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With the mention of Dunstan we can move on to a consideration of that other vexed document, the Second Recension. Everyone agrees that it was used under Dunstan’s aegis for the great Coronation of Edgar in 973 and also that it was still in use in 1101. As it refers to a king crowned ‘of the Angles and the Saxons’ and to the person concerned as a successor to a glorious father, that could only mean Edward the Elder crowned on 8 June 901 or Athelstan, his son, crowned on 4 September 925. That at least provides some options for possible dating. What is also certain is that this ordo represents a revision of the First Recension, bringing it into line with developments on the Continent.21
There are at least five versions of this text, of which the most important is that known as the Claudius Pontifical, which evidence indicates was written for and at Christ Church, Canterbury. The ordo is a fusion of insular with continental elements drawing on the Leofric and Egbert versions of the First Recension and marrying into them items drawn from Hincmar of Reims’ ordo of Metz (869), the West Frankish ordo of c.900 (the Erdmann ordo) and what was called the ordo of Stavelot (the ordo of the Seven Forms). The resulting recension surpasses all of those upon which it was based in terms of clarity, structure and power of expression and language.
Although there are variations between the surviving manuscripts, once again I present the recension as a list, pointing up what had changed. The Second Recension, thanks to the inclusion of rubrics, paints a far fuller picture of the action than the first:
1 The ordo opens with the King discovered amidst his seniores, the ealdormen who have elected him.
2 Two bishops lead the King to the church while the choir chants the anthem, Firmetur manus tua: ‘Let thy hand be strengthened, and thy right hand be exulted …’, invoking the regal qualities of strength, justice, mercy and truth.
3 ‘When the King is come to the church, he shall lie prostrate before the altar: and then shall the hymn Te Deum laudamus be sung to the end.’
4 ‘After which he shall arise from the ground: and the King chosen by the bishops and people shall promise to observe these three things.’ Then follow the tria praecepta as in the First Recension.
5 Prayers follow, including a long one invoking in plenitude biblical precedents, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David and Solomon, as exemplars of truth, mildness, courage, humility and wisdom. It petitions that the King may serve God, walk in the way of justice, and cherish the Church and his people, protecting both from their enemies. It calls for him to triumph over his enemies protected by the helmet of God’s protection and His invincible shield. It asks that the King reign with honour and be anointed with the grace of the Holy Spirit.
6 The anointing, during which is sung in some versions Unxerunt Salomonem (‘Zadok the Priest’) as the anthem and in others a special anthem with the text: ‘O people of England, thou hast not been forgotten in the sight of the Lord: for in thee may the King that rules the English people of God be exulted, may he be anointed with the oil of gladness and confirmed by God’s strength.’
7 Investiture by the bishops with a multiplication of regalia: the ring, the sword, the crown, the sceptre and the rod. Each item is presented with prayers outlining their symbolic significance as I have already described at Edgar’s Coronation. Some versions add to these a red regal mantle, ‘the garment of chiefest honour, the mantle of royal dignity’.
8 A series of blessings calls upon God, the Virgin Mary, the saints and angels to guard and watch over the King.
9 He is then enthroned with the prayer Sta et retine: ‘Stand and hold fast from henceforth that place whereof hitherto thou hast been heir, by the succession of thy forefathers, being now delivered unto thee by the authority of Almighty God, and by the hand of us, and all the bishops and servants of God …’
10 A series of further blessings.
11 The Queen is then consecrated and anointed and ‘she must be adorned with the ring for the integrity of her faith, and with a crown for the glory of eternity’.
