Heraldry and the Scribe

HERALDRY AND THE SCRIBE^*

Anthony Wood, FSHA

The Heraldic Craftsman No. 17, Summer 1992

There is an essential difference in approach to the heraldry produced by calligraphers in any form of manuscript and that of heraldic artists trained in other disciplines. The Scribe must ever be concerned with reconciling the essentially two-dimensional character of calligraphy with the three-dimensional character of heraldry. In one way this is a problem which has only developed during this century, thrown into relief by the re-discovery of the techniques and methods of mediaeval book artists.

Early shields of arms wherever they appeared, were invariably treated in the simplest possible way, the charges being painted in a strong silhouette in the appropriate tincture and drawn outlines and detail only added where additional clarification was needed. The Heralds’ Roll of 1280 is a typical example, where no further simplification could have been possible. It might be assumed that this, like most of the Rolls, was just a record of arms made in situ by the herald or an artist and was therefore not intended to be finished work.

An examination of the shields of arms found in missals and psaltery of the same period, however, reveals just the same sort of treatment. One of the mysteries of heraldic art in Britain from the 12^th to the 15^th century is that charges such as lions, whatever their position and posture, at any one period were so alike wherever they appeared, that they might all have been drawn by the same artist. True, the earliest rampant lions looked more like dogs and had the body in pale, and that two centuries or so later, they began to resemble the domestic cat with the body in bend, but at any one time they all looked remarkably alike. One can’t help wondering if there was a sort of pattern book from which they all worked.

The simplest treatment was a natural outcome of simple heraldry. In the 13^th century for instance, there were basically only two versions of the lion, either rampant, considered then the proper attitude for the king of beasts to assume, and passant gardant which was not and so they were called leopards. Also, a purely technical reason was that if the lion, or indeed any other charge, was carried out in raised and burnished gold or silver, this precluded the possibility of any sort of detail and only an outline if used, as was possible in the Westminster Psalter ca. 1250 and the Tickhill Psalter ca.1303. There is also the question of the size in which heraldry in MSS was usually drawn. In the last folio of the Hours of Englebert of Nassau ca.1480, complete achievement of Burgundy including the collar of the Toison d’Or was painted just over one inch high which leaves little room for much detail in each of the quarters or the escutcheon of pretence of Flanders which is 1/8” high.

The complete achievement was rarely depicted in manuscripts until the general acceptance of crests, with helms and mantling. An early example is to be found in the Luttrell Psalter dated 1340, though in this case it was not in its formal form, the helm and crest shown being handed to a mounted Sir Geoffrey Luttrell by his wife instead of above his shield of arms. The martlets were carried out in what was originally raised and burnished silver leaf, which has since tarnished, but show clearly the limitations of the technique.

When it became fashionable for full achievements to be shown, the use of line drawing gained ground as the quickest and simplest way of depicting them. Examples of this may be seen in Ballard’s book ca.1485, a record of the arms of the nobility and gentry of his province while March King of Arms under Edward IV and Bruge’s Garter Book, where the shields of arms still have the simplest treatment, but the rest of the achievement is drawn with washes of colour added, and in College of Arms MS M,10, a roll of shields of arms of Essex knights dated 1470.

By the end of the 15^th century, this was the established technique in any but the most elaborate and sophisticated books of hours and missals for secular owners. It had become the practice to employ well-known artists to carry out the most elaborate illuminations and paint the miniatures in such books. The techniques of, by now more detailed and naturalistic painting spilled over into the portrayal of helm, crest, mantling and supporters, though the latter did not appear as an heraldic entity until the end of the 15^th century.

The achievement of arms of John Duke of Bedford, brother to Henry V, is shown delicately carried out in the border of fol.73 of his Psalter and Hours, Ad.MS 42131, though the shield is separated from the helm, crest, and lambrequin and all are intertwined with the illumination of the border, Some of his badges are included as part of the decoration. Beneath are the arms of Sir William Catesby, a councillor of Richard III, quartered with those of his wife Margaret, a daughter of William Lord Zouche of Harringworth. The MS passed into Catesby’s possession some time before 1485.

