Heraldic badge

• 1. Introduction

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  A heraldic badge is a graphic symbol worn or displayed to show allegiance to, or the property of, an individual, a family, or a corporate body. In 1483, King Richard III ordered 13,000 badges in fustian cloth bearing his emblem of a white boar, just for the investiture of his son Edward as Prince of Wales. That number was enormous given the population of England at the time. And it raises a question: why did a king need thousands of cloth badges made at once? What were heraldic badges actually for, and why did Parliament spend years trying to ban them?

  The answers involve private armies dressed in their lord's colors, a knight pulled from his horse by a London mob, pearls sewn onto a deer made of emeralds, and a campaign by Henry VII that reshaped how power could be displayed in England.

• 2. Origins and Character

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  Badges with what one source describes as "a distinctly heraldic character" in England date to around the reign of King Edward III, which ran from 1327 to 1377. From the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, the followers, retainers, and partisans of famous and powerful houses bore well-known badges precisely because they were known and recognized.

  Badges were classed as para-heraldic, meaning they did not necessarily draw from the coat of arms of the person or family they represented, though many did borrow from the crest or supporters. Their use was more flexible than arms proper, which were used exclusively by the individual to whom they belonged.

  The meanings encoded in badges varied widely. Some badges imitated a charge from the bearer's coat of arms. Others commemorated a remarkable exploit, illustrated a family or feudal alliance, or indicated territorial rights. Some were rebuses, punning on the owner's name. A single person or family might use more than one badge, and two or more badges were often combined to form a single compound device.

  Badges worn on clothing appeared on standards, horse trappings, livery uniforms, and other belongings. Many medieval badges survive today embedded in English pub names.

• 3. Danger and Display

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  In 1377, during a period when the young King Richard II's uncle John of Gaunt was serving as Regent and was deeply unpopular in London, one of Gaunt's more than 200 retainers made a costly mistake. The Scottish knight Sir John Swinton rode through London wearing Gaunt's badge on a livery collar, an innovation of Gaunt's that was probably the Collar of Esses. The mob attacked Swinton, pulled him from his horse, tore the badge from him, and he had to be rescued by the mayor to avoid serious harm.

  More than twenty years later, after Gaunt's son Henry IV had deposed Richard II, one of Richard's servants was imprisoned simply for continuing to wear Richard's livery badge. Many of the large number of badges of various liveries recovered from the Thames in London were likely discarded hurriedly by retainers who found themselves wearing the wrong allegiance at the wrong moment.

  The physical form of badges ranged enormously by cost and status. Cheap badges in base metal, cloth, or other materials were distributed widely to followers, sometimes very freely, in a way that draws comparison to modern political campaign buttons and tee-shirts. Grander forms were reserved for important persons. A livery collar with a badge as pendant might be given to someone of significance. The summit of the form was something like the Dunstable Swan Jewel, made in enamelled gold and a rare survivor of the period.

  The Dunstable Swan Jewel, for all its splendor, lacked the ultimate luxury of gem-set eyes. By contrast, lion pendants worn by Sir John Donne and his wife did have such gems, as did several examples listed on the 1397 treasure roll of King Richard II. Richard's own badge depicted in the Wilton Diptych shows pearls on the antler tips, which the badges worn by the painted angels lack. The white hart badge on the Treasury Roll, which the painted version may have copied, had pearls and sat on a grass bed made of emeralds. A hart badge inventoried in the possession of Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy in 1435 was set with 22 pearls, two spinels, two sapphires, a ruby, and a huge diamond.

• 4. Parliament Versus the Badge

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  Livery badges were especially common in England from the mid-fourteenth century until about the end of the fifteenth century, a period of intense factional conflict that included the deposition of Richard II and the Wars of the Roses. What began relatively harmlessly under Edward III in the context of tournaments and courtly celebrations had, by the reign of Richard II, become what one contemporary account called "one of the most protracted controversies of Richard's reign."

  The problem was structural. Badges served to mark the small private armies of retainers kept by lords, largely for the purpose of enforcing their lord's will on those less powerful in his area. Parliament repeatedly tried to curb their use. The Parliament of 1384 attacked the issuing of badges by lords directly. In 1388, Parliament made the startling request that "all liveries called badges signes, as well as our lord the king as of other lords... shall be abolished", because "those who wear them are flown with such insolent arrogance that they do not shrink from practising with reckless effrontery various kinds of extortion in the surrounding countryside."

  Richard offered to give up his own badges, to the delight of the House of Commons, but the House of Lords refused to surrender theirs, and the matter was deferred. In 1390, an order restricted the issuing of badges to those of banneret rank or above, and wearing them to those of esquire rank or above. By 1397, Richard was issuing increasingly large numbers of badges to retainers who misbehaved, with his "Cheshire archers" becoming especially notorious. After his deposition in 1399, Parliament forbade several of his leading supporters from issuing badges again, and passed a statute allowing only the king, now Henry IV, to issue badges, and only to those ranking as esquires and above, who were to wear them only in his presence.

