Category Archives: Virtual Meetings

The Use of Academic Dress in Heraldry

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This was a virtual lecture put on by The Heraldry Society. It was presented by Duncan Sutherland, with an introduction by David Phillips, the latter being actually present this time. Sutherland said that he was connecting from Albania. When he started researching heraldry he came across academic dress a few times and managed to record about twenty examples.

Academic gowns in corporate arms usually reference the founder of the organisation. Academic robes date to the middle ages when most if not all students were there to train for the holy orders. The medieval university tunic was the forerunner of both the academic robe and the clerical cassock. Hoods were included because at the time they were common across all classes. When they fell out of general usage they were supplanted with skullcaps, which then evolved into a wide variety of specialised hats.

British academic styles reflected the influences of the Reformation, Republican and Restoration periods.

Sutherland then went through his examples, both personal and corporate. I have looked up free-licence images and the textual blazons wherever I can.

The Earls of Aberdeen

Dexter an Earl  and sinister a Doctor of Laws both habited in their robes Proper.

The earliest known grant of supporters to include academic robes was to the 1st Earl in 1683, with both dressed as doctors. The 4th Earl swapped them for the Hamilton antelopes. The 7th Earl was granted the present supporters. He was later elevated to Marquess but the dexter supporter was not changed to match.

William Thompson, 1st Baron Kelvin (g.1892)

On the dexter side a student of the University of Glasgow habited holding in his dexter hand a marine voltmeter all Proper. On the sinister side a sailor habited holding in the dexter hand a coil the rope passing through the sinister, and suspended therefrom a sinker of a sounding machine also all Proper.

Kelvin was the first British scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords. He served as Professor of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow for fifty-three years and was an important contributor to the Transatlantic Telegraph Project. His supporters were granted by the College of Arms in 1892 but the arms themselves had been granted by the Lyon Court.

Leonard Courtney, 1st Baron Courtney of Penwith (g.1906)

On either side a doctor of civil law of the University of Cambridge, vested in his robes, the dexter holding in his right hand an open book, the sinister in the right hand a pen, in the left hand a scroll all Proper.

Courtney was Second Wrangler at St John’s College, Cambridge.

Alfred Mond, 1st Baron Melchett (g.1928)

Dexter a Doctor of Science of the University of Oxford holding in the exterior hand a chemical measure glass sinister a labourer holding in the exterior hand a pick resting on the shoulder all Proper.

Melchett’s arms were granted in 1910 and revised in 1928. He studied at St John’s College, Cambridge and later was Chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries.

Sir Alfred Keogh

Keogh was Director-General of the Army Medical Services. His supporters were a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse and a doctor in gown.

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes (g.1944)

Keynes was a scholar at both Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge. (CA Ms Grants 107/253)

Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell (g.1944)

Dexter a soldier of the Black Watch in field service uniform supporting with his exterior hand a rifle sinister a Scholar of Winchester College in his gown holding in his exterior hand a closed book all Proper.

Wavell was himself a scholar of Winchester College. He had his first army commission in the Black Watch in 1901. He was Colonel of the Regiment from 1946 to 1950.

He had protracted correspondence with Garter over the correct illustration of the academic dress. They are displayed at Winchester Cathedral.

Alfred Webb-Johnson, 1st Baron Webb-Johnson (g.1948)

I cannot find a blazon for them, but Sutherland said they were displayed in the King’s Chapel of the Savoy as well as the Fitzrovia Chapel.

Jack Simon, Baron Simon of Glaisdale (g.1977)

Dexter a man habited in the robes of a Doctor of Civil Law in the University of Cambridge Proper and holding in his dexter hand a book Or sinister a man habited in the robes of the President of the Probate Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court Proper. (Debrett’s 2003, P1476)

Simon was President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division from 1962 to 1971. He studied at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, before his call to the bar.

Stewart Sutherland, Baron Sutherland of Houndwood (g.2004)

Dexter a male figure in the attire of the Vice-Chancellor of Edinburgh University sinister a male figure in the attire of an honorary graduate of Aberdeen University and wearing the hat appropriate to an honorary doctor of the University of Uppsala.

Sutherland was himself Vice-Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh. He also had a Master of Arts degree from Aberdeen and an honorary doctorate from Uppsala, both in theology.

Jocelyne Roy-Vienneau (g.2015)

In this case the academic references are in the crest rather than the supporters.

Two blue jays each holding in its beak a sprig of balsam fir and standing on a bed of daylilies and purple violets Proper.