The Abingdon Missal ca. 1461 illuminated by William Abell also demonstrates the limitations imposed by the use of raised and burnished gold or silver, in that little detail is possible and the result clumsy, unless the artist has shown delicacy of touch. In the 15th century, heraldic drawing reached its peak in the work of John Rous, a Chaplain at Buy’s Cliff near Warwick. A chronicler and artist whose work is beautifully observed and delicately drawn with much detail as can be seen in his The Life and Acts of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick 1485 and both versions of his Roll. But even in the latter, particularly the Latin version, the gilding mars the rendering of the arms instead of enhancing them.

In both the Great Westminster Tournament Roll in 1511 and the painting of the arms of Jane Seymour 1536, tonal painting was beginning to predominate. In the records of the Visitations of Sussex in 1631 by Thomas Benoit, Clarenceux, drawing and tonal painting are just about balanced. By the first quarter of the 17th century, in most instances that I have seen, drawing had almost been obliterated and the painting was all. This does not mean that the technique of putting colour washes over drawing was no longer used. It still is in the present day on Garter sketches and informal work of various kinds where speed is desirable.

In the second half of the 16th century, printing had developed with the invention of movable type to becoming a practical way of producing books in much greater quantities, much to the alarm and resentment of scribes who proclaimed it to be the invention of the devil. Any illumination called for was still added afterwards by hand. The Gutenburg Bible published in 1456 was illustrated with woodcuts, a technique repeated with some success by Dom Anselm and John Forbes-Nixon in Foster’s Peerage from 1880 to 1884. As early as 1473 William Caxton’s The Recuyell of the Hystoryes of Troye was illustrated with pictures finely engraved on copper plates. Heraldry increasingly appeared in both these methods.

A factor which had a major influence on the character and technique of writing was the illustrating of an instruction book by the Italian Writing Master, Francesco Morro ca.1560-70, by the pages being engraved on copper plates. This was done with a burin, a small triangular chisel, which at first was made to imitate the italic and Roman hands adopted by Humanist scholars and then by the public generally all over Europe. In a comparatively short time, the character of the burin had superseded that of the chisel edged quill, and pens began to be cut both from quills and made with metal nibs which were longer and pointed, enabling the writer to imitate the engraved letters.

This meant that the thick and thin strokes were no longer determined by the direction in which the nib was moved, but by varying the pressure on the more flexible nib. This style of writing became known as Copperplate and its beauty and quality were judged as much by the regularity and mechanical accuracy with which the writer could execute it as by any aesthetic considerations. The spontaneity so much admired in mediaeval calligraphy was gone. The publication of works such as George Bickham’s The Universal Penman did much to spread the use of copperplate and it became the standard hand taught in British schools.

This style, with its many variations, sat well with heraldry increasingly influenced by printing techniques and that reproduced by engraving. The fashion in the 18^th and 19^th centuries for completely naturalistic treatment of every part of the achievement led to helms being painted in the perceived manner of classical armour in shapes which could not possibly have been worn.

In an English Peerage of 1740, the shields were so large and ornate in proportion to the rest of the achievement that they would have been too heavy to lift. Ordinaries had their essential characteristics ironed out to the point where only close examination could determine, for instance, if a chevron was indeed a chevron and not a slightly crooked fess, and whether it was really engrailed or just carelessly outlined. Crests were so small as to be almost invisible. The supporters loll about the arts with either an expression of acute boredom or the air of having found something of vastly greater interest elsewhere.

The illustrations from Foster’s Peerage came as a breath of fresh air, but the really harmonious combination of heraldry and letters was achieved by Otto Hupp in Germany with his illustrations for the Münchener Kalender. Although they were printed, the original calligraphy and heraldic drawing was full of spontaneity, strength and movement, and achieved a rare degree of unity.

