Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. He has presented numerous BBC series, and is the author of several books including The Story of China (Simon & Schuster, 2021). His Twitter handle is @mayavision
“The coronation felt like a watershed in our relationship with the crown’’
SO THE CORONATION IS OVER, AND WE ENTER a new era for the monarchy and the nation. What struck me first was how religious the ceremony was – conducted by the archbishop of Canterbury and entirely framed in the language of the church. An Anglo-Saxon time traveller would have felt perfectly at home with the core of the service – though back then, of course, it was conducted in Latin, with the coupling of royal law with ‘the law of god’.