Social Standing and the Right to Bear Arms

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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06 November 2015 15:54
 

The following, long-delayed serial essay was prompted by various statements by Fred White in posts number 52, 60, 64, 75, and 94, among others, in the thread on “nobiliary entitlements.”  I am starting this new thread because I don’t intend to address the issue of such additaments here.  I have already explained my view on this matter the best I can:  we have no class of nobility in the United States of America, and thus symbols signifying nobility can logically have no place in our heraldry.  We’re clearly not going to persuade each other on this matter, so there’s no point going round and round over it.  The issue at hand is whether coats of arms as such constitute a claim of social status and, if so, whether this claim is consistent with American values in a way that (in my opinion) nobiliary additaments are not.

To frame my case, let me begin by offering a précis of Fred’s comments as I understand them.  I hope I am not distorting his argument by summarizing it.[

 

While the discussion was in part about how Fred believes the use of personal heraldry is perceived by modern Americans, which I don’t think we can resolve here, he also stated (I think as a matter of objective fact rather than perception) that using personal heraldry necessarily entails “assenting to some semblance of a feudal hierarchy… a stratified society—and placing oneself rather high within it” (#60).  Fred characterized armorial bearings as “a symbol [that was] explicitly designed to affirm inequality in the places where [heraldry] evolved” (#64) and contends that “to denude heraldry of any traditional social status connotations” is to “make it something fundamentally different than it generally has been (here or anywhere else)” (#94).  Thus, for American heraldists to advocate a universal right to assume arms, independent of social criteria, is basically unheraldic as well as contrary to what the Founders had in mind when they tacitly or explicitly rejected a contradiction between heraldry and republicanism.  Finally having thus discarded the inherent connection between arms and status, it is inconsistent to deny anyone’s right to use armorial elements that historically signified status.

 

In response I promised to give my own views as to “whether the use of arms itself makes a class statement, and if so whether the statement it makes is inconsistent with classic American republicanism.” (#128)

 

Let me foreshadow just a bit by saying up front that I do not believe everyone should use a coat of arms.  I agree with Fred that the universal use of arms is indeed inconsistent with the historical spirit of heraldry.  But I think there are differences in my understanding of who is arms-worthy and his that go far beyond mere nuance, and get to the heart of how we should understand personal heraldry in the USA.  Moreover, I think that the question "who should?" must be clearly distinguished from "who may?"  More on that toward the far-off end of these ramblings.

 

Before addressing substance, some words about method from Samuel Eliot Morison:
Quote:

It is said that Maestlin, the master of Kepler, remarked after reading the first work of his distinguished pupil:  “before Kepler scholars always attacked astronomy from behind” [original in French; my translation].  The same perverse practice, I have observed, distinguishes the historians of American universities.  They will begin at the wrong end, with the “dear old College” of their own undergraduate days, and work backwards; they love to interpret the early years of the institution in the light of their personal experience a century or so later.  (“Precedence at Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century,” Proc. Am. Antiquarian Soc., 42 (1932) 372)


Morison might as well have been writing about most scholars of heraldry, who regularly interpret the use of arms in other times and places by reference to the theories, rules, and customs of their own time and place, many of which grew up much more recently than the scholars realize.  I cannot promise that what follows will be totally free of this tendency or other intellectual biases, but I’ll do my best.

 

In any event, attacking the issue from the front means going through a certain amount of history.  Some of you know the history and will be bored, but bear with me.

 

First, it would be foolish to deny that heraldry originated and developed in societies that were more or less stratified and hierarchical, almost always more so than the one we live in today.  The question, to my mind, is whether the essential character of heraldry is inextricably bound up with the unequal social environment in which it evolved.

 

So…

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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06 November 2015 16:05
 

I. As an empirical fact, do personal arms “explicitly affirm inequality?" Does their use necessarily imply a claim to elevated social status?

No, it does not necessarily do so and, I would argue, often has in fact not done so. It is certainly true that the fashion of using heraldic arms first took hold among monarchs and great feudal magnates. But it soon spread to knights, then was taken up by people spreading from the top to very near the bottom of the medieval social ladder.

 

This first occurred in the very same regions where heraldry developed in the first place (northern France, the Low Countries, and southern England), where people who could not conceivably be termed “gentle” or “noble” by the standards of the time began using arms as early as the beginning of the 13th century. It was not until the end of the 16th century that we find theorists propounding the notion that bearing arms was or ought to be limited to a particular class (see more below).

 

Armorial seals of burghers, craftsmen, and tradesmen appeared in Artois, Picardy, Flanders, and the lower Rhine provinces of Germany as early as 1240. The practice spread rapidly, reaching as far as Switzerland, Poland, and Navarre by the middle of the 1300s. Donald Galbreath and Léon Jequier (Manuel du Blason, 1977) studied hundred of seals used by bourgeois (burghers, citizens) of towns and cities in these areas during this period and found that in some places as many as 90% were armorial.

