Nobiliary Entitlements (was Spanish/Mexican Law)

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
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Michael F. McCartney
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28 October 2015 18:58
 

Saying that arms are necessarily nobiliary nonsense because heraldry had it’s origin in an age of kings and nobles, could as easily (and as erroneously) be said of our government, legislatures, courts and judges, the common law and a large chunk of our Bill of Rights.  All of these were rooted in English history, which included both the growth of monarchy and reactions against it’s excesses.  But as received and practiced here, intentionally shorn of those aspects which are inconsistent with small-r republican norms.

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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28 October 2015 20:47
 

Michael F. McCartney;105070 wrote:

Saying that arms are necessarily nobiliary nonsense because heraldry had it’s origin in an age of kings and nobles, could as easily (and as erroneously) be said of our government, legislatures, courts and judges, the common law and a large chunk of our Bill of Rights.  All of these were rooted in English history, which included both the growth of monarchy and reactions against it’s excesses.  But as received and practiced here, intentionally shorn of those aspects which are inconsistent with small-r republican norms.


The fact of shared rootedness in English history does not mean they are equally susceptible of being called nobiliary nonsense. Whiggish things like representative government, equality before the law, etc. have evolved, by and large, in opposition to sovereigns who wanted no such limitations on their power. The same cannot be said of heraldry, which has had a consistently Tory character.

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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28 October 2015 23:19
 

Joseph McMillan;105068 wrote:

With all due respect, Fred, you keep changing the subject, which is nobiliary entitlements.


No, on the contrary, I’ve consistently brought us back to that subject.


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What the college would do regarding grants of arms has no bearing on the issue.


That seems like a non sequitur to me.


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The tacit assumption underlying your position is that someone who is a nobleman anywhere is a nobleman everywhere and entitled to use any heraldic insignia from his home country wherever he happens to go.


There are assumptions underlying my position, but that isn’t one of them. I’m not interested in the metaphysics of the situation, and I’m not talking about "everywhere." What I’ve consistently, explicitly said is that an American, by dint of inheritance, can hold a title of nobility somewhere else and honor that reality through the use of a coat of arms with nobiliary additaments in the U.S. without asserting that he has the legal status of anything but a plain citizen in the U.S.


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And I’m not particularly interested in what the average American thinks about this subject one way or the other.


That’s problematic if you assume the stance of explaining what does and doesn’t work, heraldically, for average Americans, who would likely prefer that you care what they think.


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And I don’t care what the Pope thinks about heraldic practice in this country, either.  His writ, so far as it runs in this country, is religious.  These issues are entirely secular.


I don’t think a neat distinction between the religious and the secular is possible when we’re talking papal ennoblements, papal orders of chivalry, papal troops (just the Swiss Guards now, but there were Zouaves defending Papal States not so long ago), etc. Even if, in ennobling someone, a pope is acting in a capacity we might compartmentalize as secular, the prestige of that capacity depends overwhelmingly on his religious function.

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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29 October 2015 01:11
 

Joseph McMillan;105069 wrote:

What are these normative American values that you believe to be inconsistent with the use of personal heraldry?


For starters, normative American values tend towards rejecting the idea that status should be ascribed to anyone based on accidents of birth, and personal heraldry celebrates accidents of birth. Even Americans born to privilege are strongly discouraged from resting on inherited laurels. Idleness prior to a suitably old age is not something Americans are inclined to aspire to. The role of the gentleman amateur is not one that Americans particularly respect. We think it is immoral not to work and prove that you matter in your own right. The world from which heraldry emanates runs counter to this outlook. This is not to say that Americans always act in accordance with it or to assert that it’s unquestionably moral.


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Their own continued use of arms is clear evidence that they did not see personal heraldry as contrary to the values of their revolution, and Washington said as much explicitly.


If what you’re suggesting is that it wasn’t within the Founders to be inconsistent, confused, myopic, hypocritical, unaware of all their motives, or unaware of all the implications of what they were saying, then I can’t credit it. There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. If what you’re saying is that the Founders show us a way that personal heraldry can be compatible with their conception of a republican form of government, then of course, I agree. What they don’t show us is that it’s appropriate for just anyone to assume arms, which is the position the AHS seems to hold.


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It may well be true, as you argue, they saw the use of arms as making a statement of social status.  But whether they did or not, they did not pretend to be inventing a society devoid of social gradations.


I haven’t been arguing that they intended to invent a society devoid of social gradations. On the contrary, I’ve emphasized that they did, and that in fact there seem to have been at least two hereditary limitations on legal status (gender and race) they were perfectly comfortable with, and another (ownership of land) that was not hereditary but in which heredity was quite advantageous. Still, the tendency of the society the Founders set up has been towards regarding any hereditary advantage as unfair and towards social gradations being based on individual merit alone. It has also been towards eliminating all but most essential limitations on individual freedom. That we find the basis for this tendency in the Founders’ rhetoric does not mean they would approve of all that has since followed from it.


