The figure is in two parts,and the head, older than the body, was easily detached. From this Janice Tindall removed a layer of recent blue oil paint presumably depicting woad. Under this was a series of repainted layers flesh coloured. I found red paint in the recesses of the robes. I extended these areas with a casein based paint so that it was clearly obvious from across the Kings Bath . The niche was conserved using the lime method and I made the new apex stone where the crutches of the healed.used to be hung. This I capped with the cast lead cover dated 1982. Janice Tindall repainted the lettered panel beneath the niche that reads
BLADUD SON OF LUDHUDIBRAS/EIGHTH KING OF THE BRITANS/FROM BRUTE, A GREAT PHILOSOPHER/ AND MATHEMATICIAN BRED AT/ATHENS AND RECORDED THE FIRST/DISCOVERER AND FOUNDER OF/THESE BATHS EIGHT HUNDRED/SIXTY THREE YEARS BEFORE/CHRIST. THAT IS TWO THOUSAND/FIVE HUNDRED SIXTY TWO YEARS/TO THE PRESENT YEAR 1699/
Bottom left: Drawing by Thomas Johnson shows the King’s Bath in 1675. Bladud’s niche supporting abandoned crutches seen on the left. Above. Excavation of the Queens Bath 1879 note the rear of Bladud’s niche and the
Coronation at Bath
Edgar the Peaceful sits aboard a barge manned by eight kings, as it moves up the River Dee.
Edgar was crowned at Bath and anointed with his wife Ælfthryth, setting a precedent for a coronation of a queen in England itself.[10] Edgar's coronation did not happen until 973, in an imperial ceremony planned not as the initiation, but as the culmination of his reign (a move that must have taken a great deal of preliminary diplomacy). This service, devised by Dunstan himself and celebrated with a poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, forms the basis of the present-day British coronation ceremony.
The symbolic coronation was an important step; other kings of Britain came and gave their allegiance to Edgar shortly afterwards at Chester. Six kings in Britain, including the King of Scots and the King of Strathclyde, pledged their faith that they would be the king's liege-men on sea and land. Later chroniclers made the kings into eight, all plying the oars of Edgar's state barge on the River Dee.[11] Such embellishments may not be factual, and what actually happened is unclear.[12]
