Читать книгу Coronation: From the 8th to the 21st Century - Roy Strong - Страница 19

The Red Book of the Exchequer suddenly records in 1236 the Coronation of Henry III’s queen, Eleanor of Provence.³⁷ The reason for this was that ‘Great disputes arose about the services of the officers of the king’s household, and about the rights belonging to their offices.’ This was eventually to lead to the establishment at each Coronation of a Court of Claims whose role was to sort out and pronounce upon the bids by rival contenders to perform this or that service for the king on the day. The earliest records that we have for one of these courts in action are for the Coronation of Richard II in 1377, but it is possible that they existed earlier.

The emergence of such a court must have been the eventual consequence of the clashes and claims which caused someone to put pen to paper in 1236. On that occasion Earl Warenne claimed the right to carry the sword ‘Curtana’. The Earl of Chester and Huntingdon claimed that right as his own on the grounds that it was a service which descended with the earldom of Chester. In that case the king intervened and we are told ‘the strife subsided’. The two sceptres were carried by two knights ‘because that service does not fall to any one by right, but only those to whom the king is pleased to entrust it’. The list runs through claims as varied as the right to be steward at the feast for the day to being the person who presented the king with his napkin. In every instance those who petitioned did so on the basis that it was ‘his of old’, ‘comes from old time’ or ‘by old-established right’.

The truth of the matter was that the grounds for these claims were often flimsy, and ‘old’ could mean little more than a generation back.³⁸ The links argued on precedent and from association with land tenure could be dubious in the extreme, but they were fought hard and often became fact. For those who won there was not only the glamour of the occasion and the opportunity to be in proximity to the king, but perks to be had ranging from pieces of plate to cloths of estate. Some, like the queen’s chamberlain in 1236, could do extremely well out of such an event, for he left the richer by the queen’s bed as well as basins and other items. Most of this had begun to be systematised by the middle of the thirteenth century, when the grant of a particular piece of land was made in return for a certain Coronation service, a transaction known as serjeanty. The earliest traceable instance of this comes in 1212 and was for holding the queen’s towel at her Coronation. Already by the twelfth century many of the nobles acted on state occasions such as Coronations and crown-wearings as almoner, steward, marshal, seneschal, butler and chamberlain. Some of these posts were less onerous than others. The almoner, for example, distributed the leftovers from the feast to the poor and exercised jurisdiction over all comers, settling the disputes which could arise at such distributions. The marshal had to maintain order within the palace and also arrange hostelry for the small army of guests. In return he claimed a saddled palfrey from every earl and baron knighted on the day. Bearing in mind the hordes of guests, he will have earned them.

Such services drew in not only the aristocratic and knightly classes but also townspeople. The Cinque Ports sent canopy bearers for the king and queen, sixteen in all, four to each stave.³⁹ They first appear in 1189 at the Coronation of Richard I quod de consuetudine antiqua in coronationis regis habuerunt. The ports involved were Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich, to which were later added Winchelsea and Rye. Together they occupied a crucial geographical position in terms of the defence of the realm, as well as in those of trade and commerce. Each year they supplied the crown with 57 ships. The canopy bearers were barons for the day and their perquisite was the fabric of the canopy itself, which was generally sold off and the money divided between the towns involved. Although the Cinque Ports had already ceased to be of any importance by 1500, they were to continue to render this service until the reign of George IV. It was William IV who, disgusted at the extravagance of his predecessor, abolished it. Nevertheless, the barons were to resurface in 1901 before a Court of Claims and attain a place as standard bearers at the Coronation of Edward VII.

Of all of these offices the most legendary is that of King’s Champion. That office was certainly in existence by 1327 and was attached to the manor of Scrivelsby, Lincolnshire. The terms of the land tenure or serjeanty specified that the tenant should at each Coronation proffer: ‘to defend with his body against any man who may assert that the king is not rightful king, that he speak not good nor truth, and for the execution of this proffer our Lord the King shall give him the best charger he has save one and his best armour save one’.⁴⁰

This office may well have originally been held by the Marmion family, lords of Tamworth Castle and Scrivelsby, whose last co-heir died about 1292, after which Scrivelsby passed to the Dymokes. In 1377 this office was further defined. The Champion was to ride ahead of the procession and if anyone actually challenged him he would get both the horse and the armour which the king provided, otherwise not. On that occasion he turned up at the north door of the Abbey and was sent away and told to perform his challenge at the feast, which he did. Challenges were a feature of late medieval feasts, and so there it stayed until the last occasion when this was enacted, the Coronation of George IV. Under William IV the Champion went the same way as the Cinque Ports canopy bearers, but also returned in a banner-bearing guise in 1902.⁴¹

The rivalry over Coronation services is a keen index of a highly stratified society where rank was measured in both the duty performed and proximity to the monarch. In spite of so many posts being assigned by descent, either through land tenure or title, there was always at any Coronation a large pool of patronage at the king’s disposal. The choice of this or that person to bear a sceptre or a crown or to fasten on the spurs or redeem the sword was looked upon as a benchmark in terms of royal favour. In 1308 Edward II’s decision that the crown, in the words of the Annales Paulini, was ‘to be carried in the filthy hands of Piers Gaveston’ added fuel to fires already burning brightly enough in the minds of the assembled magnates.⁴² In the makeup of the chivalrous mind such marks of favour were of signal importance. In a feudal society such events should be public manifestations of the immutable ordo of society, and not be soiled by upstarts.

Thirteen hundred and eight is interesting for another reason in this context, for the magnates made a bid to carry articles of the regalia of St Edward, items which, in the words of the same chronicler, ‘they ought not to have touched, for they are relics; only the king’s own [i.e. personal] Coronation regalia, in which he will return to the palace after the mass and then sit at the feast do they have the right to bear’.⁴³ The magnates, in fact, got their way on that occasion, for only the chalice and paten were borne by clerics.

These great processions, increasingly spectacular to watch, took the Coronation out to a wider public. They moved in and out of the great internal spaces of both the Abbey and the palace but, more importantly, made their way in the open along the ray-cloth path linking the one building to the other. Those who lined the route would have seen their future ruler, bare-headed, devoid of his robes of state and walking in his stockinged feet, a bishop guiding him by either hand. He would be framed by the silver staves of the canopy borne by the Barons of the Cinque Ports, and the onlookers would have been alerted to his imminence by the tinkling of the silver-gilt bells and the chant of the monks. Several hours later they would have seen the same figure re-emerge transformed, dazzling in his robes of state, no longer led but triumphant, clasping orb and sceptre, and on his head a crown of gold and precious jewels. For an age whose mental premise was the image rather than the word the impact must have been overwhelming.