Royal Inauguration and the Liturgical Calendar in England, France, and the Empire c. 1050–c. 1250

Summary

Rigord included a story in his Gesta Philippi Augusti concerning the postponement of the young prince’s consecration from 15 August to 1 November 1179. The mysterious tale of the illness Philip developed after becoming lost in the forest of Compiègne, and his father’s visit to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury to pray for his safe recovery, has understandably intrigued scholars. Less attention, however, has been paid to the importance of the dates, which are stressed by Rigord himself. Rigord twice mentions that the young king should have been consecrated on the feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, before invoking Mary as a protector of Philip as he wandered through the forest. He also twice mentions that Philip had been born on the feast of Saints Symphorian and Timotheus and remarks thrice that he was eventually consecrated on the feast of All Saints. That Rigord emphasizes the liturgical importance of these dates through repetition indicates that, while the story of Philip’s adventure and illness might well bear the imprint of chivalric romance, this was not at the expense of a sacral conception of kingship. By returning to medieval conventions of recording time and considering the evidence provided by royal inauguration and marriage in England, France, and the Empire in the high Middle Ages, this essay will demonstrate a hitherto overlooked aspect of royal image in this period. In doing so it will be shown that liturgical conceptions of kingship weathered the storm of Gregorian reform and continued to thrive in an age of burgeoning bureaucracy and with the advent of chivalry.

Diana Greenway has rightly commented that ‘it has been largely through the activity of historians that the passage of time has come to be measured in dates’. Indeed, historians are accustomed to reading medieval chronicles in editions in which the chronological information provided in the text is annotated by the date written in the margin or footnotes in the modern manner. Such information is obviously essential for placing events in the correct chronological order, but it also divorces modern readers from the relative chronology practised in this period, in which dates were recorded with reference to saints’ days, feasts of the church, regnal years, and years since the birth of Christ, amongst other things.