Gone Medieval - Heralds & Heraldry

Episode Date: December 11, 2021

Heralds and Heraldry share many aspects of modern sport today, from colourful kits to large gatherings of cheering crowds. But what did it mean to have a coat of arms, and what role did Heralds have in Medieval society? In this episode, Matt is joined by Peter O'Donoghue. Peter currently serves as York Herald of Arms in Ordinary at the College of Arms and will be sharing his knowledge of the development and significance of this system.If you’re enjoying this podcast and looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hits. I'm Matt Lewis. Heralds and heraldry were a central part of the colour and pageantry of the medieval world. Banners and badges proclaimed allegiance, much like a football shirt might do today. But how did this system develop and what did it mean to have a coat of arms and to show those colours and images? I'm delighted to be joined today by Peter O'Donoghue, who is York Herald.

Peter works at the College of Arms and is something of an expert on heralds and heraldry being a herald himself. So thank you very much for joining us today, Peter. Oh, you're very welcome. So in order to work out what we should talk about first, I might have to ask a chicken and egg question here. So which comes first? Heralds or heraldry? I think heralds come first because heraldry is basically a description of what, what heralds get up to. So heralds come first and we're talking about sometime in the 12th 13th century.

So incredibly long time ago, the heralds came along. This basically comes out of the world of the tournament. So heralds were officials who helped to organise tournaments and tournaments were the great outdoor sport, the great elite activity of the age. I always likened them to powerboat racing. So it was incredibly expensive. You had to be really rich to take part. It was the elite sport. It was incredibly dangerous. People died all the time.

You had to have special protective equipment personally made to fit you. And it was incredibly international. Like powerboat racing, people travelled from tournament to tournament. They travelled around Europe. They were part of an international sort of fraternity of jousting enthusiasts. And these guys were the elite. hyper-macho, super-rich, these were the elite of Europe. And heralds were the people who helped to organise those tournaments.

So they started off being a bit like minstrels, a bit like musicians. They were announcers at tournaments. And then they came to be the public relations people. They would promote them. They would tell people that they were happening. As the tournament went on, they would keep scores. They would record deeds of nobility and prowess, military success. and they had to know who was who, of course.

They had to be able to identify the participants. And that is where their expertise in heraldry and coats of arms comes along. So they needed to be able to recognise who was who at the tournament. And was it after their impact and appearance in the tournament circuit that they became involved in full medieval battles? Yes, so the heralds begin in the tournament, the world of the tournament.

I mean, actually, you've got this incredible nexus of heralds, heraldry and tournaments all growing up, seemingly coming from a same sort of area, northern France, low countries, kind of liminal territory, sort of outside of any king's very effective control, which is always a good face to innovate. And it looks as though heraldry, the use of coats of arms, the use of identifying symbols on shields and banners, it looks as though that evolves in the middle third of the 12th century in that part of northern France. Heralds come around the same time, same place. So around that same period, we start to see records of heralds, organizing tournaments,

participating in them. Not long after that, the herald's role broadened and expanded. Because, of course, one of the reasons for the prestige of the tournament was that it was like a small battle. It was connected to warfare. and if you had heralds at tournaments, then you would have heralds at real wars, also keeping an account of who did what,

because you might get a lot of credit for a noble deed at a tournament, but you could add a zero on the end for a noble deed on a real battlefield, where people were actively trying to kill you rather than accidentally killing you. So it was a much more prestigious thing, of course, to be noble on the real battlefield. Heralds were there to keep track of what was going on. but also they soon developed a unique role, which was that they could cross the lines. Their person was inviolate. It was really frowned upon to kill a herald, and they're still rather frowned upon today.

Thankfully. So the heralds could cross the lines. They could go from one side to another. They could help to negotiate. They could ease the sort of communicative wheels. And warfare in those days could be a comparatively civilised thing. A lot of it was sieges. if you turned up with your army outside a city,

then you would send in the heralds. The heralds would negotiate, okay, well, if you don't get relieved in six months, we'll have the city. If not, you know, fair enough, we'll be on our way. And in the meantime, you can all settle down to a bit of enjoyable jousting, and the nobody needs gets hurt, apart from, you know, 5,000 people who die of dysentery. In the meantime. So the heralds made warfare a more civilized pace, essentially.

