record those that were legitimately borne. This gave rise by 1450 to the
even more significant right to invent and grant new armorial achievements,
both to individuals and to corporations, thus giving official recognition to
the new nobility of the former.
The right to grant new armorial achievements was only rarely ex-
tended to heralds on the continent, where kings and princes retained the
right to grant them only to those whom they themselves had formally en-
nobled. Nevertheless, heralds tended everywhere to remain at least the reg-
istrars of the knightly nobility, and their rolls of arms served to identify
those whose ancestry and rank qualified them for participation in princely
tournaments and other forms of activity restricted to the old military no-
bility. The French incorporation of the national corps of heralds into a col-
lege was imitated at later dates in some other countries, including England
in 1484 (and again in 1555), while the English practice of attaching the
chief herald of the realm to its monarchical order of knighthood was emu-
lated in a number of other states, including Burgundy in 1430, peninsular
Sicily in 1465, and France itself in 1469.
As a result of the military revolutions of the sixteenth century, the im-
portance of the French and many other Continental heralds gradually de-
clined after about 1520, and heraldry was everywhere removed from its
practical relationship to warfare. Nevertheless, in most of the surviving Eu-
ropean monarchies (and in Canada, where an heraldic authority was es-
tablished in 1988), the royal heralds have continued to this day to preside
over the design and use of the emblems of the armed forces, as well as those
of the state in general, and still issue letters patent admitting people to a
now essentially honorary membership in the old military nobility.
D’A. Jonathan D. Boulton
See alsoChivalry; Europe; Knights; Orders of Knighthood, Religious;
Orders of Knighthood, Secular
References
Dennys, Rodney. 1982.Heraldry and the Heralds.London: Jonathan Cape.
Galbreath, D. L., and L. Jéquier. 1977. Manuel du Blason.Lausanne: Spes.
Pastoureau, M. 1997. Traité d’Héraldique.3d ed. Paris: Picard.
Wagner, A. 1956. Heralds and Heraldry in the Middle Ages. 2d ed. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
———. 1967. Heralds of England.London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
Woodcock, T., and J. M. Robinson. 1988. The Oxford Guide to Heraldry.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.168 Heralds