At Britain’s great occasions of state, dignitaries are vested with all manner of grand and gorgeous insignia. There are gold sticks and silver batons, embroidered tabards and ermine robes, gilt collars and garter stars, maces, banners, and coronets. Some, as befitting an old country, are tinged with eccentricity. There is the velvet purse, always carried before the Lord Chancellor, which purportedly contains the Great Seal of England, or the gold key on a blue rosette uncomfortably pinned to the posterior of the Lord Great Chamberlain, just above the right buttock.

Among these tinsel trappings of gilt and ermine, there is one member of the Royal Household who is accoutred far more simply. No gold wands, no rich velvet: the sign of his office is just a simple towel.

The position of Lord High Almoner is ancient, attested as early as 1103. The High Almoner was the king’s official, usually a senior cleric, responsible for the distribution of royal charity. At one time, the office was a considerable burden. The Almoner was responsible not just for the daily distribution of uneaten food from the king’s table to the poor clustered at the palace gates, but also collecting the forfeited goods from felons to sell for the assistance of those in poverty and other good causes. These picturesque but practical functions have long ago ceased, but the Lord High Almoner still exists – currently the Rt Rev Graham Usher, Bishop of Norwich – and he is to be seen in attendance on the King, at the annual Royal Maundy Service, wrapped in a long linen towel.

The Almoner is there to assist the monarch in distributing the Royal Maundy Money: the specially minted silver coins given to a number of aged people who have been of service to their community. This is a historic function. Kings or their representatives have distributed money as charity to the poor at services on or around Maundy Thursday for centuries. However, the towel is a vestige of an earlier ceremony belonging to the day which has long been discontinued: the monarch washing the feet of the poor.

The example was set by Christ himself. John’s Gospel recounts that at the Last Supper Christ ‘laid aside his garments, and took a towel, and girded himself’, before pouring water into a basin, washing his disciples’ feet, and drying them with the towel. It was a model of fellowship, humility, and service, that he wished them to follow. ‘If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.’ Christ’s ‘new commandment’, which followed this example, ‘That ye love one another as I have loved you’ gave the day its English name of ‘Maundy’ Thursday, from the Latin ‘mandatum’ (command).

It was an example followed by the early church as early as the third century, where the pedilavium (washing of feet) was performed by higher clergy for their juniors or the poor. Legends speak of the rite being carried out in the British isles as early as the sixth century by the Irish holy man St Brendan the Bold, and more certain testimony is given of it being a regular custom in the work of the Venerable Bede, who described the foot-washing of St Cuthbert in the seventh century. It was fatal for St Oswald, the Archbishop of York, who passed away while performing the ceremony in Worcester in 992, though whether through the infirmity of age or the strain of the ritual we are not informed.

From bishops, the custom spread to the kings. Edward II (r. 1307-27) is the first English monarch known to have performed the pedilavium. Edward III accompanied the ceremony with distributions of money, food and clothing. By Tudor times, it had become a highly elaborate occasion. Even after the Reformation, it was maintained by Elizabeth I, who treated it with great seriousness. Poor women, one for each year of her age, were brought into the court, where their feet were first washed by servants, then the sub-almoner and the High Almoner, before being presented to the queen herself. After singing, prayers and the reading of the relevant verses of John’s Gospel, the queen washed their feet in basins of warm water and sweet flowers several times over, following which she wiped them, made the sign of the cross above their toes, and kissed them. Queen Mary before her had done the same, kissing ‘the foot so fervently that it seemed as if she were embracing something very precious’ according to one Italian observer. Each woman was then offered gifts of broadcloth, shoes, salmon, ling, herrings, bread, purses of money, and the towels with which their feet had been wiped.

The tradition of the king himself washing the feet of the poor at the Maundy Service survived until the reign of James II, after which the king ceased to attend the service and the task was left to the Lord High Almoner. The custom of foot washing itself had petered out by 1736, and the ceremony was pared down, ending up solely as the distribution of money. The whole service might have been discontinued if it had not been for the revived interest of the Royal Family in the early 20th century, and in 1932 George V was the first king to distribute the money in person for over two centuries. Elizabeth II was particularly devoted to the occasion, and ordered that it be held in a different cathedral every year. She saw it not only as part of her Christian devotion, but also as a distinctive way of honouring individuals, where she came to visit them in their own cities, rather than, as on other occasions, where they came to her in the palace in London.

Even if the monarch no longer does so, the tradition of the clergy washing feet for Maundy Thursday in English churches has seen something of a resurgence in recent times. It is something I experienced in a cathedral a few years ago. I had not known that the liturgy would include the washing of feet, and when there was a call for a few members of the congregation to accept such a washing from the cathedral’s dean, there was a typically English display of embarrassed reticence. Although weighed down by this myself, I volunteered, hoping to encourage others by my lead. Certainly, the ritual is freighted with a sort of embarrassment. How was it, I wondered, that this grand and right reverend dignitary in fine robes was kneeling before me, in public and in the face of a large congregation, carefully washing and drying my revolting sweaty foot?

If anything, this shock and embarrassment is part of the ritual’s power. It communicates as vividly as anything the fundamental nature of Christ, and what is perpetually revolutionary and challenging about the Christian message. Christ, in the words of St Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, although originally ‘in the form of God’, abandoned that dignity and ‘made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross’. It is only with such an embrace of humility and a desire to serve others that power becomes validated. It is because Christ’s humbled himself unto death, that God ‘hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name’. Christ washing the feet of his disciples prefigures the giving of himself for others on the cross. Thinking on that self-giving and humility through the Maundy ritual is an endlessly fresh way to grasp and think upon the significance of the Crucifixion.

To have one’s feet washed by a person of great estate at first makes one contemplate one’s own unworthiness, but also it demands an equal response of service. It also is a challenge to the ideas of power. Christianity sees the highest power vested not in an unrestrained expression of will or vaunting grandeur. Instead, it is seen in a man broken and nailed to the cross, who, a little before, had humbled himself by washing the feet of his followers. The fact that Christianity is still an established part of the British state embeds that idea of humility and service in the heart of it. Even if the king no longer washes the feet of the poor, the fact that one of his royal officials still expresses his dignity not through fine robes or a chain of office, but rather by carrying a towel intended to dry the feet of others, speaks volumes for the Christian message and the way its influence has over many centuries moulded the state for the better.