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Your argument seems to be that because the Jacobins, the Founding Fathers, and I take the same view of the incompatibility between nobility and republicanism, we must, to be consistent, also take the same position on the acceptability or unacceptability of all social gradations and, by extension, on personal heraldry.


That argument would be a lot easier to refute than the one I am making.

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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30 October 2015 11:59
 

Wilfred Leblanc;105074 wrote:

I haven’t been arguing that they intended to invent a society devoid of social gradations. On the contrary, I’ve emphasized that they did, and that in fact there seem to have been at least two hereditary limitations on legal status (gender and race)


I should’ve made a distinction here between "congenital" and "hereditary"—accidents of birth, either way, but not precisely the same thing. My bad.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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30 October 2015 12:47
 

Wilfred Leblanc;105088 wrote:

I should’ve made a distinction here between "congenital" and "hereditary"—accidents of birth, either way, but not precisely the same thing. My bad.


Fred,

 

Just to be certain, as I try to compress several dozen pages of notes into my long-delayed promised reply on this general subject:  I’m sure you would not suggest that, because women and slaves could not bear heraldic arms in the 18th century, they should not be able to do so now?

 

I imagine this goes without saying, but it gets to the core of my case, and it would be useful to have common ground on this point, at least.

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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30 October 2015 14:40
 

Joseph McMillan;105089 wrote:

Fred,

Just to be certain, as I try to compress several dozen pages of notes into my long-delayed promised reply on this general subject:  I’m sure you would not suggest that, because women and slaves could not bear heraldic arms in the 18th century, they should not be able to do so now?


No, of course I am not saying that. What I’m saying is that the Founders had a restricted sense of who ought to be bearing arms and that most people were not included. Even if they disdained to establish an American heraldic authority under the auspices of the state, I see every reason to think that they would have agreed, more or less, with William Harrison’s assessment of the minimum requirements. You can probably repeat it from memory verbatim:


Quote:

Whosoever studieth the laws of the realm, who so abideth in the university, giving his mind to his book, or professeth physic and the liberal sciences, or beside his service in the room of a captain in the wars, or good counsel given at home, whereby his commonwealth is benefited, can live without manual labour, and thereto is able and will bear the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman, he shall for money have a coat and arms bestowed upon him by heralds (who in the charter of the same do of custom pretend antiquity and service, and many gay things) and thereunto being made so good cheap be called master, which is the title that men give to esquires and gentlemen, and reputed for a gentleman ever after.


Insofar as the Founders do not clearly support the expansion of the heraldic prerorogative downward through the legal and social strata that they ratified (and which we have since eroded, but not with the Founders’ unambiguous imprimatur), they cannot be recruited as advocates for the outlook expressed by the AHS Guidelines. To position heraldry as an essentially egalitarian mode of identification is not traditional. It is innovative. One might, with some reason, call it radical. That should be conceded by the Guidelines themselves, which rather read as if they were a distillation of an attitude Americans have been taking towards heraldry at all times.

 

If that concession were to be made, it would then be incumbent on the AHS to be generous in the other social direction. In other words, fine, if you think anyone should feel entitled to assume arms, you should indulge those who wish to honor their noble heritage by using inherited coats of arms that have supporters and the like. I stick to my contention that an American’s displaying a coat of arms with nobiliary additaments is not an objective claim that he has any legal status other than citizen in the U.S., though it is, like any personal/family coat of arms, an objective claim of superior social status.

 

Certainly, Americans are okay with claims of superior social status, for instance through luxury goods that can be acquired by anyone with the means to purchase them. But the particular claim of superior social status we are discussing is incommensurable with normative, contemporary American values because it depends on an assumption Americans have become very reluctant to share—that inalienable prestige should be ascribed to people based on accidents of birth, like having educated, prosperous, caucasian parents who come from long lines of ancestors known by name to historians. Any use of a coat of arms—even bucket shop arms, for reasons I outlined earlier—is therefore countercultural here. This is not to say that plenty of people don’t bear arms while also conceiving of themselves as being in the contemporary mainstream, but to say that such people are either confused or not being completely honest with themselves. They might be in the mainstream of the republic ca. 1776, but they are not in the mainstream of the republic ca. 2015.

 

I’m trying to be succinct. Am I being perfectly clear?

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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30 October 2015 15:07
 

Yes.  I wasn’t trying to be provocative, just make sure that I didn’t subsequently put words in your mouth or erect a strawman.

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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30 October 2015 16:23
 

Joseph McMillan;105091 wrote:

Yes.  I wasn’t trying to be provocative, just make sure that I didn’t subsequently put words in your mouth or erect a strawman.


No worries. Glad I’m succeeding in making my argument clear. Note my edit (an expanded conclusion). I hope I’m now capturing everything I’ve been saying in one post.

