The Royal Maundy at Durham Cathedral

Yesterday the King and Queen went to Durham Cathedral for the Royal Maundy Service. His Majesty is continuing his mother’s custom of taking the ceremony to cathedrals across the country rather than just holding it in London or Windsor.

Unfortunately the service is rarely televised often televised beyond a short clip on the news about a Royal visit rather than as part of a living tradition of the monarchy. I recall watching on occasions when it was televised when the late Queen distributed the Maundy purses in Durham fifty years ago, and her visits to do so at Winchester in 1979 and St David’s in 1982. 

Now, with the development of a much wider range of media transmission, the Service yesterday can be seen in a shortened form on the Royal Family Channel at King Presents Maundy Money at Royal Maundy Service at Durham Cathedral

Royal Maundy

The BBC news website has an illustrated report about The Queen marking Maundy Thursday with the traditional service and distribution of the Maundy money at St George's Chapel in Winsdor Castle.  Commemorative coins were included in the other Maundy purse - the money given in lieu of provisions and the Queen's Gown redemption money - to 90 men and 90 women, each representing one of her 90 years.


The report can be viewed at  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35890750

Imperial Maundy

The tradition of the mandatum was not confined to English kings - it survived as a practice in the Austrian Empire and in Spain during the reign of King Alfonso XIII.

" In 1850, Franz Joseph participated for the first time as Emperor in the second of the traditional Habsburg expressions of dynastic piety: the Holy Thursday foot-washing ceremony, part of the four-day court observance of Easter. The master of the staff and the court prelates chose twelve poor elderly men, transported them to the Hofburg, and positioned them in the ceremonial hall on a raised dais. There, before an invited audience observing the scene from tribunes, the Emperor served the men a symbolic meal and Archdukes cleared the dishes. As a priest read aloud in Latin the words of the New Testament (John 3:15), “And he began to wash the feet of the disciples,” Franz Joseph knelt and, without rising from his knees, washed the feet of the twelve old men in imitation of Christ. Finally, the Emperor placed a bag of twenty silver coins around the necks of each before the men were led away and returned to their homes in imperial coaches."

The Emperor washing the feet of the poor on Holy Thursday

A lithograph of circa 1910

From Daniel L. Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Austria 1848-1916 (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2005), p. 29.

Image and text: nobility.org March 7, 2011

A 1907 newspeper report says that thirty silver coins were given, but I am not sure if that is accurate.

In 1904 the ceremony was attended by Consuelo Duchess of Marlborough (1877-1964) who described it in her memoirs The Glitter and the Gold, published in 1953 and recently reprinted. The Vanderbilt heiress displays in her autobiography both a thoroughgoing pleasure in the privileges of her rank and an American edginess about such privileges, both of which are apparent in her account of the occasion:

[Text to be added]

Royal Maundy in Oxford

It was pretty typical of my luck that the year that the Queen holds the Royal Maundy service in Christ Church cathedral here in Oxford and then pays another visit to Oriel, of which she is Visitor, and where Her Majesty had lunch with the Fellows in Hall, I had to be in London all day, so I will have to be dependent on newspaper and internet reports of today's events.

This was the first time the Maundy ceremony had been conducted in Oxford cathedral since 1643 when King Charles I was residing in the college during the Civil War.

The history and development of the service can be read online here. My post from 2011 about the ceremony can be read at The Royal Maundy.

 

The Queen distributes the Maundy money purses in the cathedral

Image: ITV/Press Association

 

 The Queen and Duke of Edinburgh outside Christ Church Cathedral after the service.

Image:ITV/Steve Parsons/PA Wire

There is a good selection of photographs of today's events in the report in the Daily Mail which can be seen here and there is a report with more local detail from the Oxford student newspaper Cherwell here. 

There is a video link with film of the service in the report from the Daily Telegraph which can be viewed here.

Following the service in Christ Church the monarch and her consort travelled to Oriel for lunch with the Provost and Fellows. Oriel is the oldest royal foundation in either of the ancient universities  and the Sovereign is Visitor. So the founder King Edward II's twenty times over great grandaughter came to her  college today. The Oriel website has not yet got photographs available of the visit other than a masthead, but here is a photograph of Her Majesty leaving the college after lunch and looking both happy and in good health:

Image:oxforddailyphoto.blogspot

The Royal Maundy

Not only is today is the 85th birthday of H.M. The Queen, but being Maundy Thursday, it is also the day on which the Royal Maundy ceremony takes place. This year it is being held again in Westminster Abbey.

The tradition of the Mandatum being performed by the English monarch goes back to at least the thirteenth century. From the late seventeenth century the pedelavium was discontinued, as was the presence of the Monarch until 1932 when King George V, following the suggestion of his cousin Princess Marie Louise resumed the practice of distributing the Maundy money, as has continiued to the present day. Maybe we can see that as a case of a reform of the reform, or partially recovering with hermeneutic of continuity from one of discontinuity. The same principle could be applied to the offering of gold, frankincense and myrrh on Epiphany in the Chapel Royal - the Monarch last did that in the time of King George II.

There is an article here about the ceremony, and the Queen's website has an account of the ceremony here. The Royal Mint, which produces the silver Maundy money, has an article on its website here.

The Royal Maundy of Queen Elizabeth I c.1560
A minature by Lievine Teerlink

In the medieval period it was not just the monarch who carried out the mandatum - we know from household accounts that other princes and magnates did so as well as the liturgical ceremony performed buy Popes and Bishops. As with the Royal Maundy this latter action was an event outside the liturgy of the Mass, a feature which survived until the changes of the 1950s.

Something which seems particular to English practice is washing the feet or distributing food and clothing to as many men and women as the Monarch has years of age. This seems to have beeen established at least by the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century.

Elsewhere in Europe the custom was for the monarch to wash the feet of twelve men, as with the Episcopal ceremony, and for twelve women to have their feet washed by the Consort.

In Spain this ceremony survived in this form in the reigns of King Alfonso XII and King Alfonso XIII. Here the custom was for the King to serve a meal to the recipients. I am not sure if the ceremony has been revived since the 1975 restoration.

In Austria the ceremony was also performed. Emperor Francis Joseph and the Empress Elizabeth used to perform the ceremony, each with twelve poor people in the great Ceremonial Hall of the Hofburg in Vienna on Maundy Thursday. I recently found an engraving of this in a book on the Empress, but cannot find the picture online.

As an exercise in Royal humility, indeed in Christ-like humility, it is inevitibly ritualised, but anyone who has seen in person or on television the Queen distributing the Maundy money can recognise an authentic spirit of compassion in her demeanor as well as the reminder in the liturgy of the monarch as being at the service of their subjects. That is present in all Maundy ceremonies.

Interesting, is n't it, that those elected political leaders who so loudly claim to be of the people do not perform such ceremonies as a reminder to themselves or those they rule of the need for humility in high office. When did you last hear of the Presidential Maundy?