In England an important development came with the heraldic visitations. From 1530 in the reign of Henry VIII to 1686 in the reign of James II, commissions were issued by the sovereign to the heralds directing them to proceed to a county in England or Wales and to inspect the arms in use there. The records of these visitations have been preserved and constitute a valuable body of genealogy as well as of heraldry. From the period of the visitations the heralds compiled huge collections of family history and pedigrees.

For about a half century before the foundation of the College of Arms, the English heralds are found to be issuing grants of arms on behalf of the sovereign. This is some 300 years after the first appearance of heraldry, which obviously much antedated not only royal colleges or corporations of heralds but even the existence of heralds themselves. From this evidence, it seems that in the early days of heraldry men may have assumed arms without reference to any authority. A very simple coat of arms would not be difficult to invent. That three unrelated persons from three different counties could bear the same arms, as is documented in the famous Scrope v. Grosvenor case of the 14th century, is not only not surprising but tends to indicate that the arms were self-chosen. Scrope v. Grosvenor was referred to King Richard II, and his judgment was final. While it is reasonably certain, however, that a majority of ancient arms were probably self-assumed, many early nobles bore arms that clearly referred to the arms of their liege lords—Kirkpatrick, Jardine, and Johnstone toward Bruce, for example—and if this required permission, as seems practical, such permission would have been in the nature of a grant. A progress from this to the king alone making grants would have been natural as the government of the realm became more centralized.

Early writers

The earliest writing on heraldry extant is a short treatise by Bartolo da Sassoferrato, Tractatus de insigniis et armis (“Treatise on Insignia and Arms”), which was published about 1356. In his small book Bartolo describes the various categories of armorial bearings and how they have been assumed. He refers specifically to arms granted by a prince and gives reasons for their value but asks why one man may not bear arms identical with those of another. In 1355 Bartolo had been sent to Pisa from Perugia as an envoy to the Holy Roman emperor, Charles IV, from whom he received many privileges, including a grant of arms, which were the same as those of the emperor as king of Bohemia but with changed tincture: or a lion rampant with two tails gules. An American scholar, L.M. Mladen, remarked of this grant and others made by Charles IV at the same time:

Charles was in all probability the first ruler ever to grant arms. To my knowledge, no earlier occurrence has been found.

The first English heraldic writer was John of Guildford, or Johannes de Bado Aureo, whose Tractatus de armis (“Treatise on Arms”) was produced about 1394. Then came a Welsh treatise by John Trevor, the Llyfr arfau (“Book of Arms”). Nicholas Upton, a canon of Salisbury Cathedral, about 1440 wrote De studio militari (“On Military Studies”). John of Guildford’s treatise was printed in 1654 with Upton’s work and the Aspilogia of Sir Henry Spelman by Sir Edward Bysshe, Garter King of Arms, who edited and annotated all three works. The whole was in Latin; no complete English version of Upton’s book has been published.

These books are by authorities who were concerned with the realities of heraldry in their own day, but from the end of the 15th century a tendency away from the actual and toward the fanciful and absurd manifested itself. Some of these far-fetched conceits showed themselves in The Boke of Saint Albans (1486) by Juliana Berners, and yet, by comparison with the vast mass of nonsense contained in the folios of the 16th century, such conceits were not entirely unreasonable. The works of Sir John Ferne, Blazon of Gentrie (1586), Gerard Legh, The Accedens of Armorie (1562), and John Guillim, A Display of Heraldrie (1610), not only perpetuate the nonsensical natural history of olden days but are largely responsible for erroneous beliefs about heraldic charges having definite symbolic meanings and their being granted as rewards for valorous deeds—beliefs that today are perpetuated by the vendors of mail-order and shopping mall “family coats of arms.”

Continental versus British heraldry

Much greater significance was attached in former times to heraldic insignia than is acknowledged today, although the attitude varied from country to country. Heraldry has become more widespread than at any other time, but as a sign of rank in popular perception its value is much reduced.

