The coronation order thus yoked together the pre-Christian, the sacred, and the secular in a single ceremony. Augustine of Canterbury’s successors, it was essential to convince England’s kings that they held their authority from God, not from the assent of their thegns or their claimed descent from Woden. A clue to this possibility is the jarring appearance of a helmet instead of a crown in the first English Ordo, the earliest surviving coronation liturgy-a relic of the time when a cyning (king) was inaugurated in his war-gear by being lifted on a shield by his thegns (thanes), sometimes even on the battlefield.įor St. It is even possible that the origins of the English coronation rite reach back to the Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century. Indeed, it is likely that the English rite of coronation (older than England itself) is the ancestor of virtually all medieval coronation rites-making it historically fitting, perhaps, that England alone continues to crown its monarchs. This suggests that English coronations inspired those of Continental monarchs. But this was not the first English coronation scholars consider that an English rite of coronation in some Frankish pontificals is perhaps a century older than Edgar’s. The earliest recorded English coronation was the crowning of Edgar the Peaceable at Bath in 973. Originating as a Christian compromise with earlier pagan rites of royal investiture, it would become in time a Protestant compromise with Britain’s Catholic past, while also referencing Britain’s growing role as an imperial power. The coronation is an intriguing composite rite that reaches back into England’s deep past, expressing the aspirations of its later rulers. Whatever people in the United Kingdom and beyond may think of a coronation in the twenty-first century, there is no escaping the deep strangeness of this ancient rite, which only two nations on earth still perform-the other being the Pacific island nation of Tonga. Medieval,” “anachronistic,” “outdated,” “a magic hat ceremony.” These are just a few of the uncomplimentary terms that some have chosen to describe tomorrow’s coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla.
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