Talk:List of oldest heraldry

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Richard's first seal edit

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

While it would be preferable to give a color illustration of the full arms appearing on Richard's 1st seal, we just don't know for certain what it looked like. The fact that several different nephews would use gold lions on red allows this to be viewed as the most likely color scheme, but we don't know for certain. Likewise there has been a bit of discussion as to what the half-shield on the seal was intended to indicate - is it truly half, and there were two lions facing each other, or is this artistic licence so that the seal didn't have to show just the lion's back half? If it is one lion, is the direction it is facing important, or is this just the best way to fit one lion on half a shield (or maybe did the engraver simply fail to take mirror imagery into account)? There are too many unknowns with the first seal to show a single colored shield as what it represented. Agricolae (talk) 15:59, 20 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

Scope edit

Latest comment: 5 years ago5 comments2 people in discussion

I suppose this could be a "timeline of heraldry", especially as we are still missing a dedicated History of heraldry page. As such it could include not just "oldest heraldry" (1140s -- the end.) but trace the oldest emergence of specific heraldic items, such as the earliest use of certain charges, or the earliest mention of certain heraldic rules or conventions. List of heraldic charges is a complete mess, as it heaps up random elements taken from current-day military badges. Most of our heraldry articles simply present the "classical" view of the 18th or 19th century and ignore historical development completely.

We are missing, for example, a description of the development of "family coats of arms" out of the personal coas of the 12th century. It seems clear that this happened over the course of the 13th century, but details are sketchy, and the history seems to be complicated. The Camden Roll shows royal coats of arms, suggesting that at least successive kings would inherit their predecessor's coat of arms. The coat of arms of the "king of sicily" (Charles I of Anjou) is shown as that of the king of France (fleur-de-lys) with an added label, later the coa of the Capetian House of Anjou, but at this time presumably identifying Charles I, personally, as the son of Louis VIII of France. In other words. for the period c. 1220-1280 it is quite murky if there are "family coats of arms", or if there are, if they exist outside high-ranking royal and ducal families. At the same time, family coats of arms seem to be used as a matter of course in Italy by the 1290s at the latest, so the development during the 13th century most probably has to be documented by region.

This is only what I can grasp from the current state of Wikipedia, it just means that our heraldry coverage is really bad, not that these things aren't known, literature research is needed here. --dab (𒁳) 11:10, 16 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

I would be hesitant to go the first-charges direction unless we can find explicit sources for each stating it is the first known use. I doubt such sourcing exists or would be reliable if it did. If this is to serve as a proxy for a History of Heraldry article, then I would be in favor of including the disputed material about Bayeux and German geometric shield patterning, as well as a) something about the proto-heraldic use of totem animals and other such devices on military bammers, which is often discussed when introducing heraldry-proper, and b) that some of the geometric charges may derive from the artistic patterning, while some are thought to derive from characteristics of the shield's manufacture (I have sources for both, but they are packed away).

With regard to the equestrian seal of Henry of Saxony, is it clear that the seal dates from the 1140s? I ask this because Richard's second seal appears on older documents - when he was captured in Germany he both lost control of his first seal, and needed money. He had a new seal made and then required all documents under the older seal be re-sealed with the new, for a fee (fortunately not everyone complied so examples of the first survive). As a result it appears on documents that predate the seal's origin. (I am completely unfamiliar with the German material, as appear to be most of my English sources, which uniformly give Geoffrey precedence.) Agricolae (talk) 15:34, 16 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Atm, I am treating this as a nucleus for History of heraldry. This can easily be branched out into a standalone page as soon as we have enough material. Early attestation of individual charges would be more at home at List of heraldic charges, I agree.

The problem with this page will be what to include. Do we include mere mention of heraldic designs? In this case, the lion of León may well be dated "1148", but at the same time, we inherit about a dozen or more heraldic designs mentioned in 12th-century German literature. Do we treat equestrian seals as early heraldry? Then this page will essentially become a list of equestrian seals.

Do we judiciously include only items we somehow judge relevant steps in the history of heraldry? Then it becomes unclear why we wouldn't just transform this page into the history of heraldry article.

