Royal almsgiving in medieval England: A study in the ritual and administrative construction of kingship

This study argues that royal almsgiving was an important element in the construction of good kingship and that English kings developed almsgiving administration and rituals as a means of publicly enacting good kingship. The pittances bestowed in alms temporarily benefitted the indigent, but royal almsgiving was primarily a symbolic act of good kingship, a political performance for the benefit of the powerful whose support was crucial to kings.; Early medieval texts show that kings were more concerned with other aspects of ruling such as military leadership than the vision of good kingship promoted by churchmen. By the Anglo-Norman period, however, kings began to realize the political potential of good kingship and began to develop the administration and ritual of royal almsgiving.; The pipe, liberate, patent, and close rolls, as well as royal household accounts provide evidence of royal almsgiving practices. Twelfth-century almoners were chaplains and they transferred their skills, background, and outlook to almsgiving, gradually transforming casual spontaneous distributions of royal alms into a series of organized routines and orchestrated rituals. Henry II's almoner-accountants (many of them Templars) began to bring greater regularization and systematization to royal almsgiving.; Thirteenth-century kings developed almsgiving rituals, chief of which were the maundy (the reenactment of the pedilavium of Christ's Last Supper) and the touching for the king's evil. Both rituals were a means of affirming the social and political order as the king enacted his traditional role as protector of the poor in the maundy, and demonstrated his sacral nature in the touching for the king's evil. Henry III amplified previous almsgiving practices, arranging feasts for thousands of the poor, and including the queen and the royal children in almsgiving. Under Edward I, royal almsgiving attained the form it was to retain for centuries to come---a series of interrelated routines consisting of daily and weekly almsgiving activities (itinerant alms, daily and weekly alms in honor of saints, etc.) punctuated by staged rituals.