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THE IDEA OF UNCTION

What is unction and how did it come to occupy such a central position in king-making?⁴ The first question is a relatively simple one to answer, the second far more complex. Unction was the application to a modern ruler of a ritual recorded in the Old Testament, the anointing of a chosen leader with holy oil. In the First Book of Samuel the elders ask the prophet to choose a king for them who will act both as their judge and their leader in war. Samuel chose Saul. ‘Then Samuel took a vial of oil, and poured it upon his head, and kissed him, and said, Is it not because the Lord hath anointed thee to be captain over his inheritance?’ (I Samuel 10:1).

Later in the same book Samuel is led to choose Saul’s successor and the ritual is re-enacted: ‘Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren: and the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward’ (I Samuel 16:13).

Even more important was the precedent set by David’s son, Solomon, always cast as the ideal king. In the First Book of Kings David summons Zadok the priest, Nathan the prophet and Benaiah, the son of the chief priest, and orders them to mount his son, Solomon, on David’s own mule and bring him down to Gihon: ‘And let Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet anoint him there King over Israel: and blow ye with the trumpet, and say, God save King Solomon. Then ye shall come up after him, that he may come and sit upon my throne; for he shall be king in my stead’ (I Kings 1: 34–5).

They did what was commanded of them: ‘And Zadok the priest took an horn of oil out of the tabernacle, and anointed Solomon. And they blew the trumpet; and all the people said, God save King Solomon’ (I Kings 1: 39; I Chronicles 29: 22–3).

In these biblical passages virtually all the elements which were to constitute the early Coronation ceremonies are already there: the selection of a king, his anointing with holy oil by a priest, his acclamation by the people and his enthronement. The Old Testament was equally specific as to the effects of anointing. In the case of Saul, ‘And the Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man’ (I Samuel 10: 6).

In New Testament terms it was an outward action representing an inward descent upon the King of the Holy Spirit. Collectively it was from the application of these texts to the task of king-making in the seventh and eighth centuries that the earliest ordines were to emerge.

But there is a huge time lapse between those Old Testament rulers and the earliest application of unction to the barbarian kings. That bridge can be crossed by the continuing role played by sacred oils in the life of the Early Church. The Old Testament did not only provide precedents for the anointing of kings, it also gave ones for the anointing of priests as well as artefacts connected with worship. God commanded Moses to prepare the holy oil of anointing for hallowing the tabernacle, ark, table, vessels and altar for the ritual of worship and also for anointing Aaron and his sons as priests (Exodus 29:7–8; Leviticus 8:10–12). As a consequence holy oil was used at the consecration of churches and altars and in the ordination of both bishops and priests.

The most important of all the holy oils was chrism, a mixture of olive oil and balsam which was used in the Early Church in the rite of baptism and confirmation.⁵ The word chrism itself was a Greek rendering of the Hebrew word for the holy oil of anointing. The exotic fragrance and richness of chrism opened it up to early writers bestowing on it an allegorical significance as embodying the fullness of sacramental grace and the gifts of the Holy Spirit with the sweetness of Christian virtue. Only the pope and the bishops could consecrate holy oils, an event which took place annually at the solemn Mass on Maundy Thursday from at least as early as the fifth century. One oil was without the addition of balsam. This was used for anointing the sick, for extreme unction and for other uses by the faithful. The other was chrism, used at baptism and confirmation. Both forms of oil are integral to the history of the Coronation, for although initially kings were to be anointed with chrism, gradually that right was withheld as the Schoolmen were to argue that chrism was a purely ecclesiastical institution whose use should be confined to the ordination of bishops and priests and not for royal unction.

One final fact. Although oil was native to the Mediterranean cultures, to the Northern barbarian tribes it was a luxury item, rare, costly and exotic. Within this context it is hardly surprising that oil became viewed as a potent substance capable of solving every difficuty. When the pope bestowed unction on the first Carolingian King Pepin in 751 it was done not only in the context of Old Testament exemplars, but also in the light of people’s knowledge of and confidence in the efficacy of holy oil in relation both to the sacraments and to bodily healing.

