Right to Bear Arms

 
David Pope
 
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David Pope
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20 June 2011 08:58
 

Joseph McMillan;85037 wrote:

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.

 

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.

 

Charles E. Drake;85055 wrote:

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.


The two quotes above, taken together, do a good job of addressing my questions.  Thanks.

 

My only hang-up is that I think that the usual/historical practice in the U.S. since time of settlement was to connect the bearing arms with being of (or aspiring to) a certain social status.  But as Charles has pointed out, without an authoritive arms-regulating body, arms may be assumed by all-comers.  Perhaps this is such an esoteric pursuit that there is already a great measure of selectiveness built in…

 

In a similar way, and not wishing to give offense, my guess is that the modern day "gate-key" for COA-granted arms is the ability to pay the tariff.

 
Benjamin Thornton
 
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Benjamin Thornton
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20 June 2011 09:09
 

Joseph McMillan;85066 wrote:

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."


Fascinating.

 
Kenneth Mansfield
 
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20 June 2011 09:30
 

David Pope;85065 wrote:

Struggle with in what way?

Struggle with whether or not I believe the garbage man having a coat of arms diminishes my own, I suppose. Not sure I can put it into words this early on a Monday morning.

 
 
David Pope
 
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20 June 2011 09:34
 

Kenneth Mansfield;85070 wrote:

Struggle with whether or not I believe the garbage man having a coat of arms diminishes my own, I suppose. Not sure I can put it into words this early on a Monday morning.


PM sent.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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20 June 2011 09:49
 

David Pope;85068 wrote:

My only hang-up is that I think that the usual/historical practice in the U.S. since time of settlement was to connect the bearing arms with being of (or aspiring to) a certain social status.


I suppose this varied from person to person. Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer has a quotation from the eminent Pennsylvania Quaker botanist John Bartram (1699-1777), who was queried about how the arms displayed in his parlor squared with the Quaker ideal of simplicity. Bartram said, basically, that he viewed the arms as a sign of his family heritage and nothing more. Sorry I can’t quote it from memory.


Quote:

In a similar way, and not wishing to give offense, my guess is that the modern day "gate-key" for COA-granted arms is the ability to pay the tariff.


Well, let’s put it this way. The rec.heraldry newsgroup has been in operation since the mid-1990s, and despite repeated challenges over that period of time, no one has ever been able to come up with a single specific example within the last couple of centuries of the College of Arms turning someone down for lack of gentility.

 
David Pope
 
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20 June 2011 10:03
 

Joseph McMillan;85072 wrote:

I suppose this varied from person to person. Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer has a quotation from the eminent Pennsylvania Quaker botanist John Bartram (1699-1777), who was queried about how the arms displayed in his parlor squared with the Quaker ideal of simplicity. Bartram said, basically, that he viewed the arms as a sign of his family heritage and nothing more. Sorry I can’t quote it from memory.


Interesting.  I’ll have to try and find this.  Thanks.

 

Of course, I wish he would have explained what he meant by "family heritage"...

 
James Dempster
 
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20 June 2011 10:07
 

Kenneth Mansfield;85070 wrote:

Struggle with whether or not I believe the garbage man having a coat of arms diminishes my own, I suppose. Not sure I can put it into words this early on a Monday morning.


Well, a garbage man (or at least his descendants) having arms seemed to be no problem for Lyon Court. My arms have an extended destination to the heirs of my grandfather and he was that garbage man.

 

He retired as "Burgh Foreman", which is how he is described on my LP, but in a small town c2,000 at that time, he and his team had to turn their hands to anything. I have photos of him clearing snow from the main street (by hand, probably in 1947), concreting in the swings in the playground and could no doubt find ones of him collecting garbage. One of my last memories of him before his stoke was going round town (aged 8 or 9) with him and the Town Clerk ensuring that the maps of the whole town water and sewerage system were complete before the handover to the new local authority that was to replace the Burgh Council. I’m sure that he (in his 70s and missing a foot since WW1) and the Town Clerk found me very useful, running out with the business end of a 30-yard tape. Needless to say the updated maps were almost immediately lost by that new authority…

 

Being a garbage man is an honest, dirty, physical job of work and modern society grinds to a halt a lot faster through lack of garbage men than it does through lack of many "professions". I see no reason why a garbage man who wants to become armigerous should not become so.

 

James

 
Kenneth Mansfield
 
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20 June 2011 10:26
 

Thank you, James, for the reality check.

 
 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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20 June 2011 11:26
 

Kenneth Mansfield;85070 wrote:

Struggle with whether or not I believe the garbage man having a coat of arms diminishes my own, I suppose. Not sure I can put it into words this early on a Monday morning.


I might have to join you in group therapy for this. wink

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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20 June 2011 11:40
 

David Pope;85073 wrote:

Interesting. I’ll have to try and find this. Thanks.

Of course, I wish he would have explained what he meant by "family heritage"...


Here’s the passage. The narrator is identified as Iw_n Al_z, a Russian gentleman who visited Bartram on Crevecoeur’s behalf.


Quote:

I was no sooner entered, than I observed a coat of arms in a gilt frame with the name of John Bertram [sic]. The novelty of such a decoration, in such a place, struck me; I could not avoid asking, Does the society of Friends take any pride in those armorial bearings, which sometimes serve as marks of distinction between families, and much oftener as food for pride and ostentation? "Thee must know (said he) that my father was a French man, he brought this piece of painting over with him; I keep it as a piece of family furniture, and as a memorial of his removal hither."


Now in fact Bartram’s father wasn’t French but English, although he was apparently originally of Norman descent, and there are letters extant between Bartram and his English cousins about the family arms. So the arms clearly weren’t just a family heirloom in the sense of the painting itself as a physical object.  After all, Bartram also used an armorial bookplate.