 

The reality was no different in England. In The Merchant Class of London (1948), Sylvia Thrupp presents documentary and physical evidence showing that “it was customary for aldermen to bear arms in the same manner as any military commander of high rank.” In fact, medieval London’s civic militia regulations required each alderman to lead the men of his ward at assemblies of the general watch with his “pennon of arms” flying. Without arms, there could have been no pennon of arms. Thrupp sums up that “On the whole there is little doubt that the use of arms was fairly widespread among London merchants in both [the 14th and 15th] centuries, and provincial deeds and monuments indicate, in the same way, that the custom was also common among the greater provincial merchants.”

 

Nor was it only the greater merchants who used arms. In London, many of the aldermen who used armorial bearings did so long before they were elected, some of them while still in their mid-twenties. Scores of seals survive belonging to merchants and artisans who never became aldermen at all. The same pattern held true elsewhere in Europe. In Artois and Picardy, a majority of the seals used by bourgeois other than aldermen were armorial. Among seals used by those who were specifically identified as craftsmen (a category that was clearly distinguished from, and lower than, merchants), something like 40% were armorial. The level to which heraldic usage penetrated in some places can be illustrated by the case of Lucerne, then a town of about 4,000. In 1408, the city’s bread-bakers’ guild put together a book of the arms of its 57 members. With a total market of 4,000 mouths to feed, there is no way the 57th most successful baker could have been a man of remarkable wealth or status, and it beggars belief that his use of arms could have been taken to assert such.

 

Even peasants are known to have used arms as early as the 1300s, in areas such as Normandy, Flanders, Picardy, Lower Saxony, Frisia, Tirol, and Switzerland. In Picardy alone, the 14th century examples number in the hundreds. In Germany, “cases can even be sporadically observed of the bearing of arms by members of ‘dishonorable’ callings (skinners, executioners, lackeys, and others)” (Ludwig Biewer, ed., Handbuch der Heraldik – Wappenfibel). Michel Pastoureau cites at least two examples of French executioners who also used armorial seals. Executioners, along with gravediggers, were at the very bottom of the medieval social scale; their identity was known, and it is implausible that their use of arms could have been interpreted as an assertion of elevated status.

 

In conclusion, if we do not “attack” the subject “from behind,” there is no basis for characterizing the use of arms in the Middle Ages as an explicit statement of social class. They could not logically have been used for that purpose when first adopted (what sense would it make for a king to use a type of symbol no one had ever seen before to proclaim his kingship?), and there is not a shred of evidence that anyone at the time objected to the progressively wider use of arms by people lower and lower on the social ladder. Even in England, Thrupp could find no indication that the right of merchants to use arms “was [ever] challenged or ridiculed” during the Middle Ages. On the contrary, every early writer who addressed the matter affirms that any man could adopt arms of his own devising as long as they didn’t infringe the rights of another. “Attacking from behind,” English theorists assume that these writers must be referring only to gentlemen. But surely Bartolo di Sassoferrato and the other medieval commentators were well aware that the merchants, artisans, and farmers among whom they lived were using armorial bearings. If they had believed such people had no right to use such devices, wouldn’t they have said so?

 

More to come tomorrow.

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
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06 November 2015 23:31
 

Thanks to Joe for starting anew in a separate thread.

So far, so good; I hope that others will wait for Joe to post his entire essay before commenting, pro or con, on the content.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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07 November 2015 12:32
 

If arms do not necessarily assert status, how did we come to perceive them as doing so?

It is an undeniable fact that personal arms, in most places, are interpreted as reflecting or asserting status of some sort. This is not intrinsic to heraldry as such, but a by-product of the historic correlation between status and the frequency of use of arms. Michel Pastoureau observes that “although everyone on the continent of Europe has the right to bear arms, not everyone necessarily does.” Some social classes and groups use arms more widely than others. Pastoureau likens arms to modern business cards: “Anyone can have one but not everyone does.” Heraldry is similar in this respect to many other behaviors that are class-associated but not class-limited: playing lacrosse, sailing, frequenting art galleries, subscribing to the opera or ballet, or (in past years) dressing for dinner. No one would take doing any of these as necessarily asserting any particular class standing.

 

The de facto correlation between arms and social class varies from time to time and place to place. The Handbuch der Heraldik tells us that “ever since the 14th century, the bearing of arms has been common in all classes of the German people, although the least so among farmers. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the custom of bearing family arms was general throughout the urban citizen class [Bürgertum, bourgeoisie]” (emphasis added), but most widespread among the learned professions (professors, lawyers, physicians, etc.) and the urban patriciate, i.e., the rich merchants who dominated city government.