That a rite of anointing kings with holy oil emerged between the seventh and eighth centuries came directly out of the Christianisation of the barbarian kingdoms.⁶ With the final dissolution of the Roman Empire in the West in 476 there evolved in its place the imperium christianum presided over by the pope. That spiritual empire was to assume a temporal dimension thanks to the Donation of Constantine, a forgery datable to 752–7, a document which purported to declare Pope Sylvester I (314–5) and his successors rulers not only of Italy but of all the provinces which had once made up the Roman Empire in the West. This, in effect, cast the popes into the role of king-makers, one which they were able to exercise through the introduction of the rite of unction as barbarian kings converted and sought divine sanction for their kingship. As pagans they had claimed descent from the gods. Now they were endowed with a new kind of divinity as ‘the Lord’s anointed’ (I Samuel 26:11), a phrase which was rendered in the Vulgate version of the Bible as Christus Domini, employing the Greek word ‘christos’ meaning anointed, which, in the Middle Ages, was seen as the origin of the name of Christ.

The bestowal of unction was the prerogative of the Church which, although through its role it established a ruler as being sacred and set apart from ordinary mortals, simultaneously demonstrated that that could only be done thanks to their access to supernatural forces. In this way regnum was to be subject to sacerdotium in the medieval scheme of things. It was the pope and bishops who controlled and compiled the anointing rituals or ordines, filling them with prayers framing a vision of monarchy as they conceived it. That is vividly caught in the anointing prayer composed by Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims (c.806–82), Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, for the Coronation of Louis the Stammerer in 877, one which was to be incorporated into virtually every Coronation ordo thereafter: ‘Almighty eternal God … we ask thee to attend to the prayers of our humility and to establish this thy servant in the high rulership of the kingdom, and anoint him with the oil of the grace of thy Holy Spirit wherewith thou hast anointed those priests, kings, prophets, and martyrs who through faith conquered kingdoms, worked justice, and obtained thy promises.’⁷

In this Holy Church invoked the descent of the Holy Spirit on to the candidate for kingship, making him a new man, transmitting through anointing the divine grace by which alone he would be able to fulfil his royal ministerium as defender of the Church. In this manner kingship became an office within the Church without bestowing on it any priestly status, or at least not at the outset. Only as the rite of Coronation developed and spread would the theocratic priestly view of kingship threaten to shatter this relationship of Church and State.

All of this could be grafted with ease on to any secular ceremony of installation which already existed within the pagan tradition. So the earliest ordines progress without difficulty from unction to the handing over to the King of royal insignia, initially jointly by both principes and pontifices, but soon after by the latter only. These could include items which may well have been part of any pre-Christian installation ceremony, ones like a sceptre or a long rod or baculus. One certain link with the pagan past was the placing of a galea or helmet on the King’s head, which was only replaced by a crown in the tenth century. But the falling into place of all these elements into a common pattern was a gradual process involving several areas of Western Europe: Visigothic Spain, early Capetian France, Anglo-Saxon England and Celtic Ireland. It is to a consideration as to how these various strands eventually came together that we must now turn.

THE ADVENT OF CORONATIONS

One of the earliest references to royal unction comes in a life of the Celtic saint, Columba, written by Abbot Adoman of Iona (679–704).⁸ The monastery of Iona was the great centre of Celtic Christianity, a major seat of learning with daughter houses in Scotland and the north of England, so its influence spread wide. In his life of the saint the abbot recounts the story of Columba’s anointing of Aidan mac Gabrain as King of Dalriada in the late sixth century:

Concerning an angel of the Lord, who appeared in a vision to Saint Columba, then living in the island of Hinba; and who was sent to bid him ordain Aidan as king.

At one time, while the memorable man was living in the island of Hinba, he saw one night, in a trance of the mind, an angel of the Lord, who had been sent to him, and who had in his hand a glass book of the ordination of kings. And when the venerable man had received it from the hand of the angel, by the angel’s command he began to read it. But when he refused to ordain Aidan as king, according to what was commanded him in the book, because he loved Iogenan, Aidan’s brother, more, the angel suddenly stretched out his hand and struck the holy man with a scourge, the livid scar from which remained on his side all the days of his life. And the angel added these words, saying: ‘Know surely that I am sent to you by God, with the book of glass, in order that, according to what you have read in it, you shall ordain Aidan to the kingship. But if you refuse to obey this command, I shall strike you again.’

