What makes a medieval king?

This is a brief enquiry that enables students to get to grips with the contested nature of medieval kingship and some of the contemporary debates about it. It examines four medieval kings, whose stories are used to build a template of what makes a medieval king - literally what does someone need in order to be king. The four things that make a medieval king are: power; inheritance; a coronation; and to be a man. At different times these varied in importance relative to one another. Students then have the chance to express this relationship between the four by arranging the four features into a causal diagram which they annotated. I used this enquiry as a prelude to an enquiry looking at the Wars of the Roses, and it gave students a strong grasp of the nature of the arguments that underpinned that conflict.