 

The picture was similar in France, where d’Hozier’s Armorial Général de France tells us very precisely who was considered worthy of bearing arms at the end of the 1600s. Of the roughly 120,000 arms in the AGF, only about 20,000 belonged to noblemen (Pastoureau). The other 80% were those of corporate bodies or non-nobles. Examining several randomly chosen volumes of the AGF shows that these non-nobles were mostly magistrates, doctors, merchants, and artisans—the bourgeoisie. They included a fair number of people of relatively modest standing in modest places: dry goods merchants, potters, innkeepers, bakers, butchers, weavers, often in very small communities. But of course the use of arms among members of the Third Estate was comparatively more prevalent among those of higher standing: government officials, non-noble landowners, and those described as marchands than among those described in their AGF entries as practicing an artisanal trade.

 

The same was essentially true in England, but our perception of the reality is colored by three elements specific to the English case: the vague nature of social distinctions; the existence of an official heraldic ideology that purported to restrict the use of arms to specific, rather high ranking classes; and the mismatch between this ideology and actual practice.

 

On the Continent, whether one was noble or not was a matter of provable fact, not a judgment call. That was not the case with the corresponding class of "gentlemen" in England. The upper limit of “esquire” was fairly clear, because the next level up, knights, had to be officially appointed. But the boundary between “esquire” and “gentleman” was murky, and that between “gentleman” and “yeoman” even more so. For all practical purposes, “gentleman” was defined the same way Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography: “I know it when I see it.” Or, in the words of John Selden, the leading 17th century authority on titles and dignities, “What a gentleman is ‘tis difficult with us to define.”

 

Even though no one could provide a workable, objective definition—Lord Coke’s “Gentlemen are those who bear coat armour” was essentially tautological—“by the sixteenth century the heralds had taught all men that the shield of arms was symbol and voucher of gentility” (Oswald Barron). Why the disconnect?

 

The problem was that, during the period 1500-1600, heraldic theorists all across Europe had begun arguing that the bearing of arms should be restricted to the noble/gentle classes. The premise was that coat armor’s original function had been military, and therefore only the military class had a right to use it. This was, of course, totally disconnected from reality. As Maurice Keen points out in The Origins of the English Gentleman, the English gentry had not been a military class for well over 100 years by this time. The Dutch heraldist Cornelis Pama observes that, by the late Middle Ages, the only thing military about a coat of arms was the shape of the field on which it was emblazoned. Nevertheless, Francis Thynne (Lancaster Herald) asserted that during the medieval golden age, armorial bearings had been “the peculiar reward and honour of military service” and concluded from this counter-factual assumption that the English heralds were therefore obliged to “prohibit any merchant, or any other” from using “devises in escutcheons or shields.” The right to use such insignia, he contended, belonged only “to gentlemen bearing arms, and to none other.”

 

In practice, however, neither the Court of Chivalry nor the heralds actually acted according to Thynne’s dictum, although the heralds pretended to. As for the Court of Chivalry, whenever it was necessary to determine whether someone was a gentleman (a question that came up in the vast majority its cases), the court seldom even took evidence about a right to arms. Instead, disputes over gentility were almost always decided according to testimony as to whether the man and his family lived as and were “reputed, accounted and taken to be” gentlemen (see Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry). In one case the court actually found a man not to be a gentleman even though he proved that his arms had been accepted and recorded by the heralds.

 

Meanwhile, the kings of arms continued to confirm and grant arms to the same sorts of people who had been using arms for the previous several centuries, hundreds of whom would not have been accounted gentlemen by the traditional “know it when I see it” standards, such as “ancient” blood and a substantial land-based income. Indeed, the records of the visitations are full of men officially described not as “esq.” or “gent.,” but as “fishmonger and citizen of Norwich,” “skinner of York,” “shipwright and citizen of Bristol,” and so on. In the published edition of the 1568 visitation of London, 102 of the 196 families to which arms were confirmed show no one in their pedigree (including the person submitting it) described as “esquire” or “gentleman.” Of these, only 32 had a lord mayor or aldermen in the family tree; the vast majority of the other confirmands are described as “citizen and [trade or craft].” And the idea that these people were automatically considered to be gentlemen even though not described as such is belied by the fact that several of those in the other category, those who were described as gentlemen, were also given the further specification of a trade: “gent., citizen and haberdasher;” “gent., citizen and fishmonger.”

 

In short, the evidence on how heraldry was actually used in England at the time the colonization of America began bears out the view expressed in the 1914 report of the NEHGS Committee on Heraldry: "The use of coat armor was by no means confined to the nobility and the landed gentry. The practice of using arms had developed naturally like the practice of using surnames. It extended down into much lower strata of English middle-class society than is commonly supposed" [emphasis added].

 

More tomorrow. I warned you that this was going to be long.

 
David Pope
 
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09 November 2015 21:46
 

Joe,

Thanks for the time and energy you’re putting into this.  I look forward to the next installment.  I recently finished Keen’s Origins of the English Gentleman, which seemed to me, at least, to make a strong case for arms asserting social standing, even when that social standing was pretty far down the food chain.  I’ll likely go back and re-read it, in light of your comments.

