Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century - Roy Strong

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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

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