Advanced Heraldic Studies: An Introduction Part II. The Terminology of the Field: Its Nature, History, and Inadequacies Division B. The Third Period, c. 1330 – c. 1560 I. The First Phase of Heraldic Didacticism: Texts and Contexts D’ARCY JONATHAN DACRE BOULTON Ph.D. (Penn.), D. Phil. (Oxon.), F.R.H.S.C., F.S.A., A.I.H. Professor of Medieval Studies and History, University of Notre Dame 3. The Third Period in the History of Heraldic Erudition We turn now to the third of the Periods in the history of heraldic taxonomic terminology that I defined in Division II.A of my survey. Not surprisingly, these Periods corresponded very closely to phases in the history of heraldic erudition more generally. In the first two Periods — lasting respectively from c. 1170 to c. 1250, and from the latter date to c. 13301 — this form of erudition had concentrated first on describing and then on cataloguing the particular arms constituting the armal corpora 2 representing the nobilities of our two kingdoms, France and England, and their respective regions. Thus, the only element of the emerging armorial (or more particularly at this stage, armal) code in which the heralds and heraldists of these periods took an active interest was that of the description of particular arms. The erudition of the First Period had therefore been limited to the slow growth of the technical descriptive language now known in English as ‘blazon’. As we saw in the previous Division, the earliest forms of 1 I set the date of the beginning of this Period at c. 1335 in the previous division, but have since decided that it should be set back to 1330. 2 This term armorial corpus, adopted in the first instalment of this essay, is defined in the Appendix on Concepts and Terms as: A distinct set of arms or other armories, either in general (the full armorial corpus) or delimited in some particular way (e.g., a regnal, provincial, categorical, or institutional corpus). An armal corpus is one composed of arms alone: the normal type of corpus recorded in armorials outside Germany before the fifteenth century. Alta Studia Heraldica 4 (2011-2012) 2 D’A. J. D. BOULTON blazon are recorded exclusively in random passages of contemporary literary works (especially knightly 3 romances) composed from 1170 onwards, in which the shield or flag of a character are described. Because such works were rarely if ever composed by heralds, they represent a strictly non-specialist version of the blazon employed in that Period. In fact, as we have seen, the language of blazon was systematically recorded in writing only in the Second Period, especially in the earliest documents of the type called ‘blazoned’ and ‘illustrated and blazoned armorials’. These were both subtypes of a more general type of compilation introduced in the same Period, which constituted the earliest type of work in the tradition of heraldistic (and more particularly armoristic) erudition: the armorial or roll of arms, in which a corpus composed of the arms of some body of armigers known to the compiler was set out in the form of a catalogue including either images or descriptions (or both) of those arms. Armorials of the blazoned subtype were produced throughout the Second Period both in France and in England, but remained all but peculiar to those two kingdoms until the end of the Second Period. Indeed, only one armorial of any of these types has survived from any other kingdom from any date before 1330: the German Wappenfolge of Erstfelden of 1309.4 France and England thus led the way both in the creation of the language of technical description, and in its expression in the form of records, and they maintained a virtual monopoly in these practices to the end of the Second Period. Their leadership in this field, and indeed in the broader field of armoristic erudition that grew out of it, would be maintained throughout the following period, as we shall see. Never- theless, before c. 1340 progress in armoristic erudition remained confined even in those two kingdoms to improving the lexicon and syntax of the language of particular description. There is no evidence that before that date either the heralds (who seem to have been the principal inventors of blazonic language), or the amateur armorists (who were certainly the authors of some of the earliest armorials, and might have been the authors of most of them) attempted to explain or discuss, in any manner or language, any other element of the simultaneously evolving armorial code, let alone the less formal aspects of what I call ‘armorial emblematics’: those related to the styles in which arms could be represented, and the manners 3 As I have recently demonstrated to my own satisfaction, at least, that ‘chivalry’ is a false construct of the nineteenth century, I have decided avoid both that word and its derivatives, including the nineteenth-century ‘chivalric’, and use only words based on the English word ‘knight’, including ‘knightly’ and ‘knightliness’. (See D’A. J. D. BOULTON, ‘The Notion of “Chivalry” as the Social Code of the Later Medieval Nobilities: The Origins and Shortcomings of a Modern Historiographical Construct’, forthcoming in Chivalry, Honour, and Care, ed. Warren T. REICH and Jonathan RILEY-SMITH, Oxford University Press.) 