So they could cross the lines, they could communicate, and they could travel. They were linguists. They could travel. They could carry messages. They've got this sort of diplomatic role. In the years, the centuries before we had the foreign office, Heralds were one of the groups of people who would carry messages and communicate between princes.

A bit like a medieval Switzerland, sort of neutral territory. Yes, a bit like a medieval Switzerland or Vatican. But essentially, they all worked for a king or a prince, so they would represent that person. I mean, one of the reasons why heralds always wear the coats of arms of their employers is because they are essentially representing that person. So they're taking on some of the personhood of the guy they work for. As you know, I'm York Herald.

And in medieval times, that would mean that I was a herald in the household of the Duke of York. So my name is York. People at work call me York or Mr. York. And so that's because I've sort of, in a way, I'm taking on some of the identity of the person I worked for if I had originally worked for the Duke of York. Obviously, now we all work for the Queen. but they don't call me queen.

I mean, it would just be confusing. So the heralds represented the person of their employer. They wore his coat of arms rather than their own. And it was for that reason that they could travel across the lines and communicate from one side to the other. And I imagine their background in the tournaments, as you say, it makes it all the more prestigious to get those deeds recorded on a real battlefield.

But also, would they have been useful to commanders of each army because they were so good at spotting who was who on a battlefield and who was where, they would have an understanding of, you know, the count of so-and-so is there and the Duke of so-and-so is there, and that army belongs to so-and-so. Would they have helped in that capacity or not? They might have done. I sort of imagine that might have been rather frowned upon. I think the heralds of both sides would sort of take a safe position out of harm's way

and, you know, swap anecdotes and, you know, have a cup of coffee whilst the fighting was going on. rather than being involved in strategic sort of decision-making, I think the idea was that they were a bit more removed from the action than that. They were definitely non-competence. And so where or how or when does heraldry really develop as an important feature of the medieval period? What was it used for? What were these images designed to do?

So heraldry comes along in the 12th century and it seems to be prompted by changes in military hardware. So for the first time you start, have knights wearing really quite elaborate helmets which cover large parts of their faces. Warfare is becoming a more complicated and highly organised thing. And of course, each of those knights is responsible for a company that they've recruited and they're paying. Those people need to know where their boss is. They need to be able to muster around him. They need to sort of be guided by him. And heraldry is a way of communicating

where your company should muster, what your rallying points are, and things like that on the battlefield. Actually, there's always been a need for those sorts of symbols. In military organisations have always called upon flags, standards, and the like. Certainly, since classical Roman times, we know that they had battle standards to rally around, and it was a good way of motivating people as well as organising the army. So heraldry was sort of one in that long succession of ways of organizing your company. The big difference is that it was an inherited system. So for the first time, coats of arms, for the first time are devices which pass from father to son.

And we know that because we've got records of somebody being given a coat of arms in a military context. And then we know that his grandson, two generations later, was using that same device. So that's when you start to see, oh, right, it's not just a military rallying point. It's not just a bit of decorative fun at a tournament. This is actually being passed from father to son. And now it's representing a lineage. It's communicating genealogical information as well as identity. So coats of arms primarily, they express identity.

They express who it is that's wearing them or bearing them or displaying them. but they also communicate other things. They communicate lineage and kinship. So you can look at a coat of arms and you can know whose family they are from, who their ancestors were. They also communicate membership of this elite noble caste. So only the people who were knights and noblemen, only people who could afford to participate in tournaments would use coats of arms.

