![]() ![]() ![]() Oldest of all, however, and most imbued with a sense of the sacred, was one ritual in particular: an anointing. Dunstan, the formidable archbishop who composed the order of service, had in turn drawn on even older exemplars: some native to Britain, others reaching back to Roman times. Key elements of the ceremony – that it should be presided over by the archbishop of Canterbury, that two bishops should escort the king, that the congregation at the end of the service should join in acclaiming the newly crowned monarch – date back to the coronation in 973 of Edgar, the great-grandson of Alfred the Great. The United Kingdom is alone in Europe in marking the accession of a new monarch with a coronation. ![]() Even they cannot rival the sheer antiquity of the ritual that will be staged in Westminster Abbey on Saturday. ![]()
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