 

David

 
MacEanruig
 
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10 November 2015 08:32
 

I have enjoyed reading this thus far. Just curious, will this be developed into a larger academic paper with sources? I feel this is very relevant argument. Looking forward with anticipation to reading more of these posts.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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10 November 2015 09:47
 

Continuing on from my previous post, first with a note to Mark:  none of what I’ve posted up to now, with the exception of the next to last paragraph of the last post, is original.  That paragraph and what follows are largely my own theorizing based on the facts presented up to now.

This situation (of the heralds continuing to grant arms to people they did not explicitly define as "gentlemen") was not the result of free-lancing.  The confirmation of arms to people who were not officially deemed gentlemen was in perfect accord with the instructions for the visitations, which defined eligibility for arms according to two sets of criteria.  One of these was based on social standing, but it did not require “gentility,” merely a “good, honest reputation,” no “vile [i.e., unfree] blood,” and that the person be neither a rebel nor a heretic. The other criterion was financial:  at least £10/year in land-based income or possession of movable goods worth at least £300.

 

If we read the two financial alternatives in the context of similar provisos in other medieval and early modern laws and regulations, it is clear that they were intended for different groups of people, the first for the landed gentry, the second for urban dwellers.  For example, a sumptuary law of 1363 restricted the right to wear silk and fine furs based on similar financial criteria, the first (an annual land-based income over £100) specifically to be applied to “gentlemen,” and the other (possession of goods worth over £500) specifically applied to “citizens.”

 

(Interestingly, this distinction in assessing the standing of rural vs. urban people was applied in the colonial political context:  the legislative franchise in many of the American colonies was set at X acres of land, or, for those living in towns, ownership of a house and £Y worth of goods and cash.)

 

The differentiation between the “gentleman” whose standing was derived from land-ownership and the “citizen” whose standing was derived from membership in a recognized guild was still fully current in the late 1500s.  In the same work in which Sir Thomas Smith described the basis on which his contemporaries judged gentility, he also listed gentlemen and citizens as the fourth and fifth of six distinct categories of subjects who participated in the government of the realm.

 

The problem is that the theory linking arms and gentility had taken such a firm grip that these two distinct categories became muddled together in people’s minds, influencing how arms came to be perceived by Englishmen of the time and by their literal and figurative descendants ever since.  On the Continent, the theory that the use of arms was the exclusive province of the nobility could easily be dismissed as nonsense.  People understood that nobles were nobles and bourgeois were bourgeois.  A bourgeois or a roturier (non-noble landowner) might become noble (e.g., in France, by purchasing one of the thousands of offices that conferred nobility on the holder), but at any given moment he was one or the other.

 

In England, where “noble” meant “peer,” a citizen, burgess, or yeoman could rarely become “noble,” but thanks to the murky definition of gentry, he could become a “gentleman” by the means outlined by Sir Thomas Smith:  “As for gentlemen, they be made good cheape in England. For whosoever studieth the lawes of the realme, who studieth in the universities, who professeth liberall sciences, and to be shorte, who can live idly and without manuall labour, and will beare the port, charge and countenaunce of a gentleman, he shall be called master… and shall be taken for a gentleman.”  Then, since the heralds had persuaded everyone that a real gentleman had to have a coat of arms, “a king of Heraulds shal also give him [the new gentleman] for mony, armes newly made and invented, which the title shall beare that the said Herauld hath perused and seen olde Registers where his auncestors in times past had borne the same: Or if he wil do it more truely and of better faith, he will write that for the merittes of that man, and certaine qualities which he doth see in him, and noble actes which he hath done, by the authoritie which he hath as the king of Heraldes and armes, he giveth to him and his heires these and these armes….”

 

In other words, the theorists’ sensitivity about the bearing of arms by those with no “ancient blood” and no military record could be assuaged by a little heraldic fiction, and the recipient would have the satisfaction of being recognized as a gentleman and not merely a burgess or citizen—by the heralds if not by gentlemen of older blood.

 

None of this rationalization was necessary on the Continent.  As a result “burgher arms” were never treated there with the disdain commonly expressed by English heraldists.  In England, burgher arms in the proper sense of the term—arms borne by “citizens” and “burgesses”—existed just as much as they did on the Continent, but the theory of English heraldry led them to morph imperceptibly into "gentle" arms.

 

On the Continent, far from being disparaged, they were an integral part of the heraldic landscape.  According to the Handbuch der Heraldik,, “For [German patricians], as for the nobility, the bearing of arms was taken for granted.”  As we have seen, the same would have been true for the French haute bourgeoisie.

 

My argument is that it was equally true for the upper tier of English citizens and burgesses, with the difference that this use came to be interpreted as a claim of gentility/nobility and not the equally respectable but different status of citizen/burgess.  Thus the confluence of ambiguous terminology and official adherence to an ahistorical theory of heraldry caused arms to be interpreted as meaning something considerably grander than they really did.

