Royal coronation ordines occupy a peculiar place in the historiography of early English law, kingship, and ecclesiastical culture. As liturgical formulae, they offer instructions for religious speech and ritual action, codifying the particulars of a rite that would be employed sporadically – perhaps as rarely as once or twice in living memory. These texts are remarkable for their preservation of ritual dialogue and choreography, as well as their particularly ecclesiastical vision of Christian kingship and royal obligation. However, the ordines as written do not capture the full nuance of a royal coronation in practice. The distance between text and ritual is largely unknowable; we cannot reconstruct the full range of speech and action taken by the principals in or witnesses to the rite. The written ordines do not reveal whether their language could be modified or expanded upon; they do not specify whether portions of their liturgical Latin were rendered into Old English; and their logistical details are far from exhaustive. Although they provide an invaluable impression of how ecclesiastical authors envisioned the coronation rite, the written formulae are textual creations which delineate the priorities, ideologies, and aspira-tions of their creators.

In their status as textual artifacts, pre-Conquest coronation ordines are remarkably similar to early English law codes. Both genres articulate instructions and ideologies which were likely enacted to some extent, even if the degree of correlation between text and practice is now irrecoverable. Both represent acts of speech and consensus: royal decrees ostensibly preserve agreements among the kingdom's governing elites, while the ordines codify verbal expressions of ecclesiastical approval and public acclamation of a new king. Both seek to define and elevate the king's authority, in part by placing royal and ecclesiastical obligations in conversation. And both emerged in the ninth century as prominent genres of political literature: Alfred (r. 871–99) revived vernacular written law after a centuries-long hiatus, while the earliest extant English ordines are associated with the reign of his father Æthelwulf (r. 839–58) and step-mother Judith. New laws and revised ordines were disseminated across the tenth and eleventh centuries, and the fact that the liturgical rites and royal decrees were both penned – and, to various degrees, formulated – by elite clergymen affirms that the two genres emerged from the same political-literary sphere.

This is not to suggest that coronation rites and royal decrees were fully aligned in their content or objectives.