Vintage City Of Bath Monarchy 1000 Plate – King Edgar 973 Coronation Millennium, Civic Arms, St Dunstan Crest, Aquae Sulis, Washbourne 1973

City of Bath runs across the top of this plate in black-letter script and Monarchy 1000 across the foot, with 973 on one side and 1973 on the other. The plate is English fine china, issued for the city's millennium season.

Bath keeps a coronation at the centre of its own arms. On Whit Sunday, 11 May 973, Edgar was consecrated king of the English in the abbey church there, in a service compiled by Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, from which later English and British coronations descend. Edgar had already reigned fourteen years by then, and historians still disagree about the delay; one suggestion is that he waited for his thirtieth year, the age at which a man could be ordained priest, since what took place at Bath was a consecration as much as a crowning. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which rarely recorded coronations, set this one down in verse. Afterwards he sailed to Chester, where the Welsh and Scottish kings are said to have rowed him on the Dee.

The arms in the middle carry that day forward. The crest is a pair of sleeved hands holding a crown aloft, copied from the figure of St Dunstan in the abbey's Edgar Window, so the heraldry had been commemorating that coronation long before this plate marked its thousandth year. Beneath it the shield shows the borough wall above wavy bars for the hot springs and the Avon, the sword of St Paul through it, while the lion and the bear stand on acorns for Bladud and carry the keys of St Peter. Aquae Sulis, on the ribbon, is the Roman name for the town.

The reverse is given entirely to a printed paragraph setting out the anniversary, which is rather less common; most civic souvenirs give a name and a date and leave the rest to be looked up. A thousand years of it are set out on the back of something small enough to hold in one hand.