Where did the idea of taking an oath to show one’s loyalty originate?
In the common law tradition, in which Canadian law is rooted, the only oath people took at one time was an oath to tell the truth in court. But the oath which lies at the foundation of all modern oaths of allegiance is not an oath of us the people at all, it is the oath of the monarch himself, taken at his coronation, to govern his people well. This oath was in origin the Church’s attempt to ensure that the King would defend and advance the orthodox Catholic faith, guarantee the rights of the Church, and do justice to and preserve peace among his people, and can be traced back to the coronation of Anglo-Saxon kings. We have, for example, just such an oath sworn by Ethelred the Unready in 978. This practice continued throughout the Middle Ages and beyond the Reformation. In 1689, as a result of the supplanting of James II by William III and Mary II, a promise to maintain the Protestant religion established by law was added. And in 1937, as a result of the Kings accession in 1931 from being merely the King of the United Kingdom and its dependencies to being the King of several realms individually, George VI swore (as did his daughter, our present Sovereign, in 1953) to govern the peoples of all his realms, which were named individually, according to their respective laws and customs.