Right to Bear Arms

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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07 June 2011 10:41
 

Breaking off from the supporters discussion, pursuing the issue of what sorts of people (in the U.S.) should use coats of arms…

David and Fred both seem to be channeling approximately the received British wisdom as to what constitutes Wappenfähigkeit (suitability to bear arms), but I’d like to commend everyone’s attention to a few historical facts that bear on the issue.

 

First is François Velde’s very interesting essay on "Commoners’ Arms in England," at http://heraldica.org/topics/britain/eng-comm.htm, in which he provides a list of 64 examples of London tradesmen and artisans—none of whom would have been considered a gentleman by the standards of the time—who are proven to have born heraldic arms between the early 14th and early 15th centuries.  His interpretation of this and other evidence can be read at http://www.heraldica.org/topics/britain/england1.htm#gentry.  (Those who are tempted to argue, based on modern realities, that "fishmonger" just means a member of the Company of Fishmongers and not someone who actually gets his hands slimy selling fish should keep in mind that until the early 1500s it was illegal in England to pursue any business other than your official trade.)

 

Moving across the Channel, the French heraldist Michel Pastoureau has found hundreds of armorial seals of burghers, craftsmen, tradesmen, and peasants in 14th century Normandy alone.  Cruise up the Seine a few centuries and look at the Armorial Général de France, compiled at the end of the 17th century.  Pastoureau and other French researchers have found that 80,000 of the 110,000 coats of arms registered by the juges d’armes belonged to non-nobles.  If you accept Edward’s argument that the untitled nobility in France equated to the gentry in England, this would mean that almost 3/4 of the arms in use in France in 1700 belonged to people below the level of the English gentry.

 

Moving southwest to Switzerland and reverse the time machine by 100 years and we find the famous table painted with the arms of the members of the tanners guild of Solothurn, a photo of which appears in Neudecker’s Heraldry:  Sources, Symbols, and Meanings.  Coming back forward to 1729, we find the newly-rebuilt Church of the Holy Spirit in Bern, in which almost all of the 200-300 pews are carved and painted with the family arms of the original pew-owners.  In a church with space for a total of about 2,000, this would mean that somewhere around a third to a half of the parishioners were armigerous.

 

And then going south to Italy, we find that in 1296 the Republic of Florence actually put the regulation of personal heraldry in the hands of the respective guilds themselves:  "Let no one bear painted arms, except according to the Statutes of his Guild," a clear indication that substantial numbers of merchants and artisans were allowed and expected to have armorial bearings. 

 

Where do these examples—which there is no reason to suppose are aberrations—lead us in deciding who in modern America should or shouldn’t bear arms?

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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Wilfred Leblanc
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19 June 2011 01:05
 

Joseph McMillan;84334 wrote:

David and Fred both seem to be channeling approximately the received British wisdom as to what constitutes Wappenfähigkeit (suitability to bear arms), but I’d like to commend everyone’s attention to a few historical facts that bear on the issue. . . . Where do these examples—which there is no reason to suppose are aberrations—lead us in deciding who in modern America should or shouldn’t bear arms?


"Approximately" may be about right, but I should note that my feelings about my/our British heritage are quite ambivalent. I think my own main interest in this splinter discussion has to do with my desire to able to tell myself an internally and externally consistent story about what American heraldry is and what its actual sources are. There is probably more than one narrative that can work, and there really isn’t one to which I am presently married, mainly because I don’t feel like any of them is totally making sense.

 

Now, I note that the question you’re posing is, "Who in modern America should or shouldn’t bear arms?" The answer to that may or may not depend to some degree on how the question would have been answered at some other time in American history.

 

How would you map the trajectory of American heraldry? Are any traditions besides those obtaining in England as of the 17th c. relevant? If so, to what degree?

 
David Pope
 
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19 June 2011 13:55
 

Fred White;84999 wrote:

I think my own main interest in this splinter discussion has to do with my desire to able to tell myself an internally and externally consistent story about what American heraldry is and what its actual sources are. There is probably more than one narrative that can work, and there really isn’t one to which I am presently married, mainly because I don’t feel like any of them is totally making sense.

