The arms of Alan Geal: a postscript

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquise, duke, an' a' that;
But an honest man's aboon his might,
Gude faith, he maunna fa' that!
For a' that, an' a' that,
Their dignities, an' a' that;
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth,
Are higher rank that a' that.

Robert Burns (1795). A Man's a Man for A' That.

Nought can deform the Human Race
Like to the Armour's iron brace.

William Blake (c. 1801–3). Auguries of Innocence.

For all this pride and vivacity, all these towering symbols and flamboyant colours, should have been extended to mankind. [ … ] Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling mistake [ … ] of decreasing the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it.

G. K. Chesterton (1901). The Defendant: A Defence of Heraldry.

Except for their original and enduring purpose as ‘marques de reconnaissance’, heraldic arms are widely disparaged as inherently pretentious. This is proper, but only partly, since neither true nobility nor due honour can be bestowed by any agency and ostentatious display is plainly alien to both these virtues. However, arms do not necessarily signify privileged rank or conferred honour: arms such as the Geal arms (Fig. 1) are plain commoner's arms and have no such pretensions. Against this common assumption, heraldry has had unexpected supporters, even prominent republicans such as George Washington have advanced it — perhaps in tacit recognition that one of its essential principles is individualism: “[I]t is far from my design to intimate an opinion that heraldry, coat-armour, etc. [ … ] can have any tendency unfriendly to the purest spirit of republicanism.”‍^1,2 Even so, the taint of snobbery remains and is long-standing: for the medieval Church the pomp of chivalry was an ‘Occasion of Sin’ (that is, an extrinsic circumstance which incited or enticed one to sin, in this case to Pride).

In origin heraldic arms were a development of the ancient forms of badges and seals — whose widespread and autonomous use were no more regulated and suborned to status and privilege than were personal names — adapted to meet the need for conspicuous identification in combat. An absence of hierarchic distinctions was manifest in early heraldry and, apart from regal insignia, explicit emblems of rank were then rare in English arms. Despite this, the role of arms in the display of rank is self-evident: they were initially largely confined to members of the feudal elite, men-at-arms and prominent ecclesiastics, whereas the harsh and oppressed lives of most of humanity precluded such frivolities. The wider use of arms followed from the demise of feudalism, with the dawning of the open society and its requisite growth of trade and markets opening the way to a more extensive awareness of individuality, which had emerged in the preceding two centuries.‍³ A rudimentary individualism which soon found opponents in both vestigial feudal power and an emergent collectivist millenarianism‍⁴ — a conflict which, mutatis mutandis the seemingly changed nature of these adversaries of freedom, persists.

An ancient Greek hoplite (see Fig. 2) would have readily recognized the forms and primary function of medieval arms. But two crucial innovations in early heraldry distinguish these military emblems from their ancient antecedents: the emergence of systematic rules governing their design and their heritable use as familial arms.‍⁵ Though the latter lay the grounds for eventual confusion and disorder as family arms proliforated, this did not entail anarchy — contrary to the later casuistry supporting royal intervention; from the thirteenth century disputes over the usurpation of arms were settled by the Court of Chivalry. Notably, this Court never ruled on the assumption or grant of arms.

Pretentiousness is absurd and repulsive, but its effects are innocuous in comparision to those of the abuses of power: the ingrained, but largely harmless, human impulse to status-seeking and display tends to degenerate into vanity and envious malice under the influence of a jealous authority. Thus the insidious growth of heraldic affectation arguably originates in the foundation of the College of Arms by Richard III in 1484, which arrogated the independent adjudication of the Court of Chivalry. Prior to that, as with continental burgher arms, English arms were often ‘assumed’ without recourse to any authority — although, following French custom, arms were also increasingly assigned by royal grant from the first reign of Henry VI (1422–61) onwards. Likewise, it was not uncommon during the Middle Ages for knighthoods and subordinate Lordships — and thus arms — to be independently bestowed by existent knights and Lords. Thereafter heraldry came under exclusive royal control, except for arms held “in right of an ancestor”. This process was not confined to England nor limited to heraldry. The widespread arrogation of power by royal dynasties from the mid-fifteenth century gave birth to nation states throughout Europe, with a consequential growth of centralized control and nascent bureaucracies. Yet only in the British Isles and the Kingdom of Portugal was the right to bear arms abrogated. While the ostensible aim of the English and Scottish regulatory regimes was the elimination of the “disarray of arms”, this was an asinine fig leaf for a mercenary objective: the alleged disarray was spurious, yet arms as formerly free property were now expropriated, henceforth to be granted only for a fee or as an inducement or reward for service. Thus their former individualistic and honorific status was supplanted, arms were now commonly occasions for and tokens of petty venality and servility.

The intense social hierarchy implicit in feudalism endured in to post-medieval England and the exclusivity of royal approbation inevitably enhanced the prestige of armorial bearings for the newly aspirational, thereby snobbery was augmented. Even so — or perhaps, therefore — as with many sumptuary laws,‍⁶ the restrictions themselves were widely and sometimes blatantly disregarded. Shows of defiance or insouciance which eventually offered absolute power another opportunity for revenue:‍⁷ avoiders of heraldic fees, with their recently self-assumed arms, were summarily enforced against by sporadic heralds' visitations.‍⁸

The changing technology of weaponry eventually rendered full-body armour — and thus coats of arms — obsolete. When heraldic arms had ceased to be chivalric in either creation or function and their bearers were oblivious of the companionship formerly implied in their display, a demand for patent hierarchic differentiation emerged and a panoply of emblems of rank was soon invented. The path was now clear for the decline of a once exuberant, if brutal, visual tradition to mere fatuous ostentation. Still, remnants remain.

— that's enough of this rambling:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream ….

William Shakespeare (c. 1595). A Midsummer Night's Dream.