You have to expand that slightly because there were always coats of arms used by, women as much as by men and by corporate bodies and clergymen in particular, everybody who exercised lordship, who was a landowner, who had power, they might well use a coat of arms from the earliest time. So it expresses identity, kinship and sort of lordship and elite status. So even beyond a person of a knight, if corporations and things like that and clergymen are using it, this is about displaying your status at the level of society that you want people to understand you sit at or that you are in some measure important enough to warrant a coat of arms? Yes, I think it's not only saying this is who I am, but it's also saying

this is the class I'm a part of, this is my rank, I'm a member of this elite. And remember, they had a conception of society which divided people into, you know, say, there are various different ways of doing it, but say into the workers, the prayers and the leaders. And, you know, obviously the knights. The people who fought, the people who were armed, they were the leaders. And if you had a coat of arms and you used it a coat of arms, it made it clear where you fell in that society.

So if somebody wanted to acquire a coat of arms in the medieval period, how would they go about that? What status would they need in order to make that kind of application? And did that evolve and change over time? There was no formal system. It was an unregulated system. It was self-regulated, if you like. It was probably regulated by people's understanding of society and rank and structure.

To begin with, only kings and noblemen and knights would have coats of arms. And we should be clear that kings and nobleman class themselves as knights. And this is to do with chivalry. This is to do with being part of that great international ethos of the knight, which had a huge cultural power. at the time. There were great works of art and literature being created around that idea of chivalry. So kings and noblemen would regard themselves as being part of that knightly class. And it was those people who used coats of arms. In the 14th century, you have a change. During that period,

you've got knights fighting dismounted increasingly and fighting alongside men at arms who are not knights. So they are sort of self-funding, so they're still rich, but they're not knights. And you might call them esquires. There's a degree of parity creeping in there. So during the course of the 14th century, coats of arms start to be used by those esquires as well as by knights and nobleman. So it spreads effectively down the social circle. Of course, it's got huge elite status and power for those people.

They want to be regarded as part of that noble world, as that elite. world. So they're very keen to adopt Coats of Arms as being one of the central trappings of elite culture. During the 15th century, it spreads yet further down the social scale to what we would call gentlemen. And they are effectively the lowest rank of the noble, the lowest rank of those who don't have to work, who have an income from their land, I suppose. But it also includes people who do work, lawyers, senior clerics, merchants who are making lots of money from international trade. All of those people now start to use coats of arms as well. So you can see how it spreads down the social scale, if you like, and disseminates itself wider and wider

as people want to be associated with the ranks above them. They want to, you know, people want to say, I'm part of that noble culture. This is, you can treat me with the respect that you would treat a knight or nobleman. it's immensely advantageous to establish yourself in those ranks. And Coats of Arms were rather a useful way to those people of saying, this is who I am. I've made it, I've made lots of money, I've invested it perhaps in an estate, I'm now a gentleman and you can treat me as such,

and I can have my coat of arms, and I'll be accepted by other gentry families. Coats of Arms are a sort of marker of that arrival. So from the lower ranks, it sounds like it was a good way of positioning yourself as upwardly mobile to associate yourself with those further up. I guess I'm quite surprised that the elite were willing to allow it to filter down, that they didn't want to keep it as something that really meant something that only they could access.

Do you think they were willing for it to spread down, or do you think that was something they might have resisted? It's one of those things where people always like to put up the ladder, don't they? But once they've ascended. But one thing I think we do have to remember is that the people that higher up in the elite were never there for long. They were always coming and going. So families would rise, enjoy a period of success, and then fall.

Either they would die out, and often they did die out, or there would be a catastrophe, a series of catastrophes, a few sons dying, a few unfortunate marriages. Some bad decisions. A few bad decisions, you know, a bit of a bad luck on a campaign or something like that. So there was never this fixed tier of, of people at the top that was there for generation after generation after generation. They were always on the way up or the way down.

And so, yes, they might have been some feeling of, well, maybe it's not okay for gentlemen to be aping their betters. But in practice, of course, those gentlemen were on the rise, and they may have been richer than the people above them, some of them. So people feel hostile towards rich, part of the new families, don't they? There's not a new trope in elite culture. but of course those people feeling that host-earthy themselves were probably parvenu a couple of generations before. So there's always a churn, there's always a flux.