  It finally took a determined campaign by Henry VII to largely suppress the use of livery badges by anyone other than the king. The Statute of Liveries of 1506 finally forbade entirely the issuing of liveries to those of higher rank; recipients had to be domestic servants or persons experienced in the law, unless covered by a specific royal licence. A well-known story first told by Francis Bacon, though unsupported by surviving records, describes Henry visiting his principal military commander John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, at Hedingham Castle. At Henry's departure, Oxford lined the exit route with liveried retainers, and Henry fined him 15,000 marks for the display. Modern historical analysis of court records shows few actual prosecutions, but liveried retainers do appear to have ceased to be a major problem by the end of Henry's reign.

• 5. The Tudor Rose and Royal Badges

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  While the badges of the nobility were carefully restricted by Tudor legislation, the royal badges of the Tudors were used more widely than ever before. The most famous is the Tudor rose, which Henry VII adopted to signify the union of the Lancastrian and Yorkist dynasties, the two houses whose conflict had defined the Wars of the Roses. Tudor roses were added freely to King's College Chapel, Cambridge when the Tudors completed the unfinished building begun by Henry VI.

  The full list of English royal badges is remarkably varied in its imagery. Richard I used a star of thirteen rays and a crescent, along with a mailed arm grasping a broken lance, with the motto Christo Duce. Edward III assembled a large collection that included a fleur-de-lys, a leopard, a sword, a falcon, a gryphon, a tree stump, and rays issuing from a cloud. Richard II's badges included the White Hart lodged, a white falcon, a Sun in Splendor, and a Sun Clouded.

  Henry VII's badge collection included a portcullis and a fleur-de-lis, both crowned; a red dragon; a white greyhound; and a hawthorn bush and crown with the cypher H.R. The queens consort had their own devices. Catherine of Aragon used a rose, a pomegranate, and a sheaf of arrows. Anne Boleyn bore a crowned falcon holding a sceptre. Jane Seymour used a phoenix rising from a castle between two Tudor roses. Catherine Parr's badge was a maiden's head crowned, rising from a large Tudor rose.

  Elizabeth I bore a Tudor rose with the motto Rosa sine Spina, meaning a rose without a thorn, as well as a crowned falcon and sceptre, and her personal motto Semper Eadem, meaning always the same. With the accession of the House of Hanover in 1714, British monarchs ceased to use personal badges; royal cyphers came into use instead, though historical badges continued in use as part of royal symbolism.

• 6. Devices and Emblems

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  In the Renaissance, the badge took an intellectual turn. Now more likely to be called a personal device, it was combined with a short text or motto; the image and the text together were intended to convey the aspirations or character of the bearer in ways that neither part could convey alone.

  These impresas or emblems appeared on the reverse of portrait-medals that became fashionable in Italy, drawing on the vocabulary of Renaissance Neo-Platonism. By the sixteenth century, emblems were adopted by intellectuals and merchants who had no heraldry of their own. Later emblem books contained large numbers of emblems, partly so that people could choose one they felt suited them.

  By the later sixteenth century, allegorical badges called impresa were adopted by individuals as part of an overall programme of theatrical disguise for specific events, typified by the fancy dress jousts of the Elizabethan era known as the Accession Day tilts. The device, in its structure, differed from the emblem in two principal ways. First, the device normally consisted of two parts, while most emblems had three or more. Second, the device was highly personal and intimately attached to a single individual, while the emblem conveyed a general moral lesson that any reader might apply.

  Some devices became so well known that the image alone could identify the bearer without any motto. The porcupine of Louis XII, with its motto Eminus et cominus, meaning "from near and from far," decorated a doorway at Blois. The crowned salamander among flames of Francois Ier bore the motto Nutrisco et extinguo and appeared at Chambord. These and many others were collected by Claude Paradin and published in his Devises heroiques of 1551 and 1557, which also records the motto of Louis XII as Ultos avos Troiae. Later, the sun of Louis XIV became equally famous.

• 7. Revival and Modern Grants

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  Heraldic badges were formally revived in 1906 by the College of Arms under Alfred Scott-Gatty. Since then, badges have often been included in new grants of arms alongside the traditional coat of arms. Whether a badge is included is at the option of the grantee, who pays a higher fee to receive one.

  When granted, the badge is typically illustrated on the letters patent containing the grant of arms, and upon a heraldic standard, a type of flag. The standard is not granted automatically with the achievement of arms and badge; it can be requested separately if a badge has been granted, and requires payment of a further fee.

  Some of the most famous English badges have histories that reach far beyond the medieval period. The bear and ragged staff, originally two separate badges of the Beauchamp Earls of Warwick, were eventually united into a single device. Their successors, including Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, bore the combined bear and ragged staff as one device. The Prince of Wales's feathers derive from the shield for peace of Edward, the Black Prince. The Stafford knot, a distinctive three-looped knot originally borne by the Dukes of Buckingham, is today pictured in the coat of arms of Staffordshire County Council.