 

This is not to say that an arms-bearing citizen or burgess in England, or bourgeois/Burger on the Continent, was a man of negligible standing, or that, by the time the colonies were settled, people would have taken seriously the armorial pretensions of just anyone.  In general, only a minority of the residents of a city or borough had citizen/burgess status, and only a minority of this minority would have been likely to bear arms.  In London, for example, achieving citizenship required not only qualification as a practitioner of the relevant trade but also exhibiting qualities of honesty, wisdom, prudence, and discretion, all not coincidentally traits associated with success in business.  Sylvia Thrupp estimates that in 1501, this citizen class in London (including families, etc.) comprised about 6,000 people, one-fifth of the total population.  Based on her evidence of seals, etc., this would suggest that considerably less than half of that fifth used heraldic arms.

 

Meanwhile, of course, prosperous yeomen in the countryside continued assuming arms, sometimes new and original, sometimes usurping those of families to whom they thought or wished they were related.  And right up to the end of the visitations in about 1690, the visiting heralds kept confirming those arms if the claimant could prove their use over several generations and pass the eye test of gentility.  We now mentally merge these two categories of new armigers into one, but their contemporaries distinguished between them:  gentlemen (albeit "gentlemen of the first head") and citizens/burgesses.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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10 November 2015 14:01
 

Mike McC reminds me that I didn’t say "more to come" at the end of the previous post.

More to come.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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11 November 2015 10:58
 

If using a coat of arms has come to be understood as making some sort of statement about the bearer, what does it say?  Does the statement depend on whether the arms are inherited or new?

To address the second question first:  the use of inherited arms may well make no statement at all beyond a claim to be descended from people who previously used the arms.  Certainly some who use arms reflect on their significance, and others do not.  Those who are inclined to see themselves as of superior birth may well point to their arms in support of that opinion.  Those who wish they were of superior birth and discover a coat of arms in their past are probably even more likely to seize on that as proof of their presumptively inherited gentility.  Equally, some who use inherited arms don’t give the matter a second thought and simply use them because that’s what the family has “always” done.

 

By contrast, acquiring a new coat of arms, either by grant from a herald or unilaterally, historically has made a statement, at least in the period since the European settlement of North America.  I would suggest that taking up a coat of arms actually signifies three things, one about the individual himself, one about his family, and one about his and his family’s relationship with the broader society.

 

First and simplest, it asserts that the person is free—not a slave, not a serf, etc.  This seems like a outdated message today, but in the early centuries of heraldry it was a real one.  Note that the word “vile” in the instructions barring English heralds from granting arms to persons of “vile blood” was not a moral injunction; "vile" simply meant “unfree” and may be etymologically related to “villein.”  (Around the turn of the 20th century, rebutting those who thought a grant of arms was a grant of "lesser nobility," Sir George Sitwell mischievously suggested that no one descended from a villein could legitimately be considered a gentleman or be qualified to bear arms.)

 

Secondly, since one of the things that makes personal arms different from other types of signs is that they are hereditary, it follows that using a coat of arms implies consciousness of the family as an enduring organism.  (Leaving aside the special case of persons under vows of celibacy.)  The use of inherited arms reflects awareness of the existence of this organism both backward and forward over time; the use of new arms reflects a commitment to its permanence into the future.  Thus the growing adoption of heraldic arms—tesseræ gentilitiæ or “tokens of kinship”—by medieval urban merchants, professionals, artisans, and rural smallholders can be explained in part by a growing sense of family identity.

 

Consciousness of the family as something that spans multiple generations would have been fostered by the spread of literacy (facilitating the keeping of private family records) and the accumulation of sufficient wealth to be passed on to future generations.  Put another way, people at the bottom end of the socio-economic spectrum were not ipso facto barred from the use of heraldic emblems, but they were too busy surviving day-to-day to bother with finding ways to express family identity in graphic form, assuming that, in a non-tribal society, they even had any systematic way of recalling family history more than one or two generations back.  To this extent, the historic association between bearing arms and socioeconomic status may be more the result of consciousness than of prosperity in itself.

 

(Comment:  Note that family consciousness is not the same as family pride, although the two may be intertwined.  Even when pride is involved, however, it does not necessarily imply an adverse comparison with other families.  My second cousins in Yazoo County, Miss., are far prouder of their paternal grandfather who by dint of very hard manual labor managed to clear the land and crop mortgages that had encumbered the small family farm since Reconstruction than they are of the maternal uncle who was governor of the state and a federal appellate judge.  This pride doesn’t depend in the least on whether the grandfather’s neighbors were or weren’t able to accomplish the same thing.)

 

Finally, as I have said, the use of personal arms does, at least de facto imply some kind of standing in the community, even though (I argue) this element is not essential to heraldry the way family consciousness is.

 

Fred contends that this assertion is one of social standing vis-à-vis other people in the community—it says, in effect, “I am in some sense better than these other people around me.”  I would posit that what it actually asserts is more subtle.  My theory is that it is an assertion of a right and qualification for full participation in the life of the society, particularly political life.  It says, in effect, “I am just as good as the other people who govern my community, and just as qualified to share in that role.”  Unlike “better than,” “just as good as” does not necessarily require that there be people in the community who are ineligible to rule, or even less qualified to rule.  Whether it does or not, and precisely what the benchmark is, will obviously vary according to how power is distributed in a given polity.  (Example of the distinction:  both "just as good as" and "better than" comparisons would have been central to the self-image of a poor white sharecropper in the American South of the 1930s:  "just as good as" other white people, "better than" even the most prosperous black people.)