Just before the outbreak of World War II, a small group of students at the Royal College of Art were attempting to find a satisfactory way of combining heraldry with calligraphy under the guidance of Edward Johnston, Mervyn C. Oliver, and Professor E. W. Tristram. One of them, William Gardner, later to become well known as a designer of seals and coins, was invited to make one of the pages of a book to be presented to Graily Hewitt, one of Johnston’s early and most eminent students, by his former colleagues and students on his retirement.

He chose to write a piece on the Lion passant guardant and headed the page with a large drawing of a lion within a rectangle, made with the same quill with which he wrote the text and flanked with beautifully written Versal letters on either side. The lion was then washed over with a pale tawny yellow in the style of Matthew Paris and the background painted in vermilion decorated with groups of white dots. In fact, Paris’s heraldry was usually on too small a scale for this sort of treatment to be practical though he employed it in all his illumination. The page had great strength and beauty and a degree of harmony between all its component parts which is a joy to behold.

However, Gardner found that though this approach worked gratifyingly well, it was not adaptable enough to cope with the ever increasing complexities of present-day heraldry. In the book The Armorial Bearings of the Guilds of London, published in 1960, Heather Child, also a scribe, illustrated the text by line drawings which had the same calligraphic quality as the writing she employed on the motto ribbons. Unfortunately, she did not continue this treatment in the paintings of the achievements, one suspects because she, too, found it impractical.

To be continued…

The illustrations of the manuscripts referred to have been chosen from books which are, for the most part, generally available, as there is, sadly, not the capacity in one edition of our newsletter for this article to be printed in full, the bibliography is presented here so that anyone wishing to follow it more fully can do so without delay.

Bibliography

HERALDS’ EXHIBITION CATALOGUE, Tabard Press, 1970; Heralds Roll, 1280, Ballard’s Book 148, Visitations of Sussex – Benoit.

THE GOLDEN AGE OF ENGLISH MANUSCRIPT PAINTING, Marks & Morgan, Chatto & Windus, 1981; Westminster Psalter, Tickhill Psalter, Bedford Hours and Psalter, Abingdon Missal.

HERALDRY IN ENGLAND. A.R. Wagner, King Penguin, 1949; Luttrell Psalter and elsewhere.

ENGLISH MEDIAEVAL ROLLS OF ARMS, A.R. Wagner, Society of Antiquaries, 1959; Bruge’s Garter Book, Roll of Essex Knights – 1470.

THE LIFE OF WILLIAM BRUGES, Hugh Stanford^–London, Society of Antiquaries, 1970; Grant to the Tallow Chandlers’ Company and elsewhere.

THE AGE OF PLANTAGENET & de VALOIS, Kenneth Fowler, Elek Books, 1957; The Life and Acts of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, John Rouse; and elsewhere, The Rous Roll, and elsewhere.

HERALDRY, Peter Gwynn-Jones & Henry Bedingfeld, Bison Books 1993; Matthew Paris Roll of Arms.

THE ART OF CALLIGRAPHY IN WESTERN EUROPE, Joyce Whalley, Bloomsbury Books, 1980; The Universal Penman, George Bickham.

FOSTERS PEERAGE & BARONETAGE, Nichols & Sons, 1663, Illustrations by Dom, Anselm Baker and John Forbes Nixon.

A BOOK ABOUT BOOKS, by Frederick Harrison, John Murray, 1946; The Gutenberg Bible, William Caxton.

THE ARMORIAL BEARINGS OF THE GUILDS OF LONDON, Warner, 1960, Bromley & Child, Line illustrations and paintings.

LETTERING OF TODAY, Studio Publications, Ed, C.G. Holme, 1949; Roll of Honour of The Borough of Keighley, Edward Johnston.

WRITING AND ILLUMINATING & LETTERING, by Edward Johnston, Pitman, 1946.