And I suppose from the point of view of particularly I guess the king right at the top of that pyramid, the top of that ladder, there's a benefit in allowing that avenue for replenishment of numbers so that as people are dying out or losing favour or falling from grace, there will be other people to fill in behind them. So he's always got a decent amount of people below him that he can. rely on for military support. Yeah, I think that's right, especially in the time when you relied on knightly and noble families, as you say, for military support. It was incredibly important that there was a full complement of those people. And not everybody, not all of the people in those ranks wanted to fulfil the role. Some of them probably didn't want the expense, trouble and risk of getting

involved in conflict. So you probably couldn't rely on all of them being much good. So yes, you always needed to replenish the ranks. And there would always be new. people coming through who had done well and wanted to establish themselves. The exercise of lordship is a key part of how they fashion themselves as chivalric nobleman and knights. And lordship is partly to do with power, the exercise of power, but it's also partly to do with service. And if you are seen as fulfilling service towards your king in your state or the people above you in the feudal order, then that's you demonstrating your chivalric sort of qualities as well. And so if I was a gentleman who was starting to do quite well for himself in the middle ages,

and I was thinking I'd like to get myself a coat of arms to associate myself with this other group of elite figures, how would I go about perhaps choosing what devices appear on those coat of arms? So there's quite a range of things that can go on a coat of arms. Some of them seem to have quite technical names that I completely struggle with. But how would I go about thinking what will appear on their... to represent me? We don't really know fully how medieval coats of arms were arrived at or selected or what the design process can have been because there was no bureaucracy involved, there was no authority,

they sort of emerge. We think that most noblemen and knights must have had a good knowledge and understanding of heraldry. It must have been part of their sort of cultural heritage that they understood these things. and perhaps they had advisors and perhaps having a herald in your household was useful because they would say, well, you can't have this because it's already been used by such and such.

But we don't fully know how the designs were arrived at. What we do know is that there was a shared culture sufficient that people knew what the repertoire was. They knew the extent to which it could be expanded by adopting new devices. that hadn't been used before, new objects, new creatures. And they knew what was heraldry and what wasn't, even though there were no strict formal written rules necessarily.

So it's one of those cultural things, which is quite vague, but at the same time it's quite strict at the same time. You wonder how they knew. And I think all you could say is it's a bit like language. It's not written down, but you know when it's being used correctly, or incorrectly. You know, the subtleties of grammar and word order never formulated, but people know nonetheless when what you're saying is idiomatic or clumsy.

And I think it must be the same with medieval heraldry. They just knew when it was good heraldry and when it wasn't really heraldry. It was something else. But there was no bureaucracy and no formal person or record keeper to advise them. What we do have are the records which were created incidentally along the way. And Heralds and others were quite keen on creating enormous vast lists and compilations of the coats of arms that they thought were in circulation. Or that represented all those people with a certain characteristic, all those people who attended a certain campaign or were present on a certain day. They did that sort of thing very enthusiastically.

And I suppose if you were developing a new coat of arms, you would want to have access to some of those lists at least as a way of seeing what. has been done before. The other thing is we know that people did make mistakes and there were conflicts and there were situations where more than one family used the same coat of arms. And that could cause all kinds of problems. You could use the same coat of arms as another family

for a couple of hundred years and there'd be no problem provided they were at one end of the country and you were at the other. But then of course if you bumped into each other on campaign in France, it might cause rather awkward scene because you might think, well, I've been using this coat of arms. This is my ancestral.

