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III.—The Crowns of England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2011

M. R. Holmes
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Extract

At only one period in English history was it thought that the country had no further use for crowns, and that brief seventeenth-century heresy led to an act which has since been deplored for nearly three hundred years—the destruction of the Regalia. The significance of this destruction is worth emphasizing at the outset, as it meant a real break in the history of the development of the crowns themselves. A general popular belief is that, up to this time, all the sovereigns from William the Conqueror onwards had been crowned with the crown of St. Edward the Confessor, and all those after the Rebellion used the new St. Edward's Crown made at the Restoration. But the matter is hardly as simple as that. Not only do we find references to, and pictures of, various other crowns, but the coronation crown in some descriptions sounds very unlike a Saxon diadem, and we find, besides, that the present St. Edward's Crown has by no means been used at every coronation since it was made.

Type
Research Article
Information
Archaeologia , Volume 86 , 1937 , pp. 73 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1937

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References

page 74 note 1 Rolls Series, 83, p. 758. Cited by Norris, Costume and Fashion, ii, 122.

page 74 note 2 Vesp. B. vii, f. 100 b.

page 76 note 1 One other crown associated with Richard I is the little-known one said to have been given by him to the shrine of St. Agatha at Catania. This was probably a crown made locally for the image at the king's expense, not one of his personal ornaments.

page 76 note 2 See Dr. Rose Graham in Archaeological Journal, lxxxiii, 87.

page 76 note 3 The Romance of Treasure Trove, 110 sqq.

page 77 note 1 Pells Receipt Roll, no. 2 a, m. 1.

page 77 note 2 Archaeologia, iii, 384.

page 77 note 1 MS. 119, f. 285.

page 78 note 1 Walsingham's phrase is ‘manibus inquinatis’.

page 78 note 2 B.M. MS. Royal 2 B, vii.

page 79 note 1 B.M. MS.Harl. 1319.

page 81 note 1 Foedera, ix, 284.

page 82 note 1 Will of Henry VII, cited by G. Gilbert Scott, Gleanings from Westminster Abbey, 139.

page 82 note 2 MS. 129, f. 7.

page 84 note 1 MS. 108, ff. 1–19.

page 86 note 1 Strype's informant appears to have been the son of the old man who was assaulted by Colonel Blood in his raid upon the Jewel House.

page 89 note 1 The Publick Intelligencer, 14th June 1666.Google Scholar