 

Okay, I now hear people slamming their laptops shut at this crackpot politicization of heraldry.  So I’ll give everyone a chance to cool down before explaining further tomorrow.

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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11 November 2015 11:06
 

Joe, this is a wonderful essay, and I’m flattered to have had any role in inspiring it. I will, of course, refrain from commenting until it is complete.

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
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11 November 2015 15:22
 

Ditto Fred (except for inspiring, which is on him!)

 
Luis Cid
 
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11 November 2015 21:48
 

Great work Joe!  I’m looking forward to your coming posts.  These posts could be the bones of a good short book on the subject!

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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12 November 2015 10:21
 

An explanatory aside here.

It often strikes me how much the way we approach analytical problems is shaped by our background and education.  When I was in grad school (political science), the professor in the course in empirical political theory opened the very first class by asking "What is your assumption of the political?"  None of us knew what the hell he was talking about, and I’m not sure he ever explained clearly.  He was a recognized luminary, a former president of the American Political Science Association, but his lecture style was about as intelligible as Finnegan’s Wake.

 

My classmates and I eventually decided that what he meant was, how do you see the relative primacy of politics in the world?  Is politics driven by economics or the other way around?  Is politics derivative of social structures, or are social structures created by politics?  And so on.

 

So that’s my excuse, if I need one, for analyzing heraldry as a manifestation of politics.  It’s not my fault, it’s just how I was raised.  (And yes, at age 22 you’re still being raised.)

 

Anyway, back to the essay.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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12 November 2015 10:37
 

As suggested by my need to explain myself, I recognize that the notion of personal arms reflecting political standing is unusual if not unheard of when applied to the heraldry of Anglophone countries. I came upon this idea via Patricia Fortini Brown’s Private Lives in Renaissance Venice, where she observes that displaying a coat of arms in that republic in the late medieval period was not regarded as a claim (let alone proof) of nobility, but as a declaration that the family using the arms possessed “a certain level of politia.” This term, which can be translated approximately as “civility” or “urbanity,” referred not only to refined manners, as we understand those words today, but also to the collective competency of the family’s members to participate in governing the city. This made me wonder whether the same connection could be found elsewhere.

And, as it turns out, the places where the use of heraldry by non-nobles in the early period was the most prevalent were precisely those where political enfranchisement was the greatest—the merchant and manufacturing cities of northern France, the Netherlands, and northern Germany. The great Dutch heraldic scholar Cornelis Pama contends that the numerical dominance of burgers among those who bore arms in his country under the republic gave Dutch heraldry a permanently burgerlijk (bourgeois) character. He goes on to point out that “after the Netherlands, it is mainly in Switzerland that bourgeois heraldry is most deeply rooted. Here, as with us, there was a great desire for freedom that expressed itself in urban privileges and civil liberties, and which finally found its culmination in a free republic, where the bourgeois element set the tone. Hindered by no imperial or royal power, citizen burger[/I” class=“bbcode_wiki”]I]burger[/I heraldry could develop freely in these countries, and flourish.”

 

As for neighboring Germany, the Handbuch der Heraldik links the growing use of arms by the artisan class (as opposed to the patrician merchants) to their attainment of “a greater role in city government following the social upheavals of the Middle Ages.” It also notes that the German-speaking areas where the use of arms by small farmers was most extensive were those in which peasants had been able to achieve their personal freedom: Lower Saxony, Frisia, Tyrol, and Switzerland. I don’t have any data on it, but it is also intriguing that Pastoureau mentions Navarre as one of the places in which non-noble heraldry appeared at a relatively early date, and I wonder whether this might be connected to the rights of self-government enjoyed by the Basque towns.

 

What about England? While English heraldists have not focused on the link between political standing and the bearing of arms, the connection becomes apparent if we peel back the supposed connection between arms and gentry. In The Rise of the English Gentleman, Maurice Keen notes that at a very early date coats of arms were not merely family insignia but were associated with hereditary offices and feudal landholding. One of the chief aspects of feudal landholding is, of course, that the feudal superior is vested with political power over his vassals. Later, during the period when the term “esquire” was beginning to refer to a social rank rather than a military function, whether or not a man was considered an esquire depended more on whether his land had political authority attached to it (e.g. as a lord of the manor) than merely how many acres he owned.

