Heraldry: What is a coat of arms and what was it for?

as the medieval period developed Armour became more and more encompassing plates of Steel started to cover the human body and the face was obscured by visors and face plates that's a problem if you're a knight because you're a leader of men and you need to identify your own group and they need to identify you you need the enemy to see you coming and be intimidated and you want your deeds on the battlefield to be recognized and praised so how do you do that how do you make sure both friend and foe alike know who you are [Applause] the idea of having a representative symbol for a group of people or places is a very ancient concept obviously we know that in ancient Greek times city-states had their own symbols on their shields but the idea of identifying an individual by a symbol or by some kind of graphic depiction is something that comes in post the Bayer tapestry and that's interesting because we see no evidence of personal heraldry on the Bayer tapestry itself which is 1066 and then a hundred years later we see what would be recognizable today as traditional heraldry so in a period of two or three Knightly generations the ownership of a symbol that represented the honor and prestige of your house became a hugely important part of knighthood my guess is the first actual sort of heraldry representing the individual was probably displayed very much on the shield because that's an obvious place to have a symbol probably on the body on what would be called a sir coat hence coat of arms that's where the word comes from so the whole Knight himself and his horse because the horse would be covered in a thing called a caparison which is a cloth covering over the horse armor which would also reflect your heraldry and the heraldry might be repeated four times on the front quarters and on the hindquarters of your horse so you will be seen to be kind of completely covered in your heraldic symbol so it's not just on your shield it's on your clothing your helmet color coordinates your horse color coordinates similarly your castle well you carve it in stone and you paint over the top of your peril tree and that shows this castle belongs to that Knight and this is the long family tradition [Music] your household would share your colors as well it wouldn't necessarily wear your specific heraldry because they weren't permitted to unless they were your sons perhaps who share the same heraldry but with what's called a difference your household would probably share your heraldic badge which is a sub symbol and possibly also share your colors so they may wear a sir coat themselves with your colors but not your heraldry on potentially the colors would have been referred to on the painted armor now painted armors an interesting one because a lot of people see our in museums and it's beautiful and it's silver and it's lovely and polished but there's a lot of evidence that that polish is actually at least in some cases a Victorian invention perhaps overzealous museum curators decided that a knight in shining armor should be in shining armor we do know that when some of the armor has been disassembled from the 15th century in 14th century under hinges and things like that you can see traces of paint work and there are famous helmets that are painted in kind of monstrous and actually quite childlike figures so it is quite possible that our concept of the medieval battlefield is slightly skewed by a preponderance in museums of shiny helmets and shiny equipment it is quite likely that they were brightly colored at least to begin with until the rain fell and the mud spattered everything and blood and guts were everywhere so the medieval battlefield was not a grim gray place it was a grim brightly colored place because every Knightly household would have the knight himself his banners which of course display to everybody where he is because that's an important part as well and his retainers and his supporters would all be dressed in similar colours so you'd have the gold and blue knight on the hill next to the red and black knight on the hill and and the whole of the army would be arrayed in kind of color-coordinated blocks which must have been aspect Killa site if you have a coat of arms you are known as armigerous so if you have the same name as somebody who has their coat of arms you don't actually have the right to bear that coat of arms at all that's a very important rule of heraldry heraldry can be borne by a particular person it's an individual right which can be passed on to your offspring so if you go to a genealogical site and see that the Kingsley family for example has a coat of arms which it does that doesn't mean if your name is Kingsley you can use my coat of arms which is behind me I am lucky enough to have been granted my own coat of arms by the Court of heralds in London and by blue mantle pursuivant himself who is a modern-day Herald and I bear my coat of arms on my shield and on my banner when I go into reenactment battles and also joust under my own colors as well so I am armigerous and I'm very proud of my coat of arms it is a modern grant of coat of arms though but it is designed to look like it could have come from an earlier period the difficulty with heraldry is everybody started to want it and it's passed on and if two noble families marry each other they get to share the heraldry the heraldry gets quartered and quartered again and shields and heraldic symbol has become incredibly difficult they become really difficult to actually draw and describe in words but they become relatively hard to understand on the battlefield so having a simple coat of arms that stands out kind