Now, I note that the question you’re posing is, "Who in modern America should or shouldn’t bear arms?" The answer to that may or may not depend to some degree on how the question would have been answered at some other time in American history.


Fred,

 

This is exactly where my mind is at as well.  What I think I’ve gleaned is that many members of the society hold this opinion:

 

1.  America is a country formed of immigrants of many different nations and cultures.

2.  American heraldry should be an amalgam of the heraldic traditions of those different cultures, coupled with our nation’s republican sensibilities.

 

 

I think the rub is that attempts are made to tie the logic above (which is reasonable enough, on its own) to the historical uses/ traditions of heraldry in the United States.  That’s the bit that seems inconsistent.

 

Other than the Dutch influence in New York, it appears to me that American heraldry started out as English heraldry, with perhaps a smattering of French and German arms thrown in.  Perhaps it was a form of English heraldry that was more like the heraldic traditions that had existed in England before the Visitations, but an English tradition nonetheless.

 

I acknowledge that there would have been an influx of French heraldic traditions assimilated in 1812 (Louisiana enters the Union), and Spanish traditions in 1845 (Florida enters the Union), but by this time there was a tradition of English/American heraldry that was over 200 years old!

 

If my understanding of this history is correct, then by the mid-nineteenth century, American heraldic tradition already exists in a "fully-cooked" form and is not greatly influenced by the heraldic practices of Russia, Scandinavia, Italy, Portugal, etc.  If that is the case, then there isn’t a historical basis to incorporate/consider the heraldic traditions of these countries on American heraldry, despite large numbers of immigrants from these areas that now make up America.  One may argue that this is the way it should be done, but I don’t see that one can argue that heraldic traditions from these countries had any real/historical influence on the development of heraldry in America.

 

Then again, there’s much about American heraldry that I don’t know…

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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19 June 2011 17:23
 

David Pope;85028 wrote:

What I think I’ve gleaned is that many members of the society hold this opinion:

1. America is a country formed of immigrants of many different nations and cultures.

2. American heraldry should be an amalgam of the heraldic traditions of those different cultures, coupled with our nation’s republican sensibilities.


It may well be that many members hold these opinions. For what it’s worth, I don’t. My approach as to what American heraldry ought to be is to look to the following three sources, in this order of priority, governed by two overriding principles:

 

1. What has been the most usual practice of heraldically literate Americans on a particular issue since the time of settlement?

 

2. For areas in which we cannot discern a generally accepted American practice, what is the "logical common denominator" (Charles Drake’s term) concerning a particular area of heraldic practice across the heraldry-using world?

 

3. For areas that cannot be resolved by either of these reference points but that require resolution one way or the other, is there a practice or rule in some foreign heraldic culture that it makes sense to borrow?

 

The two overarching principles are that (1) all of this has to be adapted to be consistent with core American political and social mores, and (2) all of this has to be articulated consistent with the reality that American heraldry is not regulated by law, but only by the taste of its practitioners.


Quote:

Other than the Dutch influence in New York, it appears to me that American heraldry started out as English heraldry, with perhaps a smattering of French and German arms thrown in. Perhaps it was a form of English heraldry that was more like the heraldic traditions that had existed in England before the Visitations, but an English tradition nonetheless.


I think this is more or less true, particularly the part about American heraldic tradition in the English-speaking colonies being pre-visitation. We must remember that heraldry in English North America was never regulated, certainly not in practice and probably not even in theory.


Quote:

I acknowledge that there would have been an influx of French heraldic traditions assimilated in 1812 (Louisiana enters the Union), and Spanish traditions in 1845 (Florida enters the Union), but by this time there was a tradition of English/American heraldry that was over 200 years old!