 

Later, as yeomen started working their way up into the gentry class, participation in the business of ruling the kingdom was a key metric for gauging the standing of a rising family. In the absence of clear criteria for who was a gentleman, Keen offers what he calls an “identi-kit” of 16th-century gentility. Two of his five metrics have to do with holding office and exercising authority. The prosperous farmer who met Sir Thomas Smith’s somewhat facetious “port, charge and countenance” test was more likely to be accepted by his neighbors as a gentleman if his newly acquired lands had manorial rights attached to them. In addition, while exercising power was significant in its own right, it also put new men in close association with more established gentry, and such association with other gentlemen was seen as yet a third mark of gentility.

 

The same connection between office and status applied in England’s urban context. Citizens were ranked according to various classifications, all revolving around the premise that to be “more sufficient” and “more able” led to being “more powerful.” Those who were both sufficient (i.e., wealthy) and able were the natural leaders of the city’s political life. Having achieved wealth implied possession of traits valued by a bourgeois community, such as prudence and good judgment; to those the leaders of the community would also have applied their assessment of a man’s trustworthiness and self-control. In any case, the higher a man’s standing according to these indices, the greater his expected contribution to governance. Not only was more expected of those to whom more had been given; the holding of office then permanently reinforced the socio-political standing of his family. Judicial office was especially prestigious. Honor was also attached to election as the master or warden of a guild, the degree of the honor being dependent on the size, wealth, and prestige of the guild. A man who began using a coat of arms in this environment was manifesting a desire, Thrupp says, to be thought “estatly of his gouvernaunce,” a concept that seems very close in spirit to the northern Italian notion of politia, entailing both personal conduct and manners as well as involvement in affairs of state.

 

This connection between social rank and political competence is also vouched for by early modern writers on English law and government. One theme that runs throughout Sir Thomas Smith’s several alternative ways of categorizing Englishmen in De Republica Anglorum is the distinction between those who rule (the sovereign, peers, knights, esquires, gentlemen, citizens and burgesses, and yeomen—in that order) and those who do not rule (“day laborers, poor husbandmen, merchants or retailers which have no free land, copyholders, all artificers … These have no voice nor authority in our commonwealth.”)

 

As I observed yesterday, pinpointing the status asserted by the use of arms varies by the society concerned. In medieval and early modern Switzerland, the status required was comparatively modest. I have already mentioned the 1408 armorial from Lucerne containing the arms of 57 bread-bakers. Similar examples are the twelve armorial windows in the Zurich inn “Zur Linde,” dating from 1605, each with the arms of one of the city’s guilds surrounded by the personal arms of 16 or so leading members; the table of the tanners’ guild of Solothurn painted with the arms of 155 members during the period 1594-1733; and the Church of the Holy Ghost in Bern (1729) with more than 200 pews adorned with the carved and painted arms of the owners (this would account for at least a quarter of the seating in the church). Once again, the connection I am positing is not that all these people were more or less equally rich or of equally old "blood" but that they were all vested to some degree with a voice in running the community. In fact, in the case of Bern, it was precisely the families who were considered to have a "seat at the table" who had an armorially-marked seat in the church; just as in New England, the church was where town meetings took place.

 

Elsewhere, the bearing of arms was obviously more selective. The £10 landed-income standard for an English grant or confirmation of arms during the visitations was five times the 40s landed-income required for a yeoman to be eligible to vote for a county member of Parliament. On the other hand, it was only a quarter of the £40 required to be elected to one of the county seats in the Commons. So a man who could plausibly bear arms fell somewhere between "merely" having the right to vote and being qualified to sit at Westminster.

 

In the cities and boroughs the qualifications for voting and holding office were less clear—they depended on the charter and might range from merely owning your own fireplace (the "potwalloper" franchise) to being part of a closed, self-perpetuating council. But in a place like London the qualification to vote was enjoyed by those who had been made free of one of the recognized livery companies, and the line of plausible "armigerousness" fell somewhere between that and actually serving as an alderman. Even in the far smaller boroughs, such as Stratford-upon-Avon, we have the famous example of John Shakespeare’s grant as evidence that serving as an alderman was sufficient, even for the heralds, for a man to be arms-worthy.

 

Shakespeare brings us to the era of colonial settlement, and I shall attempt to apply the foregoing framework to our colonial period in the next installment.

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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12 November 2015 14:04
 

Fair enough.


Joseph McMillan;105161 wrote:

An explanatory aside here.

It often strikes me how much the way we approach analytical problems is shaped by our background and education.  When I was in grad school (political science), the professor in the course in empirical political theory opened the very first class by asking "What is your assumption of the political?"  None of us knew what the hell he was talking about, and I’m not sure he ever explained clearly.  He was a recognized luminary, a former president of the American Political Science Association, but his lecture style was about as intelligible as Finnegan’s Wake.

 

My classmates and I eventually decided that what he meant was, how do you see the relative primacy of politics in the world?  Is politics driven by economics or the other way around?  Is politics derivative of social structures, or are social structures created by politics?  And so on.

 

So that’s my excuse, if I need one, for analyzing heraldry as a manifestation of politics.  It’s not my fault, it’s just how I was raised.  (And yes, at age 22 you’re still being raised.)

 

Anyway, back to the essay.

