History rampant
J. Enoch Powell
Pedigree and Progress Sir Anthony Wagner (Phillimore £8.75) The Heraldic Imagination Rodney Dennys (Banie and Jenkins £10.00) There is no such thing as undifferentiated. intellect. Every man of intellectual power has a bent, a natural inclination of the mind, a talent, which is as peculiar to him as his physiognomy, though (like physiognomies) it can be classified. Sir Anthony Wagner, Garter King of Arms, is a scholar of power and accuracy — one of many such, though exceptional among them, who have followed the profession of herald down eight centuries. To be a herald is necessarily to be in some sort a historian; but there are different bents of mind among heralds, which make them different sorts of historian.
Sir Anthony's bent, recognisably (as such are) congenital, is genealogical. He is a herald because he was a genealogist, not a genealogist because he is a herald. Many are the lures by which mortals are tempted, as amateurs or professionals, into the magic wildwood of heraldry, never to escape again. For some it is art and architecture; for others chronology; for others political history; for others archaeology. For Sir Anthony genealogy is the passion which distils history of its own kind from the raw material of the herald's professional scholarship. The peculiarity of genealogy among the historical disciplines is that it rejects all generalisation: it is an assemblage of particulars. Whether a pedigree is 'long' or 'broad', it remains individual and unstatistical. It says "A is related, in such and such a manner, to B"; and it says nothing else. Other historical disciplines tell us other things about A and about B — that A on such and such a date made a speech in the House of Commons, or B in such and such a year founded a company in the City. But still Ar•-)13 remains ungeneralisable; and this would be so even if we could make similar statements about C"-D, Er\iF and so ad infinitum. We cannot marry genealogical information either on the one side with the human sciences of anthropology, sociology or genetics — no deductions are to be drawn from it as to how men behave because they are men, of how their genetic possibilities are realised — nor on the other side with the statistical human sciences, such as demography or economic history, which operate with abstracted numbers. What then does genealogy contribute?
The answer is that it illuminates and disciplines the mythology of relationship which is part of the human make-up. Because we are conscious of begetting and being begotten, we cannot avoid imagining — mythologising — the past and the future in terms of genealogical descent and ascent; the past is our ancestors, the future is our children. The myths of class, nation, race, progress and decline are genealogical myths, and genealogical history is to genealogical myths as observed data are to a science or a philosophy. This is why all genealogical history consists of monographs. This is why Garter's Pedigree and Progress had to be a collection of essays. But what myth
challenging and myth-remoulding essays they. are! One essay pursues genealogies across the gulf between the ancient and the modern world and between the Eastern Empires and the West: Another builds proved cases of the recruitment of the English upper classes from the rest of society. A third shows how Eton tradesmen's genealogies were interwoven with those of 'Etonians'.
Half the book, the business half, properly consists of "the pedigrees" — the genealogist at work as opposed to the genealogist at leisure. I select a few at random. Only those who can resist the lure of such titles can afford not to beg, buy or borrow the book: 'The Swan Badge'; 'Atlantic to Pacific, 1274'; 'The Conqueror's Kin'; 'English ancestors of Edward IV'; 'Puritans and Colonists'; 'Birmingham Unitarians'.
Simultaneously with Garter, Somerset Herald (Rodney Dennys) presents a very different face of heraldry under the title of The Heraldic Imagination. The coloured front and back of. the jacket, featuring the arms of Jesus Christ, as conceived in the fifteenth century, and the tiger and looking-glass arms of a Kentish family in the sixteenth century, excite a curiosity which the text only partly satisfies., Readers will be given an insight into the origins of heraldry from military organisation and necessities and into the wealth of medieval literature on the science of arms, which has scarcely yet been seriously studied. On the other hand, they will learn that it was only under the exorbitant pressures in the fifteenth, and even more the sixteenth, century for grants of arms on an unprecedented scale that the heralds resorted to ancient fable, medieval bestiary and downright fantasy to procure new "charges" and "supporters" for the shields.
For the professional or amateur of heraldry the value of the book will be in the preliminary list of medieval heraldic treatises which Mr Dennys offers and in the classified alphabetic collection (with first occurrence and significant examples) of all non-natural creatures used in heraldry. Sometimes the fable associated with the creature suggests a reason for its first adoption, and no doubt there were sometimes intended links between choice of a device and the circumstances of the first bearer which we shall never be able to identify.
For most readers, however, the chief interest will be in the wealth of illustrations, of which unfortunately the captions disagree with the text more often than is seemly: one sometimes has the impression that the author and the selector and arranger of the illustrations were working almost independently. Perhaps that is another of the signs of the hasty preparation which resulted in less than accurate proofreading. Still, it is hardly possible for those interested in any aspect of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to find themselves confronted with such a wealth of illustrations, (twentyfour in first-rate colour and some hundred and fifty black-and-white) — many from sources, such as the Buccleuch Wrythe Garter Book, not previously reproduced — without being set upon new lines of enquiry; for it is to the historical imagination that heraldry presents a unique and haunting challenge.
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