4 See above, n. 27. The noun ‘armorial’ has recently been extended to designate any collection of images including arms, including those painted on the walls and ceilings of buildings, and those associated with images of their bearers in songbooks. These may be distinguished as illustrative and decorative armorials. Alta Studia Heraldica 4 (2011-2012) ASH II.B.I TERMS: THIRD PERIOD (DIDACTICISM) 3 and contexts in which they might be displayed. Because of this — and because the recorded blazons merely described particular emblems of the species then and now most distinctively designated by words cognate with or equivalent to ‘arms’ — our knowledge of the words used by contemporaries to designate or indicate a relationship to such related phenomena as signs in general; signs of the general functional type we call ‘emblems’; emblems of the particular species we call ‘arms’ and ‘crests’; the contexts in which such emblems were regularly displayed; and the profession particularly concerned with such matters, has all to be gleaned in a piecemeal fashion from a wide variety of texts written for purposes other than that of informing us about these phenomena. In the years around and immediately after 1330, however, two new kinds of text of particular value for the reconstruction of the terms used for designating the different species of armorial sign were finally introduced, in both cases in England (at least in a form of use to us) considerably earlier than in France. The first of these was the legal document by which the actor — who might be a private individual, a group of related individuals, a subordinate prince, or a monarch — conveyed to the beneficiary the right to possess or make use of all or part of a particular coat of arms or crest, that either belonged to the actor (the normal situation in the early years) or was created by him for the purpose.5 The general practice of issuing documents conveying such armigeral rights seems to have begun in Germany, where the earliest non-royal acts to survive date from the 1260s and ‘70s, and the earliest royal acts from 1305, 1329, 1339, and 1355.6 In France the practice is attested from 1315, when the first known royal letters conveying the right to employ arms (in this case the arms of a the current superior of a community) were issued. Nevertheless, such acts remained rare in that kingdom throughout our period, and are not known to have involved the grant of wholly new arms before 1392, or of any other species of emblem at any date before 1560. In England, by contrast, the private practice of licencing or alienating arms and crests is attested from 1314, and the first known royal letters conferring an armorial emblem (in this case the first royal crest) were issued by Edward III in 1330. Various different types of instrument were introduced to effect the acts of these types, which for a century and a half continued to be permitted to armigers of all ranks, but around 1460 the earlier types were almost all superseded by letters patent issued by one of the royal kings of arms either to grant or to confirm a right to particular arms or armories. Whatever their formal type, however, such instruments differed from armorials in actually naming the particular species of armory they conveyed, which from the very beginning included crests as well as arms, and from the middle decades of the fifteenth century included other 5 For a more detailed discussion of the documents of this type, and a full bibliography of the published sources, see below, § 3.3. 6 For the texts of these grants in chronological order, see Gustaf A. SEYLER, Geschichte der Heraldik, (Nuremberg, 1890; repr. Neustadt an der Aisch, 1970), pp. 811-844. Alta Studia Heraldica 4 (2011-2012) 4 D’A. J. D. BOULTON elements of the armorial achievement as well. These characteristics make such instruments particularly useful sources for the history of the taxonomic lexicon of armory. The second of the new types of document of particular importance for the reconstruction of the lexicon of heraldic generalisation to appear in the period after 1330 was what I shall call the treatise7 on armory,8 or armoristic treatise, the earliest known of which — called De heraudie or the Dean Tract — was composed in England shortly after 1340, and the second, Bartolo da Sassoferrato’s De insigniis et armis, was composed in Italy in 1355.9 These and their successors in the genre in the century after 1390 were true expressions of armoristic erudition, and the former in particular clearly arose out of a combination of the established practice of compiling blazoned armorials with the even older practice of composing short didactic treatises on particular technical subjects.