Allan Barton shows how the Coronation regalia evoke their medieval – and Catholic – predecessors
The United Kingdom is unique in Europe in still preserving a coronation to mark the beginning of a new reign. Extraordinarily, given the religious revolution of the Protestant Reformation, the English coronation rite (for it is an English ritual) is a medieval ceremony. It has been unchanged (except for the bowdlerisation of some of the texts and with some of the blessings of objects removed) since the reign of Richard II, when it was codified in a volume called the Liber Regalis, which is kept at Westminster Abbey.