The Public Register explains the symbolism: The mortar and diploma symbolize Ms. Roy Vienneau’s career in post-secondary education, particularly as assistant deputy minister with New Brunswick’s Department of Education and as dean, department head, professor, manager and director general of the community college in Bathurst. They also symbolize her husband’s career as a teacher in public schools.

Worshipful Company of Framwork Knitters (g. 1933)

On the dexter side a student of the University of Cambridge in academical costume of the seventeenth century Proper and on the sinister side a female figure also in seventeenth century costume habited Azure cuffs cap neckerchief and apron Argent holding in the dexter hand a knitting needle Proper and in the sinister hand a piece of worsted knit Gules.

Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers (g.1956)

On the dexter side a figure representing Michael Faraday habited in a festal gown of a Doctor of Civil Law of the University of Oxford and holding in the exterior hand a representation of his coil Proper and on the sinister side a figure representing Sir Isaac Newton habited in a gown of a Master of Arts of the University of Cambridge and holding in the exterior hand his telescope also Proper.

Royal College of Anaesthetists (g.1991)

The supporters are representations of John Snow and Joseph Thomas Clover.

Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (g.1999)

Blazon missing.

University of Ballarat (g.1997)

I can’t find the blazon for this one.

New College, University of Edinburgh (g.2021)

Two human figures representing diversity one dressed in the academic gown and hood of a Master of Divinity and one dressed in the academic gown and hood of a Master of Arts (Religious Studies) both from the University of Edinburgh all Proper.

Liverpool John Mores University (g.1989)

Dexter a peregrine falcon and sinister a raven each statant on a doctoral hat upon a compartment comprising a grassy mount all Proper.

Worshipful Company of Educators (g.2014)

On the dexter a dragon wings elevated and addorsed Argent holding in the dexter foreclaws an abacus Azure the beads Gules and on the sinister a barn owl wings elevated and addorsed proper the wings charged with an escallop Azure charged with two swords in saltire proper hilts and pommels Or and holding in the beak by the tail a mouse Sable each statant upon a book Or bound Gules.

University College of Cape Breton (g.1995)

Here again the reference is in the crest.

Rising from a wreath of mayflowers Proper a Canterbury cap Gules.

A Place In the Country:- The Castle as Holiday Home

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Today’s virtual presentation as at the Cleveland & Teeside Local History Society. The speaker was Erik Matthews.

The main purpose of the lecture was to present an alternative perspective on the fundamental nature and purpose of medieval castles. While they are popularly believed to be first and foremost military strongholds, with luxury and decoration being a later development, research since the 1980s has found that even in their Medieval heyday a lot of these buildings were primarily status symbols and luxury homes with actual defensive capability being a distant afterthought.

Matthews’s main case study was Whorlton Castle in North Yorkshire. Whorlton was developed in three stages, the first beginning shortly after the Norman Conquest. The town of Whorlton developed at the foot of the castle in the thirteenth century, but decline in the seventeenth due to the growth of nearby Stokesley, which had better access to the Tees.

With few exceptions, Whorlton was not generally employed as a defensive building, and Matthews identified several features which gave this away, most notably the gatehouse with its wooden portcullis which would not have stopped an army, or the false gun ports through which a proper sight would have been impossible. He also noticed other features of the estate’s former grandeur, such as the elaborate water gardens supplied by an artificial leat and dam, or the compartmented gardens where high-status guests could socialise. There were also signs of earthwork boundaries which would have been dug to divide the estate into smaller burghages. He highlighted an outer enclosure, which could have been the site of the town’s fair.

He spoke more briefly about other locations, such as Sigston Castle, set in the kind of watery landscape which was often crafted to create optical illusions which would make the estate look bigger than it really was. He also said that the moat around a castle was not necessarily to keep out human invaders but rather to deter pest animals and form a liminal space which marked the boundaries between places of different social status. Also included was Harewood Castle, constructed in 1340 by Sir William Aldeburgh, then split in abeyance between his daughters with a timeshare arrangement, then Barnard Castle, then Dunstaburgh, then finally Pendragon Castle in Mallerstang, which he noted was surrounded by hills from which an attacking army could claim the advantage of high ground.

I was reminded of the BBC Radio 4 series “Short History Of…”, whose episode on British Castles also made the point that most of them were mainly used as comfortable residences for the wealthy and thus the conversion of so many of them into hotels in the modern age should be no surprise.

Paull Holme Tower, my own family’s castle (or at least part thereof) has yet to reach a habitable state, but hotel conversion is one of the options regularly suggested as an endpoint for its restoration.

