Magistra Nicolaa de Bracton
When Siegfried and Xristina became Prince and Princess of
Ealdormere, I was presented with an opportunity to put together a Rus'
coronation ceremony. I have been writing
ceremonies for about twenty years now, starting with my own Laurel elevation
ceremony. The majority have been Peerage
ceremonies, which present certain challenges, particularly a very limited (both
in time period and in culture) pool of period exemplars to adapt. Peerage
ceremonies often become a process of extrapolation based on other sources, such
as guild statutes, written documents detailing rights or procedures for groups
of people or individuals, literary descriptions, or descriptions of ceremonies
meant for groups of people (such as church liturgy or civic processionals), in
combination with SCA traditions.
The situation is different for coronations. We actually have information on quite a
number of extant period coronation liturgies for a number of cultures thanks to
R.W. Wooley's Coronation Rites, published
in 1915 as part of the Cambridge Handbooks of Liturgical Study. This series was concerned with the study of
Christian liturgy, and this brings forward the first issue for anyone seeking
to use and understand historical coronation ceremonies for SCA use: These were
profoundly Christian rites. Indeed,
kingship was widely considered an eighth Holy Order in the western Church, and
many of the rituals and meaning in these ceremonies are intimately connected to
the Christian foundations of medieval society.
This presents two dilemmas for the SCA ceremonialist: First, how to
alter the religious portions of the ceremony to keep some of the meaning but
without explicit reference to Christianity; but almost as important, how to
explain to those witnessing the underlying concepts which would have been
implicitly understood in medieval society.
In the case at hand, Siegfried and Xristina were
specifically looking for an appanage Rus' ceremony. Wooley's work contains descriptions of
Byzantine imperial ceremonies and later Russian ceremonies; there is a clear
line of descent from the former to the latter.
However, this would be the coronation not of a Tsar or an Emperor, but
of a Prince. We settled on basing the
approach on the institutions of Novgorod in the 13th century. Novgorod was generally recognized as the
second most important city in Kievan Rus' and was often ruled by the eldest son
of the Prince of Kiev. At the same time, day-to-day government was provided by
the veche (public assembly), who elected a posadnik (mayor), tysyatsky (head of
the militia) and even archbishops from the ranks of the boyars. By the twelfth century, the power of the
princes was starting to decline and the veche began to take a more pronounced
rule in inviting a Prince to rule the city and tightly dictating what he could
and could not do through a document called a ra'd. The Prince's role remained important, however, as a military
commander and the ultimate judicial and legal authority.[1]