This represents my lineage, my kin. This is deeply personal and profound meaning to me. It communicates all the honour that my family is accumulated over, you know, centuries of military service. And the other person might think exactly the same about their coat of arms. And so you do get these conflicts. In the situations where the conflicts arose, there was recourse to a legal forum, which was a court convened by the constable and marshal who were basically the heads of the English army

when on overseas service. And they would hear the case and want to see evidence supplied by witnesses who's been using this coat of arms for longer, which family has the most honour and service and prowess associated with it. And then they would usually rule in favour of the richer and more powerful family,

which is not wholly surprising. So there were ways of settling those sorts of disputes, and it's interesting that the disputes did arise. Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast, not just the Tudors, we talk about everything, from sex to spying, wardrobes to witch trials. Not, in other words, just the Tudors,

but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I suppose we've lost the knack that the medieval people had for reading imagery in the same. way because we read words more now than they possibly did in those times, we've lost the knack of reading in an image exactly what they would have seen in an instant like us reading, you know, a small page of writing. We'd very quickly understand what that meant. They would probably be able to look at these images and think, well, I know what that means, I know what that means, without really

having to think too much about it. And we've probably just lost that knack, I guess, where they would have been keen to get all of the right messages into that image. Yes. I mean, one thing to bear in mind, is that heraldic design from the medieval period, in the main it doesn't have any symbolic meaning. It's not the case that a stripe of one colour or one direction has a meaning. Most coats of arms have no symbolic meaning, and there is no fixed system of symbolic meaning in heraldry. So we can't say that a lion always means X or an eagle always means Y.

We do think that in medieval times, lions and eagles were impressive, frightening and intimidating creatures, and that made them very popular in coats of arms. And they are almost the only animals you find in medieval heraldry. And I think it's because they express values that people thought were martial and were impressive and intimidating. And so they were popular choices. But beyond that, there's very little symbolic meaning that we can uncover in medieval heraldry. What's key about the coats of arms is that they're different from each other and that they're strongly associated with one person or one family. And what I always think is that in today's visual media world,

yes, you're right, we can read writing. But more importantly, we could recognize faces. And I think we can recognize the faces of several hundred or more famous people. People of power and influence in our world, politicians, pop stars, celebrities, actors. These are people with power and influence and wealth in our world, and we recognize them by their faces. medieval Britons had no way of knowing what anybody looked like. The idea of you being able to recognise the king or your local knight by the facial features just wouldn't have occurred to them. And in fact, they didn't really think that what people looked like physically was particularly

important. But they would have been able to recognise a large number of coats of arms. And in fact, it was a vital life skill for the medieval person of whatever rank from the lowest to the highest. you needed to be able to recognise the devices of the king, the lords, nobleman, the people with power and influence in your community. And so we think that much as we would recognise hundreds of faces, everybody in medieval England would probably recognise hundreds of coats of arms, if not more, so that they could navigate their world effectively. And I wonder whether on the battlefield as well, just taking the heraldry back to the battlefield for a second, there's an element of it being slightly defensive. that it proclaims I am this person, and obviously I'm wealthy enough, so I'm worthy of being

taken hostage, so don't kill me. You know, you want to announce your status and position and associated wealth and everything else, because in an age where the commoners were tended to be killed on the battlefield, but no woman were normally taken hostage and ransomed, it was a kind of a way of saying, I'm worth not killing. Does that make sense? Yes, I mean, I think there's an element of truth in that. I think that might be slightly reductive. I don't think that they would have characterised it in those terms at the time. I think people died a horrible, horrible grizzly ways the entire time. I don't think they would have thought dying on the battlefield was such an awful way to go. And they would probably have expected it

anyway if you were a professional soldier. It was sort of inevitable that it would happen at some point. But you're right, they definitely used codes of arms to communicate their special rank and status on the battlefield. And again, it is the case that that special rank of status meant that that they were less likely to be killed and more likely to be captured and ransomed. You know, whether you can put the cause or links together in different ways. But I think you're right, that is part of the effect of the heraldry, is that they were more likely to capture. But of course, they could be identified as being noblemen worthy of ransom by a lot of other weeds

besides the fact they had a coat of arms. I mean, they were wearing completely different armour and protective clothing from everybody else. So if they didn't merge into the background, it wasn't like everybody was wearing khaki. you would easily be able to identify a knight on the battlefield regardless of their heraldry. And you work at the College of Arms now, which is where all the kind of heralds are based. How does the College of Arms come about? How do the heralds become organised into a sort of formal community like that?

