Edward II’s coronation roll goes on display alongside King Charles’s

The oldest surviving coronation roll – a 2ft hand-stitched official record of Edward II’s 1308 crowning at Westminster Abbey – is dwarfed by the 21-metre-long version produced for King Charles III two years ago.

Much has changed in 700 years. The former is tightly inscribed, on remarkably well-preserved parchment, recording details of the service, processions, promises, who attended and what ceremonial roles they performed.

The latter includes 11,500 copperplate words, is the first to use high-quality paper rather than animal skin, and took the calligrapher Stephanie von Werthern-Gill 56 days to inscribe.

Also digitised, it details, at Charles’s request, the flowers and the music, and is decorated with illustrations by the designer of the king’s cypher, Tim Noad. And, while not all guests are mentioned by name, as a record of what happened at Westminster Abbey on 6 May 2023, it could fairly be described as comprehensive and a work of art in itself.

Now the two rolls, part of a tradition dating back at least seven centuries, are on public display for the first time in an exhibition at the National Archives that also includes works of art commissioned by the government to mark the coronation.

“Both rolls contain some element of narration. In 1308, there’s not a lot of that, but in 2023 there is plenty, that’s why it is very long,” said Dr Sean Cunningham, the head of medieval records at the National Archives. “Edward’s is a more formal record.”

While Edward’s makes no mention of his queen, Isabella – though does mention Piers Gaveston, 1st Earl of Cornwall and alleged to be the king’s lover – Queen Camilla features in Charles’s, Cunningham said.

A finely detailed ink sketch by Manchester-based Leslie Thompson, produced in collaboration with Venture Arts. Photograph: Tony Harris/Government art collection, UK

Other, less formal and more interpretive records of King Charles’s coronation day can be found in the works commissioned from artists that are now part of the government art collection.

A monumental oil and acrylic entitled The Mall, by the London-based painter Dale Lewis, spotlights individuals he saw in the central London crowd, including a top-hat wearer, a street sweeper, and a woman with a duck-feathered hat. Its vibrant foreground colours fade to greys at the back. It was not just to reflect the abysmal weather on the king’s big day. “I was thinking about Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, and wanted to bring a bit of the past back. It was very heavy rain,” Lewis said.

Cornelia Parker plays on the Chambers dictionary definitions of the words “king” and “queen” in her finely embroidered diptych King and Queen (recto and verso) produced in collaboration with Fine Cell Work, a rehabilitation charity training prisoners in fine needlework.

The collage Flag by Hew Locke features an image of the gold state coach. Photograph: Tony Harris/Government art collection, UK

An image of the gold state coach was enlarged and fragmented to make Hew Locke’s collage on velvet entitled Flag, which he described as a ship that “sets off hopefully but into unknown waters”. On the ship are portraits of Caribbean cane cutters, a reminder that coronation year was also the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Windrush. “It’s layers of material, and layers of meaning,” he said.

Joy Gerrard employs a helicopter view of the crowds in the Mall in two large and finely detailed ink works, depicting the people surging towards Buckingham Palace as the police cordon was lifted for the balcony appearance of king and queen. She said being commissioned “opened up ideas of witnessing impartiality and celebration that I hadn’t considered before in my work”.

A finely detailed ink sketch by Manchester-based Leslie Thompson, produced in collaboration with Venture Arts working with learning disabled and neurodivergent artists, draws heavily on popular culture references in Crowd of People and the Different People. His Many of the TV Screens Everywhere series imagines London zoo animals, the Muppets, drinkers at a London pub and his own mum watching the coronation on TV.

Other works on show include photographic studies from different communities around the UK on coronation day.

Only 18 coronation rolls survive today, housed at the National Archives in Kew, including those for King William III and Queen Mary II, Victoria and Elizabeth II. “You could describe them as the ultimate public records,” said Cunningham.

• Details of the free exhibition, which runs until November 2025, can be found on the National Archives website.