Tag Archives: Oxford

Honour in the Eyes of Others

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

Posted on by
Reply

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.