rule and one which was to end in disaster in 1789. In sharp contrast, in England, where checks and limitations on the power of the crown were emerging fast during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the focus was on the oath which spelt out the boundaries of royal power. In this way the Coronation was already by the mid-fourteenth century flexible enough to be accommodated within the terms of a constitutional monarchy. In the Fourth Recension there is this enhancement of the monarchy in terms of its splendour and magnificence simultaneously with the ruler swearing an oath in which his power is limited. That curtailment is also vividly reflected in the pre-Coronation meeting of the king-to-be with the magnates in order to discuss the Coronation, and also in the reintroduction of the formal acclamation of the ruler from the earlier ordines.

      Although the age of the theocratic priest-kings had long gone, unction was still seen to bestow the quasi-magical power on the king of being able to touch for the King’s Evil, the healing of scrofula.¹⁶ That Henry I was the first king of England to exercise this power is hardly surprising, locked as he was into a battle with the Church. He based his powers to heal on the cure of a scrofulous woman recorded in ancient lives of St Edward. The Plantagenets enjoyed huge prestige for their healing powers. Edward I, for example, touched 1,736 individuals during the eighteenth year of his reign. A chaplain of Edward III and a future Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Bradwardine, writes of the ‘miracles’ performed by the king which could be testified to ‘by sick persons who had been cured, by those present when the cures took place, or who had seen the results of them, by the people of many nations, and by their universal renown’.¹⁷ In its very early days, when the Gregorian reform was at its height, the royal claim to heal was denounced as a falsehood,

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