A distinction may be made between the Continent and Great Britain regarding medieval and later heraldry. The doctrine of seize quartiers (“16 quarters”) prevailed over most of the Continent but not in Britain. This theory required that, in order for a person to claim a specific degree of nobility, all of his 16 great-great-grandparents should have been entitled to bear arms. This, the “proof of the seize quartiers,” was the reason Frederick the Great of Prussia, though professing the views of the Enlightenment in the Age of Reason, diligently scrutinized his courtiers’ quarterings. The principle is based on the rigidity of a noble caste that married only with its own kind. On the Continent every member of a noble family is noble, as is reflected in the enormous numbers of titles. Similarly, the Continental royalty tended to marry only with other royal families. As a result both royal and noble families formed a class apart from the bulk of the people.

Continental heraldic insignia, therefore, from their origins until the late 18th century, provided symbols to indicate a higher caste. Yet, strangely, in several countries heraldry was in wide general use as a means of identification, serving in the same way as a surname. In France, for example, it is abundantly clear that from the 13th century not only the bourgeoisie of the towns but also the peasants bore heraldic arms. The usage had percolated down from the noble class. The earliest example of the use of arms by a peasant is that of Jaquier le Brebiet in 1369; his arms show a punning allusion to his name: three sheep (brebis) held by a girl. In other European lands—e.g., Hungary and the Low Countries—burgher or peasant arms were also found, but neither in these lands nor in France were their possessors regarded as noble.

In France the regulations of arms followed a quite different course from those in England. Although King Charles VI had in 1407 led the way in creating a college of arms, over the next two centuries his heralds lost influence. Unlike their Scottish and English counterparts, they had no power to grant arms, and they gradually faded into insignificance. To overcome the loss, Louis XIII in 1615 appointed a juge géneral d’armes (“general judge of arms”), an official whose powers resembled those of the Lord Lyon in Scotland. But the French royal government was lax about the possession of arms. A decree of Louis XIV in 1696, designed to raise money, ordered all persons who bore arms to register them. Those who were not part of the arms-bearing population were forced to buy arms. Later, in 1760, an ordinance was framed by which the lesser townsfolk, artisans, and peasants were to be excluded from the use of arms—after these classes had borne them for 400 years. But the Parlement of Paris refused to allow the ordinance to be implemented, and then later, during the French Revolution (1789), arms were suppressed as signs of feudalism.

The view of arms was and remains quite different in England. The Continental system of a noble caste has not existed in England since early medieval days, and the past seven centuries have rarely seen the use of caste to prevent vertical movement in society, even though it has usually impeded it. The landed gentry, recognized as Britain’s untitled aristocracy, intermarried with the peerage families and were recognizable as a caste, and a noble caste at that, identifiable by their arms, but its membership was not protected by law and privilege to the degree prevalent on the Continent. Younger sons of the peerage families dropped into the landed gentry with a small legacy or through marriage, and a couple of generations later their younger grandsons might be yeoman farmers or city merchants or professional officers in the army or navy. During that journey they would have passed the wealthy granddaughters of newly landed squires whose own grandfathers had been successful merchants or lawyers or sea captains enriched by prize money. Those rich and fashionable girls were about to marry newly impoverished peers. Britain had a flexible society that allowed success to prosper socially.

In Britain only the reigning peer and his wife are regarded as “noble” as that term is popularly misused, and the rest of the family are commoners, only a few bearing what are called courtesy titles. Moreover, except during the Hanoverian (1714–1837) and Victorian (1837–1901) epochs when British royalty sought to marry foreign royalty, the royal house has tended to marry with the British aristocracy, which is to say the peerage and landed classes (the “nobility” in its correct meaning). As a result, the Continental ideas of seize quartiers never held sway in England. Nor are there in the British Isles non-noble arms. All arms are on the same basis; all are signs of gentility—“the ensigns of nobility.” Arms then have long had a high social significance in England; those who bear them lawfully have social prestige.

The situation tends to be a little different in Scotland, where arms have the same significance as in England but where many are tied to clanship and family solidarity and where their use is controlled tightly by Lyon Court in accordance with the laws of Scotland. To most Scots, arms are more a matter of family or clan than of social status, and they prove their right to them by process of law before the Lord Lyon.