12 The Mass.
In what way does this ordo differ from its predecessor? In the first place it is the first one with clear sections: election, oath, consecration, unction, investiture and blessing. In the second, the role of the laity is reduced, the delivery of the regalia no longer being at the hands of both principes and pontifices but of the pontifices only. In short, anything which suggests that power might have been conferred from below has been eliminated. There is no act of allegiance or indeed of acclamation. This is an ordo whose fundamental driving force is theological, represented in the opening act of prostration by the candidate on entering the church. Prostration in early liturgies was an expression beyond that of mere humility, contrition and supplication. What it signalled was an annihilation of the initiate’s former self in preparation for a ‘rebirth’ into a new status. That rebirth was, however, to be conditional upon the promissio regis, now significantly moved to the front from its place in the First Recension at the very end. This new siting had huge constitutional repercussions. In it were spelt out the obligations of late Anglo-Saxon kingship: ‘The duty of a hallowed king is that he judge no man unrighteously, and that he defend and protect widows and orphans and strangers, that he forbid thefts … feed the needy with alms, and have old and wise men for counsellors, and set righteous men for stewards …’22
The Second Recension recast the nature, context and function of kingship. Much of that is caught in the new items of regalia. The ring, which makes its first appearance in the ordination of bishops, is given as a symbol of faith. The sword, for which there is also no pagan precedent, is girded upon the king for the defence of both the Church and his own people.23 The recension also integrates the Queen into the Coronation ritual, casting her in the role of a virtuous helpmate. She, too, was anointed with chrism, an index of high status and that her role was seen as important and not subsidiary to that of the king.24
Apart from the unusually full account of the Second Recension in action for Edgar in 973 little if anything is known about the Coronations of later kings. Indeed, it is not known whether Canute, the Danish king who succeeded to England by conquest, was even crowned at all. Chaos followed his demise in 1035 until, seven years later in 1042, Canute’s stepson, Edward the Confessor, succeeded. By that date the place of crowning was still not fixed, for Edward’s took place at Winchester in 1043. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provides us with a crumb about that event, one which shows that the importance of the promissio regis was fully understood, for we are told that Eadsige, Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘gave him [Edward] good instruction before all the people, and admonished him well for his own sake and for the sake of all the people’.25 If the Second Recension was a perfect mirror of ideal Anglo-Saxon kingship, what replaced it after the Norman Conquest was to reflect a far more assertive and controversial vision of the monarchy in what was to be an age of conflict between Church and State. There is a striking representation of the last Saxon Coronation in the Bayeux Tapestry. On 6 January 1066 Harold was crowned King in Edward the Confessor’s new Abbey Church of Westminster, which had been consecrated only nine days before. His claim to the throne was tenuous, his mother being a Norse princess and his sister, the Confessor’s Queen. The Coronation took place the day after the Confessor’s death, so that any preparations must have been minimal. The tapestry is accepted as having been made in England in about 1075 and its English origins mean that the scene is as it would have been envisaged by those within the native tradition. But the storyline is that of the Norman conquerors, for what is depicted is what, in their eyes, was a usurpation and, although no doubt both the archbishops of Canterbury and York took part following the Second Recension ordo, York is omitted in favour of including the tainted Stigand of Canterbury, already under a cloud and deposed from the see in 1070.
Such an image is, of course, not reportage but symbolic. Nonetheless it evokes more vividly than the dead texts of the ordines something of the atmosphere of such an event as well as giving an indication of the visual spectacle. It suggests that the royal throne had advanced from the primitive bench on which Edward the Confessor sits in the tapestry to being something more akin to an elevated seat or chair with an approach by way of steps. Harold wears the familiar late Anglo-Saxon crown with fleurons on his head and also sports a royal mantle, suggesting, perhaps, as some versions of the ordines say, that this may have been part of the regalia by 1066. To his right there are two principes, one of whom lifts high what may be the sword with which the king was girded during the ceremony. In his right hand he supports a long foliated rod, a baculus, and, in his left, something new, an orb surmounted by a cross. The orb is an imperial attribute, first certainly adopted by the Holy Roman Emperors very early in the eleventh century and appropriated shortly after by the Dane Canute (1016–35). An orb and sceptre appear on Edward the Confessor’s seal, lifted unchanged from the Ottonian rulers of Germany. Perhaps an orb also, by the year of the Conquest, had become part of the coronation regalia. In this tableau we have brought together for the first time a coronation and what was to become its immemorial setting, Westminster Abbey, along with the potent memory of its founder, the man who was to further sanctify the royal family, this time as heirs and descendants of a saint.26
2 King and Priest
IN THE AFTERMATH of the battle of Hastings the defeated Anglo-Saxon magnates came to make their submission to Duke William of Normandy at Berkhamsted. This was succession not by election but by force of arms, for William was only Edward the Confessor’s second cousin once removed. Although he was later to embroider on to the train of events that Edward had promised him the crown, the truth of the matter is that England was the victim of the explosive vitality of the Normans, a vitality which was also to conquer southern Italy and Sicily and, during the First Crusade, much of the Holy Land.
The Anglo-Saxon magnates had little choice in the autumn of 1066, therefore, other than to petition him to accept the crown of England on the grounds that they were accustomed to a king as their lord. Many of the Normans spoke against William accepting, fully conscious of the duke’s consequent elevation in status that such an acceptance would bestow and the implication of it for them. But the duke was not slow to realise the advantage of being seen to be the rightful heir of Edward the Confessor claiming his kingdom. In this manner what was conquest could be dressed up in the robes of legitimacy. And, although William had wished to wait for the arrival of his wife, the urgency was such, after this decision, that the Coronation took place on Christmas Day 1066.1
Over this Coronation more academic ink has been spilt than almost any other, excepting that of Edward II in 1308. And, as in the case of Anglo-Saxon Coronations, we are up against paucity of material and the fact that what evidence we do have is patchy and not always compatible. With the Conquest we also enter the age of the chronicles, but what they produced can range from eyewitness accounts to something secondhand or, even worse, fabricated. What can be pieced together about Christmas Day 1066, therefore, is a synthesis of the evidence from the chroniclers together with the one unique eyewitness account by a Norman cleric, Guy, Bishop of Amiens. He wrote a Latin poem on the battle of Hastings, the Carmen de Hastingae proelio, which culminates with the Coronation. The poem was written almost certainly to celebrate William’s triumphant home-coming to Normandy in Lent 1067, literally weeks after the event.
