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THREE CORONATION ORDERS

EDITED BY

J. WICKHAM LEGG,

Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Society of Antiquaries of
London.

London.

1900.

[graphic]

II. Facsimile of the writing of MS. 20. Corpus Christi College, Car

III. Facsimile of one page of MS. 44. Corpus Christi College, Car Reduced to about two-thirds of the original in size.

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PREFACE.

WHEN the Henry Bradshaw Society was founded in 1890, it was thought that the coronation and consecration of our English sovereigns, an act so important, as Abbé Duchesne points out, from the civil, as well as from the religious, point of view, might well be illustrated by the new Society; and a series of the English Coronation Orders was spoken of. Beyond a haphazard assignation of services to individual sovereigns, very little seemed to have been done in the way of classification, or of investigation into the liturgical principles on which these services are constructed.2 An elementary division of these orders may be made something in the following manner.

First the English Coronation Orders may be divided into two classes, those in English and those in Latin, and these correspond with prae-Reformation and post-Reformation times. Then the Latin or prae-Reformation orders may be divided into four groups or recensions; the former or post-Reformation into three groups or recensions.

Of the four Latin recensions, the first is that in Egbert's Pontifical, which is already easily accessible; not only in the modern edition of the Pontifical itself, but in Martene, who has edited the order in his great collection. Further it is to be

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1 L. Duchesne, Origines du Culle chrétien, Paris, 1889. preface, p. vi.

2 Many of the editions of the later coronation services have been brought out by heralds; and by them, as indeed is only natural, more attention was paid to the ceremonial, than to the ritual, parts of the coronation.

3 I have given a comparative table of the four recensions on p. 1437. of the third fasciculus of the Westminster Missal, distributed to members of this Society in 1897. + Pontifical of Egbert Archbishop of York A.D. 732-766. Surtees Society, 1853. p. 100.

5 Edm. Martene, De antiquis ecclesiae ritibus, Lib. ii. Cap. x. Ordo i. (Antv. 1736, t. ii. col. 596.)

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