So when this angel of the Lord had appeared on three successive nights with the same book of glass in his hand, and had charged him with the same commands of the Lord, for the ordaining of the same king, the holy man submitted to the word of the Lord. He sailed over to the island of Io, and there, as he had been bidden, he ordained as King Aidan, who arrived about that time. And among the words of the ordination he prophesied future things of Aidan’s sons, and grandsons, and great-grandsons. And laying his hand upon Aidan’s head he ordained and blessed him.⁹

Scholarly debate concludes that such an anointing never actually took place, but, on the other hand, the text can be taken as sure evidence of a strong desire by the abbots of Iona that they should consecrate the Dalriada kings. And in order to achieve that St Columba was cast in retrospect as the reincarnation of the Old Testament prophet Samuel. The text would also indicate that by the close of the seventh century such a book with a rite for unction actually existed. As a whole the episode worked, too, from an important premise: the assertion that the Church had a key role to play in king-making.

Within the Celtic world the next appearance of royal unction is in the Collectio Canonum Hibernensis (c. 690–725), in which there is a chapter headed ‘De ordinatione regis’ with a text which implies that anointing was part of the action. The world of seventh-and eighth-century Ireland was a turbulent one with up to one hundred and fifty kings at any one time and no automatic right of succession. The introduction of unction fulfilled the twofold purpose of increasing the influence of the Church and, at the same time, stabilising disputes over succession.

Much the same motives prompted its introduction in Visigothic Spain in 672. In this case it was the further legitimisation of an elected ruler, Wamba, who received unction in the royal city of Toledo as a sign that his kingdom had been bestowed by God. But by far the most important anointing was that of Pepin, the first Carolingian king of West Francia, in 751. Pepin brought to an end the rule of the Merovingian kings, seeking sanction for his action from the pope. This was a step in terms of power politics both in the interests of the new dynasty and of the papacy during precisely the years when the Donation of Constantine was forged. Unction under the aegis of the pope not only enhanced the mystique of the new dynasty but, by implication, cast the Franks as Israel reborn, the chosen people of God.¹⁰

As a consequence the second half of the eighth century saw an ever-escalating interplay between the papacy and the Carolingians. In the winter of 753 Pope Stephen II (752–7) crossed the Alps to reanoint Pepin and anoint his two sons. Charlemagne’s sons were anointed in Rome in 781 and 800. In the former year Pope Adrian I (772–95) made two of Charlemagne’s sons, Carloman King of Italy and Louis King of Aquitaine. But more important than any of these was what took place in Rome on Christmas Day 800 when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor by placing a crown on his head. With that act arrived the second central symbolic action of any Coronation, the bestowal of a crown.¹¹

Arguments about that Coronation and what it signified continue, but no one demurs from the fact that by crowning Charlemagne the pope was introducing a rite which was associated with the Byzantine emperors. It was also one, like anointing, with a firm biblical basis. In the Second Book of Samuel an Amalekite brings David the crown and bracelet of Saul: ‘and I took the crown that was upon his head, and the bracelet that was on his arm, and have brought them hither unto my lord’ (II Samuel 1:10). Even more graphic is the account of the crowning of Joash by the chief priest: ‘And he brought forth the king’s son, and put the crown upon him, and gave him the testimony; and they made him king, and anointed him; and they clapped their hands, and said, God save the King’ (II Kings 11: 12).

Crowns had no role in barbarian installation ceremonies which could involve instead, as did the Anglo-Saxon ritual, the placing of a galea or helmet on the elected ruler’s head. In the Eastern Empire, however, the crown had been adopted as early as the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century as a symbol of his regality and vice-regency of Christ on earth. The first Byzantine emperor to be crowned by a patriarch was Leo I in 457 and the first to be crowned in a church was Phocas (602–10), but only from the second half of the seventh century did all this come to rest in the great church of Hagia Sophia.¹² In 800, therefore, the pope did what had become the norm for the patriarch, crown an emperor, only this time one of the West. The people present all acclaimed Charlemagne as ‘Augustus, crowned by God, Emperor of the Romans’. Thereafter crowns, in the case of the Holy Roman Emperors as often as not donated by the popes themselves, ousted helmets as Kings in the West opted for the style a Deo coronatus. In 816 yet another pope crossed the Alps, this time to crown Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, emperor in a ceremony which, for the very first time, brought together unction and crowning within a single ritual.

