Sanders, Ernest H. “The Medieval Motet.” In Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen:
Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade, ed. Wulf Arlt, Ernst Lichtenhahn, and Hans Oesch. Bern: Francke,
1973, pp. 497–573.
MOTTO/DEVISE
. The adoption and use by individual nobles in late-medieval France of a distinctive
aphoristic phrase of the type known in Italian and English as the “motto” and in French as
the devise was probably derived in part from the much earlier use of war cries, or cris de
guerre. From at least the 12th century, princes and barons in France, as in other parts of
Latin Christendom, made use in battle of a distinctive rallying cry. Such cries took a
variety of forms, from the simple name of the family (Châteaubriand!) through a call for
aid to the lord in specific terms (Louvain au riche duc!) to an invocation of the patron
saint of the dominion (the Montjoie Saint-Denis! of the kings of France or the Notre-
Dame de Bourbon! of the lords of Bourbon) to an exhortation in the most general terms
(the Passavant li meillor! of the counts of Champagne and the Place a la banniere! of the
lords of Coucy).
The use of devises or mottoes as distinct from cries dates only from the 14th century
and was closely associated with the adoption of those figurative cognizances called
“badges” in English from the same period. In fact, the earliest mottoes were closely
associated with badges, whose significance they often helped to explain, and although the
French term devise was employed by contemporaries to designate both badges and
mottoes separately, and has come to be used in ordinary language especially to designate
the latter, scholars now restrict both it and its English derivative “device” to a
composition including both a badge and a motto set on or next to it. Ephemeral devices of
this sort were employed from ca. 1330, but the first stable devices in Europe seem to have
been those of the monarchical orders of knighthood founded by kings and by sovereign
dukes in France and the empire between 1347 and 1470. The earliest stable devices were
the garter of the English Order of the Garter, bearing the famous motto Hony soyt ki maly
pense (1346); the sword of the Cypriot Order of the Sword, with its motto Pour loyauté
maintenir (1347/59); the love-knot of the Neapolitan Order of the Knot, with its
changeable motto Se Dieu plaist/Il a pleu a Dieu (1352); and the belt bearing the motto
Esperance and the golden shield bearing the motto Allen created by Duke Louis of
Bourbon in 1366 and 1367. The last two may have been the first stable devices in France
proper, though they were anticipated by several years by the device adopted at some time
between 1352 and 1362 by Amadeus, the “Green Count” of Savoy: a love-knot similar to
that of the Neapolitan order, usually accompanied by the motto Fert. This motto was also
among the first, if not the first, to be used independently of a figural badge.
Promoted in the royal court of Charles VI from 1382, the use of mottoes, typically
short and more or less cryptic, spread rapidly among the nobles of France in the last third
of the 14th century and enjoyed its greatest vogue in the 15th and 16th centuries. After
1420, indeed, the use of a badge without some sort of motto was rare in France. The use
of independent mottoes grew steadily, however, to the point where most great families
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