But in these places there were traditions of Spanish-American and French-American heraldry that in some instances were even older.  Moreover, established legal and social norms didn’t simply disappear from these territories when they were acquired by the United States. The French-speaking residents of the old Northwest Territory were explicitly allowed by the Northwest Ordinance to preserve their traditional laws of inheritance, for example. There are decisions of the state supreme courts in Texas and the Southwest requiring various statutes on things like illegitimacy and marital property to be decided on the basis of old Spanish civil law. As Stanley Kowalski explains in A Streetcar Named Desire, "We got here in the state of Louisiana what’s known as the Napoleonic code." There are many aspects of property law in the West that derive from Spanish laws on things like water and mineral rights, and there’s also a reason why almost all the community property states in the U.S. lie outside the original territory of the United States.  So if we are to have a set of American rules of heraldry, they have to be drawn broadly enough for these traditions to fit comfortably within them.


Quote:

If my understanding of this history is correct, then by the mid-nineteenth century, American heraldic tradition already exists in a "fully-cooked" form and is not greatly influenced by the heraldic practices of Russia, Scandinavia, Italy, Portugal, etc. If that is the case, then there isn’t a historical basis to incorporate/consider the heraldic traditions of these countries on American heraldry, despite large numbers of immigrants from these areas that now make up America.


As noted above, I don’t believe in using these sources individually to define what American heraldic law or practice ought to be, but I think they all have to be taken into account when ascertaining the general transnational norms in the heraldry-using world (my source #2 above).  For example, how, if at all, should marital arms be marshalled?  Did an old Californio family like the Peraltas or De la Guerras have to start following the English custom of impaling just because California became part of the United States?  On what basis could we reasonably demand this?  Conversely, when an Anglo-American family moved to Louisiana, should they have been compelled to relinquish the use of their crest on the grounds that French and Spanish heraldic law forbade crests to non-nobles?

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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19 June 2011 20:06
 

David Pope;85028 wrote:

What I think I’ve gleaned is that many members of the society hold this opinion:

1.  America is a country formed of immigrants of many different nations and cultures.

2.  American heraldry should be an amalgam of the heraldic traditions of those different cultures, coupled with our nation’s republican sensibilities.

 

I think the rub is that attempts are made to tie the logic above (which is reasonable enough, on its own) to the historical uses/ traditions of heraldry in the United States.  That’s the bit that seems inconsistent.


That’s about my analysis of the situation.

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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19 June 2011 21:03
 

Joe’s approach seems the best thought-out I’ve seen.

I wonder what an example of the following would be:


Joseph McMillan;85037 wrote:

3. For areas that cannot be resolved by either of these reference points but that require resolution one way or the other, is there a practice or rule in some foreign heraldic culture that it makes sense to borrow?


The following seems to be where significant room for debate will always lie:


Quote:

The two overarching principles are that (1) all of this has to be adapted to be consistent with core American political and social mores, and (2) all of this has to be articulated consistent with the reality that American heraldry is not regulated by law, but only by the taste of its practitioners.

 

 
Kenneth Mansfield
 
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19 June 2011 21:29
 

The part I personally struggle with (as opposed to disagree with) is…
Joseph McMillan;85037 wrote:

all of this has to be adapted to be consistent with core American political and social mores


I have trouble squaring America’s political and social mores with each other, much less with heraldry. After all, the men who signed their names to the document declaring "all men are created equal" didn’t really think that. Maybe they aspired to that notion in some theoretical sense, but it certainly wasn’t true in their time and the early laws of this country did not reflect this ideal. So is heraldry supposed to keep pace as we become more and more egalitarian or follow the traditions it has held?


Fred White;85043 wrote:

Joe’s approach seems the best thought-out I’ve seen.

Certainly more thought out than any ideas I have. As stated before, I struggle with this whole idea.

 
 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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19 June 2011 22:46
 

Kenneth Mansfield;85045 wrote:

I have trouble squaring America’s political and social mores with each other, much less with heraldry.


Me, too. Not that I don’t think it can all be reconciled somehow, but as I said before, it seems like we’ve got an awful lot of competing narratives going on and it gets to be kind of, like, "Who’s on first?"

 

Even at the outset of American history, we find problems. The more I take into account Joe’s reminder about the pre-visitation status of early American arms and the social strata from which the early, armigerous New England immigrants came, the more I am reminded of the tension between the Puritan outlook and the Cavalier outlook. My sense is that Washington pretty well exemplified the latter outlook, which seems to have lent credence to the mother country’s regulation of heraldry and the notion that a coat of arms is a badge of membership in the minor nobility. And then, of course, you’ve got the British Borderer/Scotch-Irish and Quaker elements to contend with, too. Which of these is most informative for the direction American heraldry would take in the 13 original states alone?