All of this represented the redefinition in the West of kingship as an office, one whose remit was defined by the Christian Church and its clergy. It was they who composed the rituals which turned king-making into a liturgical rite in which the central act was anointing, preceded by an agreement of conditions formulated in an oath and followed by investiture with regalia and enthronement. That this development gained momentum was due to two factors. One was that primogeniture was unknown at that date. The most suitable candidate for ruler was chosen from within a royal family by a process of election by the principes. This secular side of king-making did not suddenly vanish with the advent of Coronation rites. Each Coronation was always prefaced by certain rituals which took place in secular space, generally in the palace. It usually involved election and an enthronement. We know little about such happenings because, unlike the Coronation in church, there was no tradition of compiling an ordo. The second reason why clerics came to play such a key role was that it was precisely during this period that they began to occupy a major part in the running of any state. In England, for instance, from as early as the reign of Athelstan (924–39) the king’s council had at its core a group of bishops who were in constant attendance on the king and were crucial players in both the legislative and administrative process.

It was inevitable that sooner or later these new king-making ceremonies would call for being codified in written form. Special ordines first emerge during the eighth century in West Francia, the result of two personalities, Charles the Bald (823–77), King of West Francia and subsequently Holy Roman Emperor, and Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims (845–82), his principal councillor. The latter is generally acknowledged as being responsible for the compilation of the four earliest ordines, including those for the 13-year-old Judith on her marriage to Æthelwulf, King of Wessex, in 856 and for Charles’s son Louis the Stammerer as King of Lotharingia in 869. These Frankish ordines were to be heavily drawn upon by those who compiled the ones for the Anglo-Saxon kings.

ANGLO-SAXON CORONATIONS

The Anglo-Saxons were made up of a mixture of tribes who came from an area of the Continent stretching from between the mouths of the rivers Rhine and Elbe. They began first to attack England from the third century on and then, by the middle of the fifth, decided to settle. By the close of the following century they had carved the country up into a series of petty kingdoms, each with its own royal family. The Anglo-Saxons were pagan, but during the seventh century were Christianised in the aftermath of Pope Gregory the Great’s mission of 597 to Kent. A golden age of Christian civilisation followed, which was only disrupted by a fresh wave of invasions in the form of the Vikings. 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 bishops shall take the helmet and put it on the King’s head’ with a last invocation of blessings. After this ‘All the people shall say three times with the bishops and priests, May King N. live for ever. Amen. Amen. Amen. Then shall the whole people come to kiss the prince and be strengthened with a blessing.’

9 The Mass.

10 At the conclusion comes the promissio regis in the form of the tria praecepta: ‘that the Church of God and all Christian people preserve the peace at all times’, ‘that he forbid rapacity and all iniquities to all degrees’ and, lastly, ‘that in all judgements he enjoin equity and mercy …’

We have no idea when and for whom this ordo was used. The earliest reference to unction being administered is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle quite suddenly under the year 787 when it states that Ecgferth, the son of Offa, King of Mercia, was ‘consecrated king’.¹⁷ Presumably this was a means to ensure his succession to the throne. Then follows a complete silence until 4 September 925 when Athelstan was anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Athelstan, along with Edward the Elder and Edgar, was one of the three great tenth-century Anglo-Saxon kings. In 937, he would rout an alliance of the Danes and rebel subject princes at the battle of Brunanburh. The location for his Coronation was Kingston upon Thames and it was followed by a great feast:

With festive treat the court abounds; Foams the brisk wine, the hall resounds: The pages run, the servants haste, And food and verse regale the taste. The minstrels sing, the guests commend, While in praise to Christ contend. ¹⁸

Kingston first appears in 835 or 836 as a meeting place for Egbert and Coelnorth, Archbishop of Canterbury. Edward the Elder, son of Alfred, and likewise a warrior who laid low the Danes, was crowned there in 901. Athelstan’s brother, Edmund, was also crowned at Kingston in 940 and his brother, Eadred, in 946 and Edmund’s son, Eadwig, in 955 or 956.¹⁹ Once again we get an unexpected glimpse of what could be the reality of such an occasion. Eadwig is recorded as getting up during the Coronation feast and going to his chamber. Dunstan, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Bishop of Lichfield were sent to fetch him back. What they saw was the unedifying sight of the new King with two women, Athelgifu and her daughter, Elfgifu, to whom the King was uncanonically married, and the crown, ‘which shone with the various glitter of gold, silver and precious stones’, tossed on to the floor. Unsavoury though the episode was it provides the earliest evidence that we have that the Kings now wore crowns.²⁰