Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

largely the creation of heralds, who certainly provided it with its technical
terminology. They also kept its records. Possibly from as early as 1250, and
certainly from 1275, some English heralds prepared books or rolls of arms,
collected from various sources, to assist them in remembering the hundreds
of distinct but often similar arms they encountered in their work, and this
practice soon spread to France and from there to other kingdoms of northern
Europe.
From ca. 1390 a growing number of heralds also wrote treatises on
armory and the other aspects of heraldry, and from about 1450 these were
aimed not only at apprentice heralds but at all members of the nobility and
those who had hopes of working for them. From about 1480, heralds also
began to invent new rules to govern the use of the various additional emblems
of identity and insignia of rank, office, and honor that had come
since about 1300 to be added to the shield of arms in the complex iconic
sign eventually known as an “armorial achievement” in all its various
forms: the “crest” of carved wood or boiled leather borne atop the helm in
Germany from ca. 1250 and the rest of Latin Europe from ca. 1300–1330
as a supplementary symbol of personal identity, especially in tournaments;
the headgear of dignity (crowns, coronets, miters, and so forth) that sometimes
replaced the helm and its crest over the shield from about the same
period; and the collars and other insignia of the Orders of the Garter,
Golden Fleece, St. John of Jerusalem, and other knightly orders and aristocratic
societies, both lay and religious, into which noblemen were admitted,
which were displayed in conjunction with the shield of arms from ca. 1400.
After about 1480, the heralds also brought within their expertise (and
growing jurisdiction) most of the livery emblems that emerged in rivalry to
armory in the later fourteenth century, and formed part of a still broader
set of what are now called paraheraldic emblems. Most important of these
were the livery colors, livery badge, livery device, and motto, used from the
1360s to as late as the 1550s to mark the household servants, soldiers, and
political clients and allies of kings, princes, and great barons, and displayed
both on livery uniforms and a variety of livery flags, all of which had a primarily
military function. The livery banderoles, guidons, and standards, divided
into bands of the livery colors and strewn with livery badges and
mottoes, all supplemented, in the various nonfeudal companies, the more
traditional armorial pennoncelles, pennons, and banners that were still
used to indicate the presence of the lord or his chief deputy.
As the existence of these various forms of flags indicates, armorial and
paraheraldic emblems generally were closely associated with the role of the
knight as warrior. This was true not only in the increasingly sanitized combats
of the tournament and joust (which themselves frequently took on the
outward form of a scene in a romance), but in the combats à l’outrance (to
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