THE hand that descends from heaven holds above the king’s head a golden circlet. Jewels stud the sturdy band, alternating egg- and lozenge-shaped knuckle dusters. To the monarch’s left and right, in this 9th-century illustration of the coronation of the Frankish ruler Charles the Bald from a manuscript in Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale, stand bishops. Their gaze does not dwell on the king himself. Instead, it is the crown that transfixes their attention. At this moment of royal transformation, the crown embodies Charles’s preeminence. Above it is a cross, which, like the crown, is golden, gleaming.
Nothing expresses earthly kingship more powerfully than a crown. As an emblem of royalty and divinely ordained authority, it was assumed in evocation of Old Testament references by Byzantine Emperors from the 4th century. Charlemagne’s coronation by the Pope in Rome on Christmas Day 800 effectively introduced it to the kingdoms of the former Western Roman Empire and English kings are regularly depicted wearing crowns from the 10th century.
In the late Middle Ages, these objects were important partly for their value and accrued in numbers within the Royal Treasury. The first page of the inventory of Richard II’s treasure drawn up in 1398–99, for example, lists 11 gold crowns, collectively valued at the stupendous sum of £50,237. One of