Art Deco – Building Style of the 1920s and ’30s

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Rachael Unsworth in profile

For my first virtual lecture of 2025 I joined Leeds City Walking Tours, though obviously on this occasion I walked very little.

The presentation was by author and geographer Dr Rachael Unsworth, and it focused on the Art Deco architectural style of the interbellum period.

Art Deco was dubbed some some as the most glamorous style of the 20th century. It stood in stark contrast to the misery and gloom of the First World War. It had its antecendents in both the Beaux Arts and Bauhaus movements – the latter, Unsworth notes, has proven extremely influential on other artistic and architectural movements ever since despite not being very long-lived in its own right.

The Art Deco movement is traditionally traced back to the 1925 Paris Exposition, though the actual term “Art Deco” is a retronym not properly established until the 1960s. It overlapped with Modernism and was notable for sticking to some of the established rules of the preceding Classical period (especially regarding the overall shape of a building) while radically changing its ideas about materials and ornamentation. The decorative flourishes of this fashion focused on bold geometric shapes and the Greek Key symbol (of which Unsworth pointed out a few examples). It also saw the widespread adoption of Portland Stone, steel frames, reinforced concrete, “Crittal windows”, chrome fittings, vitrolite and fluorescent lights.

Dr Unsworth listed some of the “architectural lynchpins” of Art Deco – Charles Reilly, Robert Atkinson, Thomas S. Tait, Howard Morley Robinson – then some rapid-fire examples of the Art Deco buildings themselves. As you would expect from the name of her organisation, these were mostly focused on Leeds.

Particular attention was given to the university, where she brought up the anecdote of the Parkinson Building which was faced with Portland Stone at the front but ordinary brick at the lesser-seen back, because the latter was 4% cheaper. There were also some examples closer to (my) home, such as the Dorothy Perkins building in central Hull.

Unsworth closed out by noting the paradox of Art Deco – it was used as a component of national identity in some countries but stood for internationalism in others. It also stood for peace and democracy at the same time as standing for the power of dictatorships. The League of Nations headquarters in Geneva had the same aesthetics as the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

She had hinted at the start of the lecture that this topic had particular salience at the moment. I had no idea what she meant.

FURTHER READING

Art Deco style is popular again, a century after its heyday – Associated Press

A Proliferation of Signs: Badges in the Medieval World

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It has been a while since I attended any virtual events by the Royal Heraldry Society of Canada. Today’s was rather different in style to the ones I remember during the COVID years.

The speaker was Ann Marie Rasmussen, Professor and Diefenbaker Memorial Chair in German Literary Studies at the University of Waterloo. Her lecture was divided into three parts.

Badges are small devices found mainly in north west Europe. They were easy and cheap to make, usually from pewter in moulds carved from stone. We have an example of a surviving stone mould in Mont-Saint-Michel showing the image of St Michael slaying the dragon. Pewter can show fine details well, but it has the weakness of tarnishing easily. Currently there are more than twenty-thousand medieval badges surviving in museums, and during the middle ages there were probably more than a million in existence. Badges were designed to be decoded. Pilgrim badges were one type, made and sold at holy sites showing religious imagery (e.g. one from Canterbury shows Thomas Becket, one from the Vatican shows crossed keys with a tiara). There survives an anonymous painting of Christ himself among the pilgrims, all of them wearing badges.

Almost all retainers and employees would have a badge to show the identity of the lord, household or organisation for which they worked. There are even examples of badges made of children’s toys. A 1432 portrait of the poet Oswald von Wolkenstein shows him wearing a badge of a dragon and griffin.

The separation of the spiritual and temporal realms is a modern idea. The types of badges often crossed over. Not all imagery was reverential – there are some humourous ones designed to resemble unsightly body parts, and there are records from medieval times of people complaining about indecent badges being worn and distributed around festival times.

EXTERNAL LINKS

UPDATE (June 13th)

The Society has uploaded the lecture to its YouTube channel, so I am spared from writing out a long description of its contents.

Honour in the Eyes of Others

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The Oxford University Heraldry Society’s May lecture was given by Vicky Fletcher. It was a study of pseudo-heraldic shield motifs in historic church graffiti and medieval personal seals. She began by confessing that she was not a heraldic expert, and so “heraldic” was here used in a broader than usual sense.

The idea of chivalric knighthood was significant in the late middle ages. Heraldry was a free-for-all until Richard III gave a charter to the College of Arms in 1484. Large amounts of land became available during the reign of Edward III due to, among other factors, population disruption from plague and famine. Labourers could demand higher wages and much arable land was converted to pastoral. New landowners used heraldry to bolster their social status. This was the age of the burgeoning “middling sort”.

