Welcome to Rex Factor!

This week, the history of the Coronation!

With your host, Graham Due and Ali Hoon.

Hello! Hello!

And welcome to Rex Factor, where today we are stepping outside of the current series of the Queen's and Prince consoles.

And instead, kind of stepping back to our first series, where we reviewed all the Kings and Queens of England from now for the Great to Elizabeth II,

because in this one of special, in anticipation of the Coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla we are doing a special episode on the history of the Coronation,

which does pretty much take us through, out for the Great to, well, to Charles III.

We're not doing his coronation then.

We're not doing his coronation because his, at the time of recording, hasn't happened yet.

Okay, so it's not news.

It's not news. We're not looking ahead to the future. This is just a history of the Coronation, which is, say, is featured in most of the episodes that we've done,

but usually it's just a little small bit at the start of the reign, but now, good opportunity to look at it in its own right,

how it's changed over time, some of the amusing things that go wrong, and why we even have a coronation in the first place.

Good point.

So, let's head back to the past, and back to the beginning.

Anglo-Saxons.

I said we were going back to Alfred the Great, but actually we know very little about the coronations of most of the Saxon monarchs.

Indeed, we don't know if Alfred was even consecrated as King at all.

So we've got the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, gives an account of when he went to Rome that Pope Leo IV consecrated him in 853 as a child,

but it's either a vast exaggeration given that Alfred's father was King, also there, and Alfred had several older brothers,

so he probably wouldn't have consecrated him King at that point.

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