Everyone agrees that the 1066 Coronation was different, but the problem centres around the degree of difference. In recent years it has been argued that this was the occasion on which a new ordo was introduced, the one we know as the Third Recension. It was probably composed, they argue, by Ealdred, the Anglo-Saxon Archbishop of York, in response to the quite unique set of circumstances which surrounded 1066. It has also been suggested that it was composed even earlier at the behest of Edward the Confessor and had been already used for Harold II. There is no way of settling that debate. What this new ordo does reflect are imperial aspirations of a kind that we know both the Confessor and equally William I had. Ealdred was uniquely qualified to provide an ordo with imperial overtones, for he had been present at the Coronation of the German King Henry IV in 1056 and would have known the continental ordines upon which the Third Recension drew. Edward the Confessor’s vision of imperial status for the kings of England is reflected in the imagery of his coinage, his use of the Byzantine imperial style of basileus and, even more spectacularly, in the construction of Westminster Abbey, which was a building of European status designed to rival the great imperial churches of the Rhineland at Mainz and Speyer. There are equally imperial echoes around the Conqueror, whose crown at the Coronation Guy of Amiens records was ‘Greece inspired’, that is, it was modelled on that of the Byzantine Emperors which had pendologues, detachable strings of pearls alongside the cheeks. It was also studded with twelve precious or semi-precious stones. These related, in terms of biblical symbolism, to the breastplate of the High Priest and appear also as the foundation stones of the Heavenly City in the Book of Revelation. And his choice of Christmas Day for his Coronation would have been made in the full knowledge that both the Byzantine Emperors and the Western Holy Roman Emperors had also chosen it for theirs.2
An opposing case, however, continues to be maintained for the use of the Second Recension, albeit with revisions and additions, on the grounds that it was still in use and that William would not have wished to introduce something new but, rather, use an existing rite to emphasise continuity in his role as the rightful heir to Anglo-Saxon England. That argument depends, of course, on what was used at the Coronation of Harold II. None of this, as I have said, seems to be solvable and it is impossible to do more than piece together what can be gleaned to have happened, highlighting innovations, and leave the reader to draw his own conclusions. Those who opt for the use of the Second Recension in 1066 favour the introduction of the Third Recension during the second quarter of the twelfth century. What is certain is that Harold II’s Coronation was a rushed affair following immediately after Edward the Confessor’s death, allowing no time for preparation, but William I’s had a lead of three months allowing ample time to prepare what was a formidable spectacle.
Both Harold II’s and William I’s Coronations mark the advent of a spacial configuration for royal ceremonial which has lasted down until today, that of the Palace of Westminster and the adjacent Abbey. It is likely that we owe that to Edward the Confessor. Both the economic expansion of the eleventh century and the growing mercantile traffic across the North Sea rendered a royal presence in London highly desirable. Such political and economic practicalities went hand in hand with a dynastic one, a desire to emulate the example of the French monarchy which already had its royal Coronation church of St Denis. Up until Edward the Confessor the royal palace had been in the City of London. Now a new residence was built on the island of Thorney close to a Benedictine Abbey dedicated to St Peter, the guardian of the keys of heaven, for whom the king had a special devotion. Nothing is known about Edward’s palace, but a great deal is known about the Abbey which he embarked on to replace the one he found there.3
This was built to the east of the existing foundation and, by 1066, thanks to his benefactions, Westminster was to be among the richest religious houses in the country. What arose was grander than any church in England and in a new style, the Romanesque as it was practised in Normandy, but far exceeding both in size and splendour any church there. When complete it was to be 320 feet long. By 1066 the east end and transepts must have been up, although the nave and the twin west towers were not to be completed before the middle of the 1080s at the earliest. This was one of the great buildings of early medieval Europe. William’s decision to be crowned there must have been conditioned by a desire to cancel out Harold II’s Coronation and also to be seen to be crowned in the burial church of the Confessor as his rightful heir. It was a precedent which, once established, proved permanent.