 

And then we get the Dutch, the French, the Spanish . . . I’m guessing that there were very few armigers among the principal immigrants of the 19th c., and for that matter among the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch and Palatinate Germans (though of these, I do have some ancestors, the von Holtzendorffs, who were armigerous and perhaps not alone in so being. It’s just that I don’t recall seeing a lot of German arms in Crozier, et al.)

 

Anyway, it seems to me like we have to be able to say some tradition is the one that leads the way and that others have to be reconciled with, or we get very stuck.

 

Or, perhaps we take the tack that it’s proper for one to operate within the heraldic rules of his male-line ancestral culture. But where does that leave Poles, for instance, who aren’t of noble descent and want to assume arms? Do we ask them to default to pre-visitation English norms?

 
Charles E. Drake
 
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19 June 2011 23:03
 

Kenneth Mansfield;85045 wrote:

The part I personally struggle with (as opposed to disagree with) is…

 

I have trouble squaring America’s political and social mores with each other, much less with heraldry. After all, the men who signed their names to the document declaring "all men are created equal" didn’t really think that. Maybe they aspired to that notion in some theoretical sense, but it certainly wasn’t true in their time and the early laws of this country did not reflect this ideal. So is heraldry supposed to keep pace as we become more and more egalitarian or follow the traditions it has held?


I think every living tradition evolves. If it does not, then it is dead. We do not practice the Judaism of 3000 years ago, the Christianity of 1000 years ago, or understand the meaning of equality in the same way we did 200 years ago. Every living tradition has a mechanism for change, reinterpretation, a more enlightened understanding, etc., as culture and society evolve. So I think we cannot practice heraldry in the same way we did 200, or 400, or 800 years ago.

 

So I think Joe’s overarching principle should be modified slightly as


Quote:

all of this has to be adapted to be consistent with core American political and social mores as they currently exist or are understood


This isn’t always easy, of course.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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19 June 2011 23:18
 

Fred White;85048 wrote:

Or, perhaps we take the tack that it’s proper for one to operate within the heraldic rules of his male-line ancestral culture. But where does that leave Poles, for instance, who aren’t of noble descent and want to assume arms? Do we ask them to default to pre-visitation English norms?


No, I emphatically would not suggest that.  I might suggest that they may, if they like, design arms that are reminiscent of the Polish style without infringing upon any particular design (perhaps they might look into the few cases of non-noble arms of the bourgeoisie of the old Polish merchant cities for inspiration).  But as for the general approach to the adoption of arms in general, I would refer them to the general European pre-regulated attitude toward arms—that anyone may assume them, per Sassoferrato, echoed in the writings of dozens of early armorial theorists from one end of Europe to the other.  This was also the solution to the central dilemma of American heraldry that was hit upon by William Barton circa 1818 and again, independently, by the NEHGS COH in 1915.  As Barton put it:

 

- "Heraldic ensigns confer neither privileges nor titles and are, in themselves, as perfectly inoffensive to the commuinty as the surnames which denote different families."

 

- "[Assumed arms], when they are once appropriated to a particular family and do not belong to any other, will serve to distinguish that family, together with their descendants, from others."

 

- "No person of reputable character would wish to use any armorial insignia which might evidently appear to be the right of another."

 

As to American mores, well, they evolve, and generally their evolution is eventually formalized in laws like the 13th and 14th amendments, married women’s property acts, and adoption statutes.  But even in 1787, in the context of drafting the Constitution, an aristocrat like Charles Pinckney could extol the legal equality of all Americans and reject the concept of hereditary official rank.  True, Pinckney meant only free, white, male Americans, but the principle has prevailed even if it took time for it to be more fully realized.

