Long-time readers may recall that in late 2024 I submitted some Freedom of Information requests to various state bodies concerning the award of certain British orders of chivalry. One of the questions I asked was how many people currently hold each grade of each order, if such statistics even existed. I was advised that the Central Chancery of the Order of Knighthood might hold such information, but cautioned that they were not subject to FOI requests.

The website of the Chancery was, for its first few years, ridiculously amateur in appearance. Thankfully sometime between May and September 2023 it underwent a revamp and now looks far more respectable. Between 15th February and 26th March last year the site finally got around to using the new Noad illustration of the royal arms instead of the old Sodacan one (although I’d rather not start talking about that topic again). It was only recently that I noticed (although in retrospect I see it was there for sometime) the presence of Annual Reports for both the Royal Victorian Order and the Order of St Michael & St George (sadly not the Bath or the British Empire though). These PDFs include recitations of the histories of the orders, a list of events related to them that had happened over the past year and a rundown of the order’s financial accounts, mostly relating to the upkeep of their respective chapels. Most importantly for my purposes, they also answer the question of membership totals by including an annual register: That for St Michael & St George says that as of 11th July 2025 there were 71 Knights & Dames Grand Cross, 224 Knights & Dames Commander and 935 Companions. The limits for those grades are, respectively, 125, 375 and 1750. That means the ranks are a long way from being saturated. The Royal Victorian Order does not have formal quotas on appointments at any grade, and its much glossier newsletters do not contain that information.

The seal of the Order of St Michael & St George, as seen on the cover of its annual reports.

In addition to this, the latest edition of The Dragon, the newsletter for St George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle where the Order of the Garter is headquartered, mentioned the Lent Lecture for 2026, and included a link to the Vimeo page. That got me wondering how many other heraldry lectures might have become available online since the last time I looked. Restricting the YouTube search results to the past twelve months got me a surprising bounty. I have put here a list of the videos I found:

• “Between Two Turks:” Racialization and the Heraldry of Esclabor Le Méconnu (Royal Heraldry Society of Canada, 3rd March)
• Scottish Heraldry: A (Surprisingly?) Egalitarian Tradition by Prof. Gillian Black (St Mungo Festival, 22nd January)
• Tolkien Tuesday: Heraldic Overtones (Prancing Pony Podcast, 6th January)
• Preble Lecture: Flags of Canada (North American Vexillological Association, 10th December)
• The Simchat Torah Flag: From Biblical Roots to Modern Israeli Icon with Prof. Shalom Sabar (Community Scholar Program, 16th October)
• Folklore in Heraldry with Samantha Cook (Augustan Society, 9th October)
• Stitching a Lineage: Embroidered Coats of Arms in Eighteenth-Century Boston (American Ancestors, 22nd August)
• Heraldic Collections from Medieval Times to the Digital Age by Ralf Hartemink (Genealogical Society of Ireland, 26th May)
• Aspects of Heraldry in Drogheda and its Vicinity (clahs Louth, 28th March)
• Webinar – Origin + Meaning of O’Molloy Coat of Arms and Crest (O’Molloy Clan, 21st March)

That’s probably not even a complete list, but it’s more than enough to keep me entertained for a while and I’m glad to see more activity in this field as just a few years ago the offerings were very sparse.