There is much in William’s Coronation with which we will be familiar as well as much which could be innovative. It opened, as in the case of Edgar’s at Bath, with a great procession. However, this time it was not only of monks and other clergy headed by a crucifer, but went on to include the great magnates of the realm and the future king led by the two archbishops. That was different from 973 when Edgar was led by the bishops of Durham and of Bath and Wells, an arrangement which was to reappear later. ‘In this manner,’ runs the Carmen, ‘to the chanting of the Laudes, the king sought the church and was conducted to the royal chair.’ What were the Laudes?
The Laudes are a set of jubilant acclamations which invoke God as an all-conquering and victorious commander.4 They open with the resounding salute ‘Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat’, and continue in a splendid descent through the celestial and thence through the terrestrial hierarchy. In these chants the serried ranks of heaven and earth are presented as mirror images of each other, each terrestrial rank being linked to a heavenly intercessor. The ruler, as Christus Domini, the anointed of the Lord, has as his intercessor a group of angelic and archangelic powers. To the queen is assigned a choir of virgins who intercede on her behalf. In sum the Laudes were a unique form of litany addressed solely and triumphantly to the victorious Christ in his divinity as the king of heaven and earth, and the prime exemplar and guarantor of power and prosperity to all rulers who safeguarded the fabric of Christian society. The act of unction, which was shortly to follow this procession, was to turn the Duke of Normandy into a type of Christ on earth and the embodiment of theocratic kingship.
It was customary to chant the Laudes at the great festivals of the Church, including Christmas (which it was), but here, in this procession, we already have a potent statement as to the nature of post-Conquest kingship. They were also to be sung at the solemn Mass which marked the ceremonial crown-wearings that were to become a feature of Norman and Angevin court life, when the magnates of the realm gathered at Christmas, Easter and Pentecost to attend on the king and queen and take part in the service and also in the great feast which followed it. As in the case of the debate over which ordo was used, so it has been argued that crown-wearings pre-date the Conquest. Whether they did or not, the evidence shows a sharp elevation of the monarch to almost semi-divine status.
In this manner William I was conducted to the new Abbey. On entering it there was yet a further deviation from the Second Recension. That opened with the king in the midst of the magnates of the realm who had acclaimed him. This action was now moved into the sacred precincts of the Abbey church, taking place on what the Carmen refers to as a pulpitum. This would appear to mark the first appearance of some kind of stage or elevated dais which lifted some of the action aloft and apart from the assembled dignitaries. If we turn to the reconstructed ground plan of the Abbey, it must have been erected at the crossing beneath the central tower. Its advent in 1066 would surely have been prompted by the need to give emphasis and prominence to an action in which the duke was seen to be ‘elected’ by both the indigenous Anglo-Saxons and the occupying Normans. It began with Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances, addressing the latter in French, asking them: ‘If the king presented please you, declare it to us, for it is fitting that this be done by your free choice.’ In response came applause. The action was repeated for the Anglo-Saxons in their own language by Ealdred of York.
The rite which followed took place in an arena which was to remain unchanged until the Coronation of Edward I. The high altar stood where the present one does. It was sited in an apse which was 26 feet 8 inches wide and with an approach to the altar measuring 14 feet 9 inches. The flanking north and south aisles had upper and lower chapels to which access was had by way of turret staircases. Such staircases may have led up to viewing points for the ceremonial, a feature which was to be repeated in Henry III’s rebuilding in the thirteenth century. The monks’ choir stalls were beneath the tower, so presumably the purpose of the pulpitum was also to lift part of the proceedings above them so that they could be seen.
This innovatory but politically necessary acclamation was to have an unfortunate consequence, for the roar of approval was such that one chronicler records: ‘the armed and mounted men who had been stationed around the Abbey to guard it hearing the tremendous shouting in a language they could not understand, thought that something had gone wrong, and under this misapprehension they set fire to the environs of the city’.5
While events outside the Abbey had taken a nasty turn, those within it went on with the accustomed opening prostration before the altar and thence to the administration of unction with chrism by the Archbishop of York (Canterbury, although present, was tainted and under an ecclesiastical cloud). There was, however, yet another major departure from the Edgar ordo. William took the Coronation oath after and not before he had been anointed. One version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records: ‘And he [William] promised Ealdred on Christ’s book and swore moreover (before Ealdred would place the crown on his head) that he would rule all this people as well as the best of kings before him, if they would be loyal to him.’6
The changed placing must have been designed to reinforce the sanctity of the king’s oath, for it was made by William as a man who had just been sanctified and endowed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Thereafter the ceremony follows what has been argued to be compatible with either the Second or the Third Recensions: investiture with the regalia, enthronement and the Mass.
