London | Britain’s church and monarchy will on Saturday perform a ritual dormant for seven decades, but for which they have almost a millennium of precedent. Yet King Charles, like his predecessors, can reinvent it almost as he wishes.

Nobody has needed to know the difference between a “chair of state” and a “chair of estate”, or to rustle around in the royal cutlery drawer for the silver anointing spoon, since Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in June 1953.