 

Heraldry historically gets a bad name in the U.S. mainly when someone like William Whitmore tells everyone that it’s available only to those whose ancestors had been certified as gentlemen by the King of England’s minions.  If it is to have anything more than antiquarian interest,* the right to bear heraldic arms must be available on an equal basis, the same as any other right, whether or not we as private citizens may want to discourage some people from exercising it.

 

____________

*Which is what Whitmore argued was all it legitimately should have, even though he and his fellow founders of the NEHGS COH eagerly cited the extent of early armorial usage in New England to prove that their ancestors were just as gentle as those of the Southern rebels.

 
Kenneth Mansfield
 
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19 June 2011 23:29
 

Joseph McMillan;85051 wrote:

...the right to bear heraldic arms must be available on an equal basis, the same as any other right, whether or not we as private citizens may want to discourage some people from exercising it.

The former I agree with completely; the latter is what I struggle with. But I think that could be due to some social insecurities on my part.

 
 
Charles E. Drake
 
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20 June 2011 01:39
 

As to American heraldry, I think it has to be "whosoever will may come." As to fulfilling some criterion to qualify for arms, I believe the criterion is self-fulfulling. That is, when someone wants to bear arms, he meets the criterion. I have never known of a "base and unworthy person"* wishing to have a coat of arms.

As I have said before, it is similar to buying a tuxedo. No one does this unless he needs one.

 

It is different in the United Kingdom, of course, where arms are for gentlemen and there are people appointed to decide who qualifies. But since we have a different system here, we must allow everyone who aspires to be an armiger to become one.

 

* By this I am quoting traditional language, but I mean social criteria, not morality.

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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20 June 2011 02:20
 

I’m bringing this over from the supporters discussion because I think it’s relevant:


Michael F. McCartney;85031 wrote:

. . . Some of our ancestors may have been Dutch (well, not my own, but other Americans), BUT—they ceased to be Dutch when, for better or worse, the English took over New Amsterdam, well before our Independence.  They were thereafter no more nor less than English colonial subjects; & what they were able to legitimately continue from their Dutch roots was no more nor less than their English (or formerly-German or formerly-Swedish etc.) fellow colonial subjects.


This is a coherent, reasonable point of departure, and if this were the party line—that everything flows from colonial Anglo-American norms—I could abide it. It certainly has a way of keeping things simple. But extend the argument, and substitute Irish, Italians, French Creoles, Latinos, etc. for Dutch, and I wonder if one doesn’t start running into resistance at which he is apt to balk in light of contemporary mores.

 
Derek Howard
 
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20 June 2011 04:32
 

Are there any traces of any Russian heraldic influence in Alaska?

Derek Howard

 
David Pope
 
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20 June 2011 08:35
 

Kenneth Mansfield;85053 wrote:

The former I agree with completely; the latter is what I struggle with. But I think that could be due to some social insecurities on my part.


Struggle with in what way?

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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20 June 2011 08:51
 

Derek Howard;85064 wrote:

Are there any traces of any Russian heraldic influence in Alaska?

Derek Howard


None I’ve ever been able to discern in the area of personal heraldry, but the imperial arms have had an impact on the decorative arts among a number of the Indian tribes, including their use as a motif in basket weaving and on totem poles.  Like many of the European colonial powers, the Russians would distribute representations of their state arms to symbolize that those who accepted such medallions, etc., accepted the suzerainty of the tsar.

 

This article http://qmackie.wordpress.com/tag/southeast-alaska/ describes the tradition in some detail.  The author makes an interesting point that among the Alaskan tribes one sign that a powerful chief had acquired authority over another clan was that he gained the right to use the subject clan’s totems.  Thus, the author speculates, "By acquiring the Crest of the Imperial Russian lineage as compensation for their dead, the Tlingit Chiefs may have in effect subordinated the entire Russian aristocracy: a stunning coup in Tlingit terms.  The Russians may never have noticed that they had become Lesser Chiefs in their own colony."

 

 

This picture from the article is a Tlingit rattle in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

 

http://qmackie.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/tlingit-double-headed-eagle.jpg

 

This is one of the brass Russian eagles presented to the Sitka in 1804, from the same article.

 

http://qmackie.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/baranov-to-sitka-eagle-medallion.jpg