What is missing from the list at the moment is the emergence of heritable "family coats of arms" around 1200. The source I have just found, Wandhoff (2016), is quite valuable for this. "Heraldry" of the 12th century should properly be treated as "proto-heraldry". It wasn't even yet called heraldry, there were no heraldic rules, etc. It was basically warlords painting their shields with animals they thought were cool. Heraldry proper emerges very rapidly at the turn of the 12th to 13th century, within a single generation, and the more or less complete system of heraldry was in place by about 1230. I have so far failed to find proper references for this, but I do have references that by the 1260s, Italian merchants started to adopt coats of arms, and by the 1290s, the full-fledged system of family coats of arms was in place in Italy at least. Wandhoff says:

"It seems to me that in these texts [German epics up to 1200], the shield's surfaces are no longer used as ekphrastic 'windows' to draw the reader's or listener's inner eye into the work of verbal art. At the same time, however, the poetic shields are not yet used as displays for symbolic or hereditary information later characterized as heraldic." (underlining by me)

Regarding Henry the Lion's seals, I have only seen Ertzdorff et al (1994), who in turn cite Schmidt-Phiseldeck (1882). Henry was duke during 1142–1180, and apparently he used a total of seven seals, successively, during this time, so he made a new seal every six years or so on average. It is reasonable to assume the first seal dates to 1142, which would make it at least unsurprising to find the second of seven dates to 1146. Maybe he had it made in 1147 and used it on a 1146 document, who knows, but this seems like splitting hairs, and it is unlikely we are going to find any academic author speculating about this precise possibility. It seems justified to say that Henry's heraldic lion is ascertained for the 1140s.

--dab (𒁳) 08:19, 19 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

I just found what is likely the standard work for this topic, Brault (1972). Unfortunately only available online as "preview"[1]. --dab (𒁳) 08:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

fr-wiki has an interesting list of proto-heraldry in 12th-century seals here: fr:Liste de blasons d'après les sceaux du XIIe siècle --dab (𒁳) 10:35, 19 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Ponce Giraldo de Cabrera edit

Latest comment: 5 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

How does the coat of arms of Ponce Giraldo de Cabrera not appear here? There is a depiction of Ponce Giraldo with a painted shield showing a goat (canting arms) in a privilege dated 1150 (Era Hispanica 1188).
Image here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Privilegium_imperatoris.jpg
From the Spanish wiki article "Imperator Totius Hispaniae". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.165.0.178 (talk) 10:29, 26 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

At its simplest, they don't appear here because nobody put them here and Wikipedia is a work in progress. That being said, we don't get to look at an image and draw our own conclusion, 'Hey, that would be an early example of heraldry'. Someone needs to have discussed this in a scholarly work that can be cited to establish verifiability. Part of the reason for this is that early heraldry is a bit tricky, there being documented use of heraldic emblems that predate heraldry proper. For example, the Bayeux tapestry shows patterned shields, but there is general agreement they don't represent heraldry, just decoration, and the earliest seal of a count of St. Pol from the 12th century has wheat sheafs in the open space surrounding the horse, but it was only much later that we first see these family totems on their a coat of arms. Even the Merovingian kings used totemic fleur de lis but it wasn't until centuries later it became the pattern on the royal arms. We really need someone to have published the conclusion that Ponce's shield in 1150 is the first representation of the coat of arms of the Cabrera family. Are you aware of such a source? Agricolae (talk) 17:41, 26 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

OK, I found a source, but if I am reading it right, it basically is saying what I hinted at - that this does not represent true heraldry. The Cabrera family had used the canting goat (cabra) as their emblem before this time, but its appearance on this shield is more an indication of this totemic usage and not a true coat of arms: (trans.) "on his shield, we find, perfectly represented, the goat of his lineage, used, not as a heraldic element, evidently, but, as we know, as a distinctive 'sign' facing the battle." (Ernesto Fernández-Xesta y Vásquez, Un magnate catalan en le corte de Alfonso VII: Comes Poncius de Cabreira, p. 51) It is not found among any of his descendants, and though his kin in Catalonia would adopt a goat on their coat, they did so at a later date and it took a different form so probably indicates independent development of a coat of arms, not related to Ponce's usage. Absent other sources that take a different view, I think we must exclude it, at least for now. Agricolae (talk) 00:49, 27 April 2019 (UTC)Reply