 
David Pope
 
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David Pope
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30 October 2015 17:45
 

Does anyone have heartburn with US civic bodies using supporters?  I appreciate that in such a case there is no implied/understood claim of nobility.

http://www.ncleg.net/Graphics/SenateCoatofArms.jpg

 

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Virginia_Senate_Seal.png

 

http://www.tigerwires.com/cms/lib3/PA01000001/Centricity/Domain/496/coatof_arms.jpg

 

Also, I suppose that we would have to view the Bigham-produced coats of arms as decorative accidents of ignorance / 18th century bucket-shops, rather than a deliberate American (Scotch-Irish?) assertion of the appropriateness of supporters for commoners?

 

http://www.wauchopes.com/JamesMargaretWalkupGrave.jpg

 
Luis Cid
 
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Luis Cid
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30 October 2015 17:55
 

There is an wonderful old Anglican approach to the practice of formal private confession of sins to a priest that goes something like: "all may, none must, and some should."  I remember our society’s current president once posted here some years back something somewhat similar in regard to citizens assuming heraldic arms today in the USA, which he put as: "all may but not everybody should." At the time I thought that was as good a description of what constitutes good taste and good sense as it gets in regard to these matters.  I still do.  (This of course does not touch on the related matter of the use of nobiliary additaments; which people can agree with the AHS guidelines or not - but those guidelines are reasonable and should be kept to on the AHS website and all AHS documents, etc.)

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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30 October 2015 18:11
 

Luis Cid;105094 wrote:

There is an wonderful old Anglican approach to the practice of formal private confession of sins to a priest that goes something like: "all may, none must, and some should."  I remember our society’s current president once posted here some years back something somewhat similar in regard to citizens assuming heraldic arms today in the USA, which he put as: "all may but not everybody should." At the time I thought that was as good a description of what constitutes good taste and good sense as it gets in regard to these matters.  I still do.  (This of course does not touch on the related matter of the use of nobiliary additaments; which people can agree with the AHS guidelines or not - but those guidelines are reasonable and should be kept to on the AHS website and all AHS documents, etc.)


St. Paul’s formulation strikes me as the best: "Not everything that is permitted is advisable." I would probably say that no American "should" use a personal/family coat of arms if it’s important to him to honor normative, contemporary American values. If, on the other hand, he’s ambivalent about all that and wishes to strike a blow for some other agenda (e.g., TFP, and see also this offshoot), well, he might be able to pull it off if the rest of the picture complements it.

 

Note that when I say "use," I mean let other people see the arms on a regular basis, for instance by wearing a signet ring or using armorial stationery. Simply putting a blazon on file somewhere makes the arms little more than a hypothesis.

 
Luis Cid
 
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Luis Cid
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30 October 2015 18:29
 

Wilfred Leblanc;105095 wrote:

St. Paul’s formulation strikes me as more pertinent: "Not everything that is permitted is advisable." I would probably say that no American "should" use a personal/family coat of arms if it’s important to him to honor normative, contemporary American values. If, on the other hand, he’s ambivalent about all that and wishes to strike a blow for some other agenda (e.g., TFP), well, he might be able to pull it off if the rest of the picture complements it.

Note that when I say "use," I mean let other people see the arms on a regular basis, for instance by wearing a signet ring or using armorial stationery. Simply putting a blazon on file somewhere makes the arms little more than a hypothesis.[/QUOTE]

 

If an individual hides his arms, if they are not made public and identified with him in some meaningful manner—those arms do not exist.  They are nothing more than a pretty painting hanging in that individual’s study (or worse yet - in a desk drawer).  Arms were invented in the 12th century to be used publicly.  They have ever since been all about public use - exactly like a name or surname.

 

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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30 October 2015 18:33
 

David Pope;105093 wrote:

Does anyone have heartburn with US civic bodies using supporters?  I appreciate that in such a case there is no implied/understood claim of nobility.


It seems appropriate to me, especially for such a first-rate place as North Carolina, though I suppose it undermines its famous, endearing characterization as "a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit."


Quote:

Also, I suppose that we would have to view the Bigham-produced coats of arms as decorative accidents of ignorance / 18th century bucket-shops, rather than a deliberate American (Scotch-Irish?) assertion of the appropriateness of supporters for commoners?


I’ll defer to those who have studied the Bigham phenomenon more closely, but that sounds safe to me. If you weren’t on this forum when the self-styled chief of "Clan Akins" attempted to prove his bona fides with the help of a Bigham tombstone, you missed one hell of a spectacle.

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
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Michael F. McCartney
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30 October 2015 19:55
 

I would certainly say that anything on a tombstone - from name & dates to arms simple or exalted - lack evidentiary value if said tombstone is carved in styrofoam rather than marble.

And AFAIK no one here has objected to supporters for governmental entities.

 

Beyond that I’ll wait for Joe’s promised reasoned response rather than taking random potshots at Fred’s manifold errors. wink