Every coronation of an English or British monarch since William the Conqueror in 1066 has been held at Westminster Abbey, an unbroken continuity of place that has no real parallel among the surviving monarchies of Europe and that the Abbey and the British state alike treat as central to the rite's claim to legitimacy across nine centuries of dynastic change, conquest and constitutional transformation. The service follows a structure whose core, recognition, oath, anointing, investiture and crowning, has remained recognisably stable since the medieval Liber Regalis codified the order in the fourteenth century, even as the surrounding pageantry, the specific music, and the constitutional meaning attached to each element have shifted with the times, most significantly with the Church of England's establishment after the Reformation, which reoriented the rite's religious authority from Rome to Canterbury without discarding its inherited medieval shape.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has for centuries been the officiant who performs the anointing and crowning, and the coronation chair, built in the early fourteenth century to hold the Stone of Scone brought south from Scotland, has been the physical seat of nearly every English and British coronation since, a piece of furniture whose continuous ceremonial use across more than seven hundred years is itself part of what the rite asserts about continuity.