So in the medieval times, as we've said, there was no real regulation. Families, individuals adopted coats of arms when they attained a certain status, richness, power influence, they adopted their own coats of arms. There was no centralised regulation, but in the 15th century, that starts to change. At around the time of Agincourt, you've got Henry V, saying, you can't use Coats of Arms on campaigns with me unless they've been properly granted or they were born on the Agincourt campaign. So you start to get this idea of there being, coats of arms needing to be granted by a proper authority. And he also says to the Herald, in the household, because there have been heralds working for the king for centuries by then, he says to the

heralds in the household, you need to meet regularly together and act in a more corporate way and establish rules and bring this heraldry under some kind of control. This comes out of the development of the nation state. You've got the development of bureaucracy. I mean, this is the state expanding its reach over whole areas of life, and expanding its reach over coats of arms is just part of that process. So for the first time, you've got the heralds in the household being given. given authority to grant new coats of arms to people and to maintain records of coats of arms. And given the responsibility, you know, you should know the coats of arms in your areas. You should keep records of them.

You should meet regularly and settle heraldic matters together as a corporate entity. So the 15th century, that process grows and grows. And the kings of arms who are the senior heralds are making grants of new coats of arms to people that they regard as being of sufficient merit. and that means that they can sort of be categorized as coming in one of the social categories that have coats of arms. By the end of the 15th century,

the process has sort of continued and the heralds are acting more and more as a corporate body and it culminates in their grant of a charter in 1484 by Richard III. And Richard the 3rd, who was very interested in heraldry and chivalry and had a sort of personal fascination with it, he basically granted the heralds in the household a charter to incorporate them.

And that was so that they could own property. Because he said, if you can own property, you can act in a much more effective corporate manner. You can have somewhere to keep your records. The whole regulatory framework that we're trying to run here will be more efficient. And so that's why the heralds were granted their charter in 1484, which is when the College of Arms was founded. Unfortunately, of course, as we know, Richard III didn't have a long and successful reign. The very next year, he met a bit of a sticky end at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. and the first thing that Henry the 7th did when he came to the throne

was to revoke the grants that Richard III had made. It was a popular trope to characterize your predecessor as being profligate with Crown Resources. And it was an easy win for Henry the 7th to say Richard III was granting away Crown resources in a far too generous a fashion. And so he revoked the grant to the College of Arms and the College of Arms had no property

until it was granted the site where it presently stands in 1555. So we've been on that site since 1555. And what does the college do today, if we think about the 21st century College of Arms? What does it do in the day-to-day world today? So the core activity of the College of Arms is granting new coats of arms. The Kings of Arms, who are the senior heralds at the College of Arms, they're appointed by the Crown and given the specific power to grant new coats of arms. And that's what they've been doing since the 15th century, by letters pattern,

under their own seals as officers of the Crown. They grant new coats of arms to people. And that's the only way that a new coat of arms can be created. So that's the key activity of the college. We also record pedigrees of families. Anyone can record a family pedigree at the college, and they've been doing that for centuries. We pride ourselves on our genealogical records.

So if you record a pedigree at the College of Arms, every fact and relationship has to be proven with contemporary documentary evidences. And that makes our records very reliable and very accurate. They're as accurate as they can be. We maintain records of all manner of other things, so we handle all kinds of other things. Royal licenses for changes of name,

Royal licenses for transfers of coats of arms. We do a lot of flags and national symbols work, so we're the only body with responsibility for registering flags. So we retain a register of flags. We do a lot of advice, of course. We advise the Crown, the palace government and local government and all kinds of other bodies and individuals on heraldic, genealogical and flag-related matters. And, yeah, it's very varied, actually. One of the great things about working at the College of Arms is the diversity of things we get involved in.

That's one of the reasons I love working there is that you do so many different things. The other great thing about it is the opportunity to work in our archive. As an institution founded in 1484 and obsessed with record keeping and collecting ever since that day, we've generated a great archive of materials, about 7,000 or 8,000 manuscript volumes, and a similar number of unbound manuscript rolls and pedigrees and other kinds of documents. And a lot of my job is working in those archives, researching coats of arms, answering questions. somebody might say, do I have a coat of arms?