of indicates that you come from an ancient line of nobility and fighting people and a lot of modern coat of arms will reflect the modern aspects of the people that are granted them so people have computer keyboards on their coat of arms they have fishing nets they have a funny hat all sorts of stuff can be shown on heraldry for mine harks back to an earlier day of simpler ideas and that means I can wear it when I'm pretending to be a 15th century Knight and I'm quite proud of that effect so you've got your heraldry you've protected in court and you want to send a letter to somebody well they need to know it's you sending it so what you do is you have the parchment written out you have the message put on the parchment you roll it up and you seal it securely with a wax stamp of your heraldry that heraldry embedded in the wax seal does two things one it says it's definitely from you because it's your heraldry two it says that the parchment itself hasn't been opened by somebody else in red heraldic seals are fixed to important documents so for example Magna Carta itself has a series of seals attached to it it has the names of the Knights but it also has their seals the heraldic seals attached to by ribbon to it embedded in wax it's sort of attesting to the fact that yes their name was written down but also this symbol this heraldic component represents the spirit and person of those great Knights heralds were incredibly important because they represented incredibly important powerful people so for example the Kings Herald effectively was the voice of the King so to actually attack and kill the Kings Herald was considered to be such a serious crime that it was effectively an attack on the king himself and we know this because there is one example in Provence of a Kings Herald being attacked and killed and was savagely punished by his royal personage he actually went there with his army and he killed everybody in that town that must have been hundreds if not thousands of people for the death of one person but it wasn't really the death of one person it was a symbolic attack on the king himself as the great and powerful were arguing about who ought to carry what kind of symbols on their shoes so the Herald's were developing a series of rules to describe exactly what was on the shield and to record it for posterity so the formal rules of heraldry were invented and they involved a written description of what was on your shield that written description I think is quite unusual because why didn't they just use a drawing of the of the heraldry well I think the answer is because different artists would interpret the words slightly differently and also if you are going to draw a picture of a Turtledove another person might not recognize your handiwork as a turtledoves and they might think of it as I don't know a lizard or something and so the arms would change over time if you had it written down that it was a Turtledove on your shield then artists could interpret that Turtledove in their own way but the words wouldn't change and the words could be passed on to somebody else to draw them in a slightly different style but still being turtledoves this is days before computers so if you were describing a lion or a heraldic leopard people would interpret it in different ways but it would basically be the same heraldry so writing down the latin terms and enables somebody else who is going to interpret that to do their own interpretation of it but it's still 3 Lions for England for example on a red background they know what that's going to look like because they're gonna draw it in their own style but it's written down in Latin some of the heraldic rules seem a bit obscure and you know they learn a huge books written on this and many many people who are more expert than me can can go into great detail on how heraldry but one of the interesting observations are I've come across is that it's about contrast and visibility to begin with so there are metals and colours and the two are combined and effectively gold is yellow and silver is white and it allows you to have heraldry that stands out on the battlefield because remember the origins of heraldry are to identify you and prove who you are on the battlefield if your shield didn't stand out and was it particularly memorable well done its purpose so the rules of the Herald's start out as a way of making sure Knights had symbols that they were carrying that could be seen a long way away and were very clear so they get very complicated and they get quite obscure and as heraldry develops they become well their own science if you like but originally the rules were designed to avoid confusion and maintain clarity on the battlefield heraldry is all around us even today and fascinatingly the very thing that was designed to mark out and distinguish the noble knight on the medieval battlefield amidst the din and clash a battle is still used today by corporations to mark them out amongst the Battle of modern business but also sport the English football team uses heraldic symbols to represent it on the sports field and interestingly the heraldry that the English football team uses is that that was taken into battle by Richard the Lionheart back in the era of the Crusades thanks for watching please like and subscribe and use that notification button if you want to be told when there's a new video and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Modern History TV

Views: 338,901

Keywords: history documentary, jason kingsley, medieval, middle ages, knight, heraldry, coat of arms, banner, shield

Id: zexpH6GCOh8

Length: 12min 41sec (761 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 22 2018