 

I conclude that what Bartram meant was as I characterized it—that as far as he was concerned, the arms were a simple mark of family identity and not something that elevated his family over others.

 

We have Bartram in our roll of early American arms, by the way: Gules on an escutcheon Or within an orle of eight crosses paty Argent a thistle head Sable.

 
David Pope
 
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20 June 2011 12:22
 

Joseph McMillan;85079 wrote:

Here’s the passage. The narrator is identified as Iw_n Al_z, a Russian gentleman who visited Bartram on Crevecoeur’s behalf.

 

 

Now in fact Bartram’s father wasn’t French but English, although he was apparently originally of Norman descent, and there are letters extant between Bartram and his English cousins about the family arms. So the arms clearly weren’t just a family heirloom in the sense of the painting itself as a physical object.  After all, Bartram also used an armorial bookplate.

 

I conclude that what Bartram meant was as I characterized it—that as far as he was concerned, the arms were a simple mark of family identity and not something that elevated his family over others.

 

We have Bartram in our roll of early American arms, by the way: Gules on an escutcheon Or within an orle of eight crosses paty Argent a thistle head Sable.


Very interesting.  Thanks.

 

Funny in a way…

 

About a year back, I was "down home" visiting my dad’s first cousins and scavenging for family history info, scanning family photos, etc.  One cousin disappeared into a back bedroom and brought out a bucket shop plaque in order to show me "the Pope Arms" (actually, the arms of Sir Thomas Pope).  The manner in which he did, though, was similar to your reading of the passage.  He’s not a pretentious guy and is close to my family’s well…earthy roots, so there wasn’t any implied claim of social status, but there was this matter-of-fact assertion that this was "our family’s" means of identification.

 
Kenneth Mansfield
 
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20 June 2011 12:58
 

Joshua and Daniel Henshaw, also in our roll of early American arms (Argent a chevron between three heronshaws Sable) are the nephews of one of my ancestors (my paternal grandmother was a Hinshaw). My Henshaw/Henshawe/Hinshaw ancestors, however, came here via Ireland (from England) and were Quakers by the time they got here. No evidence of their using the arms at all.

 
 
James Dempster
 
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20 June 2011 15:42
 

On the Quaker front, whilst I appreciate that most of the Quakers went for the simple life, maybe particularly in the US, in the UK that has not prevented the use of heraldry. Obviously the most famous (to me) American Quaker was William Penn and both he and his family made use of their inherited arms.

In Scotland, the well known Aberdeenshire Quaker family of Jaffray were armigerous and in England there were a "tribe" of inter-related Quaker bankers in East Anglia, of whom, as far as I know, the Gurneys, Bevans and Barclays (the latter originally from Aberdeenshire) were all armigerous. I believe that another prominent early Quaker family, the Fells, were also armigerous.

 

How much they made use of their arms is not immediately obvious. The Barclays certainly did as there is a 1725 matriculation in Lyon Register LR i/259 by Robert Barclay of Urie (son? of Governor Barclay).

 

On the wider point of the right to bear arms. It must be remembered that in Europe by far the majority of arms are likely to be inherited arms, and given the vicissitudes of time, such arms are liable to pass to people in all lines of work and at all levels of wealth and of all degrees of respectibility.

 

Twenty or so years ago the British satirical magazine Private Eye did a series "Britain’s Least Known Peers" which highlighted hereditary peers who were bus drivers and gardeners. Earl Nelson was a police sergeant and on the flip side, one of the Dukes of Manchester a convicted con-man. Simple armigers have ended up in exactly the same sorts of places as the peers.

 

To paraphrase Dorothy L Sayers in one of the Peter Wimsey books "the quality guarantees the brand", rather than the brand guaranteeing the quality. Arms, inherited, granted or assumed don’t guarantee that an armiger is worthy of them, but conversely a person can try to be worthy of the arms.

 

In the UK as others have pointed out, you pays your money and, usually, you get your grant. It takes quite a bit to be refused or have them revoked. In the US and in most (these days) of Europe, you can assume them. Surely it’s better to let people know that anyone in the US can assume arms and give them something they might feel they have to live up to than to worry that the ideal of heraldry will be somehow diminished if they can’t/don’t live up to it.

 

James

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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20 June 2011 16:36
 

James Dempster;85094 wrote:

Obviously the most famous (to me) American Quaker was William Penn and both he and his family made use of their inherited arms.


Including in the form of a carved and painted emblazonment above the pulpit of St. Peter’s Church (then Church of England, now Episcopal) in Philadelphia.  Which is rather ironic for a Quaker family, if you think about it.

 

Barely visible in this photo:

http://stpetersphila.org/_images/content/image_history.jpg

 
Wilfred Leblanc
 
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20 June 2011 21:20
 

James Dempster;85094 wrote:

On the wider point of the right to bear arms. It must be remembered that in Europe by far the majority of arms are likely to be inherited arms, and given the vicissitudes of time, such arms are liable to pass to people in all lines of work and at all levels of wealth and of all degrees of respectibility. . . .

To paraphrase Dorothy L Sayers in one of the Peter Wimsey books "the quality guarantees the brand", rather than the brand guaranteeing the quality. Arms, inherited, granted or assumed don’t guarantee that an armiger is worthy of them, but conversely a person can try to be worthy of the arms.

 

. . . Surely it’s better to let people know that anyone in the US can assume arms and give them something they might feel they have to live up to than to worry that the ideal of heraldry will be somehow diminished if they can’t/don’t live up to it.


Well said, James. Certainly, the idea that one sets a certain standard for himself by using a coat of arms resonates with me.