Or another might say, I've got a coat of arms on this object. Can you tell me who it belongs to? People write in with all kinds of fascinating questions of one kind or another. We do quite a lot of work with peerage and baronetcy cases. So my senior colleague, Arta King of Arms, adjudicates on whether successions to peerages and baronetsies have been established. So we do a lot of work with those things. And yeah, it's very varied.

But the archival work is at the centre. of it, I suppose, or the centre of a lot of it. And that's the great joy, of course, as with all historical work. Absolutely. Is that archive quite well cataloged? Is it something that any of it's available, or is that very much just for the use of the College of Arms? It's for the use of the college, but we have a student's room for visiting scholars. So we always have academic scholars working in the students room, pursuing all kinds of exciting and esoteric subjects of their own. And, you know, we've had some wonderful things come out of our archives. But yeah, it's a private archives, so we're not open to the public in that sense. We just don't have the resources

to staff a search room and make it available to the public. Because so much of it is genealogical, if it were open to the public, it would be very, very busy, as you can imagine, because genealogy is such a huge topic. And one, we are all involved in and have a degree of expertise in as well. But to say, yeah, that would not be practical. But yeah, we're open to scholars, but for other types of inquiries, we do the research work on people's behalf. So if somebody comes to me with a genealogical or heraldic question, then I will do the research because I've got experience of using this very specialist archive and very precious and fragile and vulnerable collection, which we can't expose to the dangers and risks of allowing too much use. So it has to be

controlled. As for digitisation, that is something we are looking to, and it's a long-term project. But as you will probably know, it's incredibly expensive. And the College of Arms is not a publicly funded body. So we are funded entirely by our own resources and by the fees we charge for grants of new coats of arms. So we don't have the resources of most public record offices or county record offices. And I'd imagine to digitise the quantity of material that you've accumulated over 600 odd years would just be restrictive as well. If there's that much relating to everybody's genealogy that's contacted the College of Arms over hundreds and hundreds of years, that must be a huge amount of material. There's a lot of material and it's very irregular. If digitising a book where

every page is the same size and shape and it's all been written in a very uniform way is quite straightforward, but where it's a massive unbound material, very fragile and delicate, all different shapes and sizes, that is very slow, painstaking and skillful work, which takes a very, very long time and costs an unbelievable amount of money. So it's not something we're able to just sort of lightly embark upon. Is there a good reference guide that you might recommend for anybody who is interested in medieval coats of arms, is perhaps looking at some medieval families in their coats of arms and trying to get to grips with some of the terminology that relates to genealogy and coats of arms?

There's lots of odd words that are used around heraldry and things. Is there a good guide to be able to get to grips with that? Heraldry has a sort of feeling of it being deeply arcane and difficult because there is a jargon associated with it. But actually, you can get over that in the course of an afternoon's reading. A couple of standard textbooks as a book called Boutelle's Heraldry, which came out of the 19th century and has subsequently been republished and updated. And there's another book called The Guide to Heraldry by somebody called Fox Davis,

again republished in the 1960s or 70s. And they are sort of vast, but they have a lot of information in them. You don't need to read the whole things, all of them cover to cover, and you'll see a lot of this stuff is online as well. But actually, just don't be put off by the use of the jargon, because the jargon, you know, the weird terminology, which comes from sort of Anglo-French. The language of nobleman from the sort of 13th, 14th century was French, and so Heraldry has kept some of that. Grammatically, it's English, but in the vocabulary is quite a lot of it is French. But you shouldn't be put off by that because actually you can get to grips with those words in an afternoon very, very easily. And it's not as difficult as it at first appears.

But there are books. But Boutel's Heraldry is the standard one. But there's plenty of others. There's an Oxford Guide to Heraldry, which is very good, widely available by Woodcock. There's plenty of information online as well. So, yeah, there's lots of things you can find. It's a fascinating subject. And it's the brilliant way into lots of different areas of history as well.

