The Heraldry Society - coat of arms

No. 191 Autumn 2000

Symbols of Nationhood (excerpt from Aspects of National Identity in Mediaeval Britain

At the battles of Agincourt and Bosworth Field Cornish bowmen fought beneath a banner that proclaimed their national identity. At Agincourt the banners of St. George. St. Edward the Confessor and St. Edmund King and Martyr indicated the patrons of the English realm, and after Henry Earl of Richmond triumphed at Bosworth Field he took the undifferenced quarterings of the English sovereign as Henry VII. It would seem from this that there was some kind of understanding of nationhood in mediaeval Britain, albeit in the form of a political suzerainty, as indicated by such banners and coats of arms. Despite this, some scholars would claim that "there was no room for nations or nationalism in antiquity or the middle ages".

Today, British citizens proclaim their national identity with the royal arms of the United Kingdom stamped upon their passports. However, when the recent report, sponsored by the Runneymede Trust, suggested that the word "British" was racially divisive it spurred the Home Secretary to say that he was "proud to be English and proud to be British". This kind of remark raised the question of what we mean by national identity, for the Home Secretary is presumably English by blood and British by being a subject of the British realm. Nationality is a unifying ideology therefore which has an ethnic as well as political connotation.

The bounds of Christendom in the middle ages encompassed what today would be described as Europe, this comprised of a type of hegemony of Christian kingdoms with the sovereignty of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor acting as a kind of fluctuating bipolar infrastructure. Society in Britain at this time was to some extent mobile and disparate, divided by the estates of nobility, clergy and peasantry. However the Celtic fringes of Britain seemed to retain more consistent understanding of nationality.

For the most part, national identity seemed to have more to do with the matter of sovereignty and allegiance which grew out of the post-conquest culture within the Norman ascendancy. This produced to some extent a common culture and language, albeit Norman French was the language of the ruling classes, but a sense of national unity was enhanced by common laws and institutions and the Norman settlers embracing an English identity. A consistent symbol of nationhood was the dragon standard, said to have been taken from the Roman cohorts and which became the "burning dragon of Cadwallader", a native Celtic prince who adopted the symbol nearly two centuries after the Roman departure. The West Saxons then adopted the same dragon which came was also borne by Duke William as a sign of his claim to the English throne. Heraldically speaking this was a wyvern or a two legged dragon which reappeared as a national symbol in the reigns of Richard I, Henry III, Edward III, Henry V. Henry I was probably responsible for the introduction of the lion and Henry II's wife Eleanor of Acquitaine, as evidence of her seal, could have been the first to bear three lions passant guardant. Richard I bore the same arms on his second great seal and thereafter this device has represented all British sovereigns.

Mark Turnham Elvins OFM.CAP,MA,GRAD.DIP.SIP.