Mind Your Language | 26 April 2003

A curious piece of information came the other day from my friend Patrick Williams, the chef and flute-player, accompanying a very English set of photographs of the people of Canterbury observing preparations for the Enthronement of Dr Rowan Williams as Archbishop. Mr Williams told me that he’d seen a programme dated 1862 for an ‘Enthronization’ in the cathedral.

Well, I thought, perhaps that was for the American market, although transatlantic tourists must have been rare then. The event must have been the enthronement of Archbishop Longley. The ceremony had been revived by his predecessor Archbishop Sumner in 1848. Before that the last archbishop enthroned in person was Wake in 1716.

I was staggered on looking up enthronization in the Oxford English Dictionary that, far from being a neologism, it had been in use since the beginning of the 16th century. The verb enthronize was used by John Gower in the Confessio Amantis, which circulated in manuscript (printing not having been invented) from 1393.