I mean, one of the brilliant things about heraldry is by learning about coats of arms, you can be introduced to social history, to social change. You can use it as a way into art history and the history of aesthetics. Why did people have different designs at different times? And, of course, it's got 800 years to work with. So, you know, you can be getting into different time periods from quite recent to many centuries ago. And then, of course, there's the connection with genealogy. and heraldry, in a way, it illuminates genealogy because, of course, coats of arms are markers of lines of lineage.

In the male and the female line, they were passed down to celebrate ancestry. So the whole subject connects to genealogy very closely. And if you're interested in genealogy, then heraldry is like a sort of colourful illuminated manuscript that sort of accompanies genealogy. So it's a delight from that point of view as well. From that point of view, I'm reminded of the coat of arms of Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, the Kingmaker, who is someone I've looked at his coat of arms fairly recently. And it's such a hodgepodge of everybody that he considered important that he was ever related to going back centuries and centuries, even to people who he wasn't directly related to, but he wanted to associate himself with. And it was such a tapestry of images that I think speaks to how he viewed himself and his place in the world and how he wanted other people to understand that. as well. So it's quite an insight, I think, into how his mind was working when he had that coat of arms made for himself.

I think that's absolutely right. By the 15th century, you've got these schemes of quarterings, where, as you say, people are displaying the coats of arms of all the families that are descended from through different routes, all marshaled together on one shield. This is something quite different, I suppose, from early heraldry, where you want the design to be as simple as possible because it's going to be used in a military context. And the last thing you want, when somebody's galloping towards you, waving their sword, is for you to be trying to puzzle out lots of fiddly details. You need the thing to communicate identity quickly and efficiently at a distance. So by the 15th century, you're moving away from that very practical, simple function to a more genealogical, statement, a celebration of all your noble ancestors in different ways, and just a delight in colour and complexity, which is so different from early medieval heraldry, but as you say, it tells you about the psyches of the individuals, but it tells you about their aesthetic sense

as well, what they liked, what they celebrated artistically and aesthetically. So I think that's very interesting. By the time you get to the reign of Elizabeth I, their approach to Heraldic display was quite different. By then, they wanted. coats of arms to look ancient and medieval. And it's a measure of how far they'd moved away from that military world, that they now wanted their coats of arms to sort of pretend to it. The designs are deliberately anachronistic. By Elizabeth Thrain, they're sort of aspiring to look medieval

because, of course, chivalry by then was on its way out as a real thing, but they still had value, still had power to people. They still aspired to it. By the 18th century, you've got a completely different approach to Heraldine again. They thought that a coat of arms could encapsulate the person that it belonged to

by displaying the moment that they most fully became themselves. It's almost a Freudian or certainly a romantic conception of personality that the moment of greatest peril of greatest drama in their lives was the moment they most strongly became or expressed their true identity.

And so coats of arms at that time had little pictures of. them of battles and scenes and dramas of one kind or another because those were the key sort of psychological moments in the lives of those people i think it's absolutely fascinating later people thought that that was a horrendous sort of appalling thing to do to coats of arms and should never have been allowed so people's ideas about what makes a workable or realistic design have constantly changed and evolved over time and i guess we'll continue to do so that's right i mean We design coats of arms now, and grants of arms are made,

of designs that would never have been thought suitable 100 years ago, because modern coats of arms, of course, have been influenced by 20th century art and design very strongly. So modernism, pop art, all kinds of things like that, have strongly influenced modern coats of arms. Well, thank you so much for that, Peter. I think that's been a really interesting look into heralds and heraldry and how they emerged and how they influenced the medieval world. and how they continue to influence the world around us today and work within that world.

Join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode, and don't forget to subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. I would like to recommend an episode of Dan Snow's history hit entitled The Vikings Who Beat Columbus to America, in which our very own Kat Jarman joins Dan to examine the recent evidence that places Vikings in America by the end of the 11th century.

It really is a fascinating and groundbreaking bit of news. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.