Britain’s institutions are medieval, and rightly so
The customs, rituals and constitution we inherited from the Middle Ages have sustained us ever since
We all saw the return to Westminster this week of the Stone of Scone, the ancient seat on which Scottish, English and British monarchs have been crowned. But there is another such stone in this country and it goes even further back.
Just off the high street in Kingston upon Thames – there’s a clue in the name – you will find the Coronation Stone. This is said to be, and plausibly is, the seat on which a series of Anglo-saxon kings were crowned in the tenth and eleventh centuries in the predecessor of All Saints Church, Kingston.
For me, the relative anonymity of the Kingston stone epitomises the neglect of the Anglo-saxon kings in our own historical memory, as if English history only began in 1066. Yet the first monarch we know for sure was crowned in Kingston, in 925, was the first genuine king of a recognisable England and arguably of Britain – Athelstan. By chance, we know a bit about his coronation, because a version of the order of service survives. For the first time, the Te Deum was sung, and the king anointed with holy oil and, almost certainly, crowned with a crown rather than a war-helm: all will happen again in Westminster Abbey on Saturday.
The great historians Michael Wood and Tom Holland have both written powerfully about Athelstan, but it is thanks to Bernard Cornwell and his Last Kingdom book and television series that he has perhaps now crept above the event horizon of popular knowledge of English history. He deserves it.
When crowned, he called himself “King of the Anglo-saxons”, meaning Wessex and Mercia, south and central England. In the late 920s he conquered Viking Northumbria and Cornwall, imposing direct rule over the approximate area of modern England, and made the other kings of Britain his tributaries. In 937 they all revolted, only to be crushed at the Battle of Brunanburh, the site of which has perhaps been recently rediscovered at Bromborough in the Wirral, in a campaign that 50 years later the man in the street still called the “Great War”. It all fell apart for a time after his death, but the project lasted, and by the late tenth century England was a recognisable territorial unit and kingdom.
Why does this matter? It matters because it reminds us we don’t live in a young country, as Tony Blair once claimed, but in a very old one. When
Duke William conquered England, the English state had already existed for a century and was arguably the most coherent and best-administered territorial unit in Europe. Westminster Abbey itself was founded by the pre-conquest king Edward the Confessor – though little remains of his building – and after him is named the (much later) crown, St Edward’s Crown, with which Charles III will be crowned on Saturday.
It matters that we live in an old country because it means that our ceremonies are not simple flummery, as some claim, but have real symbolic meaning. Some sneeringly describe the Coronation as medieval. They mean it pejoratively, but actually it’s a simple fact. This medieval ceremony is not a distraction from reality, but rather an accurate picture of reality, the reality that the English, now British, state is itself still largely medieval in form.
The King, the Parliament of Lords and Bishops with the Commons, the royal prerogative now exercised by the executive, all this originated in the Middle Ages. We are almost alone as a country in not having dismantled our original constitution to replace it with something supposedly more rational. Instead, we largely kept it but shuffled the powers around to create a flexible system based on the King in Parliament, hence parliamentary sovereignty and, eventually, a democracy.
These developments were possible within our ancient constitution because of the prior understanding that even the monarch was subject to the law. As
Sir Edward Coke put it in the famous 1610 Proclamations case, “the King hath no prerogative but that which the law of the land allows him”. If anyone doubts these issues are still relevant, the Supreme Court quoted these very words in its 2019 judgment on Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament. And the pre-existing law referred to, that “common law of the land”, went back – both in legal myth and in the popular mind – to Anglo-saxon times, the era of Athelstan and St Edward.
This ancient system still works well. The same can’t be said of the recent bolt-ons to it: Edward Heath’s savaging of the pre-conquest shires, which I still hope might yet turn out to be only temporary; Tony Blair’s Supreme Court; the now defunct Fixed-term Parliament Act; and of course the unhappy experiment of EU membership. But the system itself continues to function.
That is why on Saturday, we are seeing a ceremony which, for sure, has evolved and developed, with new elements each time round, but which has done so without losing touch with the fundamentals and the deep past. It symbolises the way we are governed, gives substantive form to our abstract constitution and, I hope, helps us sustain and renew it. Vivat Rex Carolus!