 

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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13 November 2015 10:01
 

I’m starting to understand how Charles Dickens must have felt writing his serial novels. I wonder if he know how they were going to end as he was going along…

What did arms and gentility mean in the English colonies in America?

 

As I was writing this section, shortly after posting the first installments of this essay, it occurred to me that the very first English grant of arms associated with North America supports my hypothesis that bearing arms was connected to political standing. This was the 1587 grant to the planned “Cittie of Ralegh in Virginia”—the famous Lost Colony—which included an augmentation to the existing arms of Governor John White and new arms for each of his assistant governors. The assistants’ arms were not granted in token of existing gentility or past achievement but solely on the basis of their prospective role in running the new colony. This is attested by the fact that the surviving draft patent includes blazons for several coats with blanks left for later insertion of the names of assistants who had not yet been named.

 

Obviously we cannot extrapolate from this one example to generalize about the use of arms in the colonies throughout the succeeding two centuries. As a matter of fact, it’s hard to generalize at all given the spotty nature of systematic scholarly research on heraldry during this period. New England has undoubtedly the best coverage, thanks to the early work of the NEHGS Committee on Heraldry, with Virginia probably second. I know the Virginia situation better than others, so the following may seem somewhat Virginia-heavy, but even there it will necessarily be impressionistic.

 

A lot more research needs to be done on the arms borne in the 13 colonies, where they came from, and the families who bore them. It should be possible to build a database of all the arms known to have been borne in the present United States during the pre-Independence period along with profiles of the men who bore them and the provenance of the arms they bore, perhaps a good long-term project for the AHS to undertake. One could then see how these men measured up to the criteria suggested by Keen for gauging who in England would have been considered a gentleman, and draw conclusions as to whether the use of arms in the colonies was primarily an assertion of socio-economic class, of political standing, or something else. (Or nothing.)

 

Also, as far as I know there is very scanty primary evidence about what the colonists thought bearing a coat of arms meant. I’ve found a few exceptions and will mention them below. I have not yet had a chance to read the master’s thesis pointed out by Seb Nelson about the use of arms in colonial Virginia, but most discussions of the subject that I have seen essentially reflect the post hoc assumption that a coat of arms meant to the colonials exactly what it meant to 19th century British heraldists.

 

In the absence of comprehensive, systematic data, I propose to consider three questions against more or less anecdotal evidence. First, how was colonial society different from English society measured by the criteria in Maurice Keen’s “identi-kit” of gentility? Second, is there a discernible link between high scores on Keen’s indices and the use of coat armor? Finally, what might all this imply for perceptions of the entitlement to bear heraldic arms going into the American Revolution?

 

First, Keen’s “identi-kit.” He sets out five metrics of gentility:

1. Antiquity of blood.

2. Source of livelihood, preferably lands freely held and ideally with manorial rights attached.

3. Holding office.

4. Kinship or "habitual association" with gentlemen and people of noble blood.

5. Honorable service in war, government administration, or a noble household.

 

Taking these more or less in turn (I’m going to flip the sequence of 4 and 5 because in the colonial context 3 and 5 are logically related to each other):

 

1. Antiquity of blood. Being of gentle descent (real or perceived) was seen as a matter of considerable consequence by people in most of the colonies, certainly in Virginia, even to the point of inflating the grandeur of one’s lineage—hard as that is to believe! One prominent Virginia family, the Fitzhughs, persisted in using the arms of a powerful but extinct medieval English family of that name, even though their English cousins repeatedly pointed out to them that they were actually entitled to a completely different (but newer) coat.

 

There is little to suggest, however, that antiquity of blood played much practical role in either the likelihood of bearing heraldic arms, the attainment of wealth, or the distribution of political power. Arms implying descent from a family that was gentle before 1485 (the usually semi-arbitrary date for the end of the Middle Ages in England) are no more frequent among members of the Council (the colonial political and economic elite) than among armigerous families in Virginia in general, and the proportion of such arms in both the general public and on the Council declines over the course of the colonial period.

 

There are numerous anecdotes of squabbles about the relative quality of different families’ blood, but these often seem to be covers for arguments about money or other issues. For example, when Councillor Daniel Parke, Jr., tried to weasel out of paying the £4,000 dowry he’d promised his daughter Frances, he attempted to justify himself by deprecating the family background of her husband, Councillor John Custis. Parke’s father-in-law, Councillor Philip Ludwell, is recorded to have dismissed this posturing by remarking that Parke’s own blood was no better than Custis’s or his own. Custis later played this same game of one-upmanship with respect to the families of his then-prospective daughter-in-law (Martha, daughter of Councillor John Dandridge) and his son-in-law, William Winch. Winch actually was of more obscure origin than the other families mentioned here, but neither the Parkes, Custises, Ludwells, nor Dandridges can be traced back more than one or two generations before their respective immigrant ancestors—hardly ancient Norman nobility!

 

With that, I’m going to stop for today, as the next metric, source of livelihood/land ownership, requires a rather long discussion.