Her in-depth study was of All Saints Church in Worlington, Suffolk. The parish church was the centre of medieval life, although the new rich were also prone to establishing private chapels. All Saints Church would be one of the first buildings encountered by people who arrived from the river. Fletcher had looked in depth at the many motifs carved into the church’s walls but decided to confine herself to those which were shield-shaped. There were an estimated 390 inscriptions were found in the church, of which around 10% were heraldic in nature.

Heraldic graffiti was mainly clustered around four of six piers in the south arcade. Motifs do not cut across each other and defacement is rare, though a lot of it would have been whitewashed during the Reformation and then clumsily scraped off by the Victorians. The most common motifs were the bend, the chevron and the quarter (which in Fletcher’s terms included crosses and saltires).

There are many prominent examples of the arms of Jerusalem, probably used by returning pilgrims. Peasant rebels in Richard II’s time used the arms of St George. Heraldic symbols were widely used by merchants. There were also “personal seals” used by individuals in a private capacity. Peasants who rose in status might want to disguise their low ancestry to escape the notice of their former masters (and thus avoid having to pay tax to them).

A link to the full paper can be found here.

New World Heraldry with Bruce Patterson

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The Oxford University Heraldry Society often plays host to reasonably esteemed academics in their field, but incumbent officers of arms themselves are a rare treat. This evening our guest speaker was Bruce Patterson, Saint-Laurent Herald of Arms in Ordinary and Deputy Chief Herald of Canada. He gave us an overview of the history of Canadian heraldry from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.

Canada began as a colony within New France, and thus naturally used the French royal arms. In the 1760s sovereignty was taken over by the Kingdom of Great Britain and exercised by the Hudson Bay Company. In 1826 the Canada Company was created to recruit Brits to emigrate to the under-developed parts of the colony. Both of these corporations had grants of arms.

Grants of arms to Canadian citizens were mostly the responsibility of the College of Arms and the Lyon Court until 4th June 1988 when the Canadian Heraldic Authority was established as part of the Governor-General’s office. The government at the time deemed the existence of a home-owned heraldic authority to be an essential feature of a sovereign nation. The physical headquarters of the CHA are found at La Salle Academy complex, along with the rest of the Canadian honours system. The individual offices of arms within the authority are named after Canada’s rivers. The Chief Herald has a blue and black tabard, but the other heralds merely wear morning dress in contrast to their British counterparts (as illustrated by a photograph from the Diamond Jubilee pageant in 2012). The CHA has an arrangement with the CoA regarding the supply of drawings of older grants, and the former lacks the latter’s vast genealogical remit.

The Authority issues grants on letters patent and, like its parent institutions, allows recipients to choose the level of extravagance and ornamentation in their design. A distinctly Canadian feature is that the blazon is written in both French and English, with grantees able to choose which language takes precedence. Other distinctive Canadian features are that male and female armigers use identical arrangements of elements and that cadency is determined on a personal basis rather than according to any standardised convention. Canadian grants often combine symbols familiar in European and Inuit traditions – most prominently in the arms of Mary Simon.

Patterson rounded off with some illustrations of the royal achievement of Canada itself, as well as the sovereign’s banner of arms and the new variant of the Tudor crown.

The lecture aimed for breadth rather than depth (as this blog post likely reflects), and served better as an introduction for beginners than a deep dive for the devout. If this proves to be the teaser for a long-running series I would be overjoyed, especially as I have not found many session of the Royal Canadian Heraldry Society advertised on Eventbrite for quite some time.

The Audley Beast with David Phillips

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Thomas’s daughter Margaret, painted in 1562, with the beast in the background.

After a long-ish break – the January lecture failing due to technical glitches – I returned to the Oxford University Heraldry Society for a lecture about the Tudor era nobleman Thomas Audley, 1st Baron Audley of Walden, and the mysterious animal that features as his heraldic supporter.

At the end of the lecture I asked a question that had been intriguing me for a while – why, in the early Tudor period, was there such an explosion of historically-prominent senior officials with the first name Thomas?

Phillips gave the answer that, prior to the reformation, Thomas Becket was one of England’s most venerated saints and so of course a high proportion named their sons after him. That just left me with the new question of why there weren’t so many Thomases in high office between Henry II and Henry VII’s reigns, but I didn’t get time to ask that one.

On an unrelated note, today marks the tenth anniversary of my registration as a Wikipedia editor. In terms of edit count rankings, I have climbed to number 5452. There was no grand celebration – not even an automated reminder – but I did discover a Ten Year Society to join, albeit one with little activity thus far.