HOW THE MIDDLE AGES GAVE US THE ROYAL JUBILEE

Elizabeth II has outlasted every British monarch in history by reaching her Platinum Jubilee. But the idea of the Jubilee has its origins in the times of the Queen's Plantagenet predecessors

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A fresco by Giotto shows Boniface VIII announcing the first Jubilee in 1300AD

When Queen Elizabeth II reached the 70th anniversary of her accession to the throne yesterday, the U.K. entered Platinum Jubilee mode. Elizabeth has had a lot of Jubilees already; I was not even born at the time of her first, her Silver Jubilee in 1977, after which the London Underground’s Jubilee Line was named. (It was originally going to be called the Fleet Line.)

As has become customary over the decades, there will be plenty happening this year to mark the jubilee, including colourful military parading, beacon-lighting, a public holiday weekend in the early summer and a pudding-baking competition. And there will be lots of reflection on the history of the Queen’s exceptionally long reign and her exquisitely dull approach to rule, which has been the secret to Her Majesty’s general popularity for seven decades.

But as we observe, absorb and enjoy all this, it’s also worth remembering that the idea of the Jubilee has an even longer history than the Queen, reaching back to the fourteenth century. Here’s how it began.

The first Jubilee was in Rome

The notion of a Jubilee is found in the Old Testament: the book of Leviticus commanded God’s people to ‘consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land’. But it was only in February 1300, during the papacy of Boniface VIII, that this injunction was translated into policy in the Christian west.

To mark the turn of the new century, Boniface invited pilgrims to confess their sins, travel to Rome and pray on fifteen days at the basilicas of St Peter and St Paul. Their reward would be full remission of sins: a get-into-heaven-free card which in previous generations had typically been offered to crusaders who risked their lives fighting Christ’s enemies in the Holy Land, the Baltic or Iberia.

Unsurprisingly, tens of thousands of pilgrims flocked to Rome to take up Boniface’s offer - which was as much a boon for the Roman economy and papal treasury as it was for the souls of the faithful. So subsequent Popes repeated the trick: in 1350, 1387, 1400, 1423 and 1450. This was not quite Boniface’s intention. He thought an annus jubileus should be reserved for the turning of a century. But by the late 1400s, Jubilees were generally held every twenty-five years.

Edward III had the first Royal Jubilee (kind of)

Edward III’s tomb effigy in Westminster Abbey (Getty Images)

In the thirteenth century, Henry III of England had gone past his fiftieth year as king in 1266 - eventually dying in 1272 after a reign of 56 years. He was the first English monarch to have lasted anywhere near so long; since the days of Alfred the Great only three kings had previously reigned longer than 30 years (Aethelred, Henry I and Henry II).

However, even if Henry had wished to hold a year of cheerful celebration, 1266 was not the time to do it. He was in the midst of mopping up a terrible civil war, which was only brought to an end the next year. For Henry, perhaps the biggest year of celebration and commemoration was 1269, when his dramatically rebuilt Westminster Abbey was consecrated around a new shrine to Edward the Confesssor.

The next king to reach 50 years on the throne was Edward III, who passed that mark in the last year of his life, 1377. This was hardly a fun time either - Edward’s health was failing, his court was corrupt and under sustained political attack and the glories of his youthful military conquests in France were a fading memory.

However, in retrospect 1377 did come to be seen as Edward’s Jubilee year. His tomb at Westminster (pictured above) was probably built about ten years after he died, during the reign of his grandson, Richard II. An inscription on the marble body of the tomb reads:

Here is the glory of the English, the paragon of past kings, the model of future kings, a merciful king, the peace of the peoples, Edward the third fulfilling the jubilee of his reign, the unconquered leopard, powerful in war like a Maccabee.

He had limped to his half-century, but had made it nonetheless.

‘The Grand National’ began the modern Jubilee tradition

George III’s Golden Jubilee in 1809

From the end of the fourteenth century until the early nineteenth no English or British monarch lasted longer than Elizabeth I’s 45 years. But in 1809 George III reached his fiftieth year as king, and a festival was held across Britain and the colonies.

Known as the Grand National Jubilee, this was marked with a prisoner amnesty, processions in London and an ox roast for the royal family in Windsor. Medals struck to commemorate the year noted that George had ‘govern’d and preserved an affectionate and loyal people’. (Americans may have thought otherwise.)

In a nineteenth century when there was often a conscious attempt to root royal ceremony in a (part-imagined) medieval past, the idea of the Jubilee went down well. So Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee with gusto in 1887. Her spectacular Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897 were a high-point in pageantry never matched since.

In our own time, Elizabeth II has had more jubilees than some medieval kings had hot banquets. This year is Platinum. Anyone already thinking ahead to her 80th year as Queen may want to note that this one will be known as the Oak Jubilee. After a certain age, things stop getting better.