History rampant
J. Enoch Powell
Boutell's Heraldry revised by J. P. BrookeLittle (Frederick Warne and Co £4.95) Heraldry of the World Carl Alexander von Volborth (Blandford Press E2.40) It is striking testimony to the widespread and eager interest in heraldry that a revised edition of Boutell's Heraldry — the nearest thing to a standard English textbook of the subject — is nowadays demanded every three years or so. Mr Brooke-Little (Richmond Herald) has occupied the title-page alone since 1970, taking over from Mr Scott-Giles (1950), who in turn inherited from Fox-Davies (1907) the work of revising English Heraldry first published in 1867 by the Rev Charles Boutell. Thus a classic has evolved over more than a century. "What never fails to surprise me,” says the present reviser, "is the number of amendments which have to be made to each edition of Boutell in order to keep it right up to date. This illustrates the important fact that heraldry moves with the times although its roots are firmly planted in the past." Heraldry is a subject of which it is easy to acquire an elementary knowledge but which sharply chastens those who imagine that they can progress with equal ease thereafter. The basic grammar of a coat of arms ought to be part of 'every gen.tleman's' education. Without it he will be deaf to statements which are being addressed to him all the time, from a monument in his parish church or the spine of a book in his library: he will not even realise that they are statements at all.
Once interest is awakened, any one can fairly soon learn to realise the sort of thing that is being said and even to decipher some portions of Vie actual message: a fifteenth century brass and a seventeenth century memorial are at least understood to be interpretable. "Well then," Say his admiring companions to the unfledged hierophant, "go on and interpret it for us." At that moment the novice glimpses the reason why your true herald is a modest and a diffident man.
Heraldry is a language of which the grammar was subject to constant change and development, from the rise of heraldry in the twelfth century right down to the present. The grammatical rules (as it were) which were formulated or approved at any one point in those eight hundred years shed a dim or misleading light if simply applied to the heraldry of some other time. Even now, the evolution of some of the principal verbs and tenses — to continue the metaphor — is imperfectly documented and analysed. Ask, for instance, when and where quartering crystallised into a statement of paternal and maternal inheritance, or when and how the use of the escutcheon of pretence arose and when its use was distinguished from impaling, and the experts and the works of reference will 'give an uncertain sound.'
Much more daunting is the vast diversity of charges in all their possible variations and combinations. It is all very well to recognise at sight a certain number of the most famous medieval families, or to deduce from other evidence the identity of a particular coat, The language of heraldry lacks anything com parable to the lexicon. from which the veriest tyro in a foreign language can identify the meaning., or possible meanings, of a word. The Rolls of Arms, which began to be compiled in the thirteenth century, represented an attempt to provide some sort of repertory; but the attempt was soon overwhelmed by the immense multiplication of the number of coats.
The dust jacket of this edition reproduces a page from a Tudor book of arms, with thirty six simple coats featuring one or more eagles as the charge. A glance at it brings home to the reader the almost infinite variations of which one charge is capable, given the permutations of tincture (colour), arrangement and subordinate charges. Theoretically, it should be possible to compile a dictionary of arms by arranging them in alphabetic order of. their blazon, or correct heraldic description; but anyone who has visions of heraldic lexicography simplified in this way should open the pages of the only attempt made to do it, Papworth's. Ordinary of British Armorials, published posthumously in 1874.
Perhaps it will be possible for modern techniques to provide for storage and recovery of the myriad data of the heraldic past and present; but the marvels and the fascination of heraldry will continue to be in its intersection with human and political his tory. There is a sense in which every student of heraldry is by inclination either a historian or a genealogist. This man bore these arms: what does it mean in terms of his heredity? and what does it mean in terms of his place in the society and the government of his time? The arms entice us to attempt an answer while they mock us with our inability.
Britain, as in so much else, so in her heraldries (English and Scottish), has been fortunate in her insularity and the continuity which it preserved. Even at the worst periods in the last eight centuries the heraldry of this island has been preserved by sufficient authority against degenerating into arbitrariness or meaninglessness. By contrast with the heraldry of the Continent, it seems as orderly and well-behaved as cricket.
Insularity however has the limitation of its virtues; and the amateur of British heraldry ought to be exposed to the experience of a dip into the wide and tumultuous waters of Continental heraldry. A Dane has boldly at
tempted, as it were, a Boutell of the world in
250 pages. with nearly a thousand coats and badges in black and white, and in colour, ranging from the arms of the Emperor
Maximilian .on the first page to those of the Swedish Evangelical bishop of North West
Tanganyika on the last. Such a book cannot attempt to be more than a compilation; but to judge by the parts which refer to English heraldry, the compilation is painstaking and not misleading. There is something to be said for a pocket work of reference which will provide at least the elements of the heraldry of Imperial Russia and the Roman Church, of Scandinavia and of Spanish America.
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