What is the origin of the second lion in the Royal Arms of England? Some historians suggest that it came into the Arms through Henry I’s marriage to Adeliza, daughter of Godfrey of Louvain, image above, who bore a lion in allusion to his name (Leuwon : Leones). But there is no proof that the second lion was intended to commemorate this union, it may indeed have been added purely for artistic effect. From his grandfather Henry II is supposed to have inherited two gold lions on red, but they first appear as an undoubted shield of arms in the seal of his son John. But Prince John’s lions looked not out of the shield but over their shoulders (reguardant). This may have been deliberate, to distinguish the son’s Arms from those of his father. Two lions differently placed were probably used by Henry’s eldest son, Richard I, during his crusade.

Over the course of time the two lions came to be regarded as having been the Arms of all English kings from William I to Henry II, and they appear in the shields of several foundations connected with those monarchs. The are found quartered in the shield of the Duchy of Brunswick, owing to the marriage of Maud, daughter of Henry II, to Henry V, Duke of Bavaria. When Maud’s remote descendant, George, Duke of Brunswick and Luneberg, ascended to the English throne as George I, the two lions were reintroduced into the Royal Arms and remained there for a century. Just as Henry I is thought to have acquired the second lion through marriage, it is also thought that Henry II added the third when he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose Arms were known to be  a single golden lion on a red shield. The three lions in their present incarnation are thought to have been first used by Richard I being placed on his seal in 1194.

Many English cities and towns bear on or more of the royal lions in their civic Coats of Arms. Canterbury has a lion on its red chief above the three Cornish choughs ( birds) of St. Thomas-a-Beckett. York has five lions on a cross of St. George. Winchester has two lions supporting the middle one of five castles on a red shield. Cambridge University has four lions on a red shield around its ermine cross bearing a red-bound book. The three lions also form the Coat of Arms for the Channel Islands, between England and France.

Cambridge University Arms

The Lion is a lively image of a good soldier, who must be valiant of  courage., strong of body, politicke in counsell, and a foe to feare.”  — Guillim, Display of Heraldry

The Armorial Roll of Caerlaverock from 1300 describes the Arms of the King of England as “ Three leopards of fine gold set on red; courant, fierce, haughty and cruel; to signify that like them the King is dreadful to his enemies, for his bite is slight to none who brave his anger, and yet towards such as seek his friendship or submit to his power his kindness is soon rekindled.” In heraldry a leopard represents a lion staring you in the face, the three lions have stood in the Royal Arms of England since the reign of Richard I. Their origin is uncertain but there is an interesting but doubtful theory as to their origin.

The seals of the first and second Williams and Henry I are free of Heraldry, but Henry seems to have used a single lion as a badge, and some historians think this may have been an allusion to the title “ Lion of Justice” by which Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the prophecies of Merlin, refers to the King. If this is the case, the first English lion may be regarded as commemorating the foundation of the administrative and legal system by the organization of the curia Regis for financial and judicial business, the establishment of itinerant justices to carry the King’s law throughout the land, and the strengthening of the popular courts to resist the encroachment of feudal franchises. It is significant that it was in the reign of Henry I that the first recorded lion was seen in England as part of the King’s menagerie at Woodstock. The main reason for believing that the lion was Henry I’s  particular emblem is its prevalence in the Heraldry of the King’s descendents and those connected to his family by marriage. When Henry knighted his son-in-law, Geoffrey, Count of Anjou ( father of Henry II ), he gave him a shield charged with golden lions and this appears on an enameled figure of the Count formerly on his tomb. Here he also has a lion on his cap, the forerunner of the English Royal crest. Geoffrey’s grandson, William Longuespée, Earl of Salisbury, bore similar Arms, placing his golden lions upon a blue shield. There is evidence that Henry II himself bore two lions on his shield. Henry I’s descendents through his  illegitimate children all bore one or more lions in their Arms.

Geoffrey Count of Anjou

The badge of Sagittary or Sagittarius, the centaur armed with a bow and arrow is attributed to Stephen of Blois and it is thought that this emblem commemorated a victory won by his archers. An alternative theory is that he took his badge from the sign of the zodiac under which his reign began. Another badge said to be used by Stephen was a plume of three ostrich feathers, with the motto, Vi nulla invertitur ordo, “ By no force is their form altered.” This is not to be confused with the ostrich plumes on the Coat of Arms of the Prince of Wales, which are of different origin. The family of Dering from Kent regard the three red roundels (rings) above the blue fess on their silver shield as a memorial of the battle of Lincoln where Stephen was taken prisoner. Normannus Fitz Dering, who made gallant efforts to rescue the King, was found dead after the battle with his shield covered in blood, whence, it is said, the red roundels borne by his descendants. The crest of the family, a black horse, refers to their claim to have been people of note in the old Saxon kingdom if Kent.

Two Coats of Arms give us a glimpse of the styles of clothing and armor that were worn in England in the twelfth century. The first is that of the Hastings family, gold with a red maunch ( a maunch is a lady’s sleeve with a long baggy cuff). William de Hastings, the progenitor of the family, was Steward of the Household to Henry I, in whose reign the illuminations in which we discover this curiously shaped sleeve were, it is most probable, executed. Possibly Hastings adopted this emblem in token of some lady’s favor. A more interesting point for the herald is that in the Hastings shield we have an emblem which seems to have been in continuous use since the reign of Henry I, and is therefore an unusually early example of a personal cognizance which became hereditary. The second hint at old fashions is the shield of De Quincy, Earl of Winchester; red with seven gold mascles ( belt buckles). This device was probably suggested by the armor of the period, which consisted of diamond-shaped pieces of steel superimposed on leather. The mascle also became a very common heraldic device and dates from the time of Henry I.

Maunch

Mascle

Historically, the dragon is more properly regarded as William of Normandy’s emblem than the two lions posthumously conferred on him by the heralds. There is evidence that the Dragon standard was used by four of William’s successors, namely, Richard I, Henry III, Edward I and Henry V. In his account of Richard’s crusade, Richard of Devizes wrote: “ The terrible standard of the dragon is  borne in front unfurled.” Henry III is recorded as having issued a mandate “ to cause a dragon to be made in fashion of a standard of red silk sparkling all over with gold, the tongue of which should be made to resemble burning fire and appear to be continually moving, the eyes of sapphires or other suitable stones.” It is recorded that at Crécy King Edward raised “ his unconquered standard of the Dragon Gules,” and that it made its appearance again at Agincourt.

So this ancient monster, descended from an ensign of Imperial Rome, continued as the national standard of England until the fifteenth century. It is important to also note that the so-called griffins that support the shield of the City of London are in reality dragons, the griffin being composed of the body of a lion and the head of an eagle. But the London dragons are not related to the old national emblem. They had an accidental and unnatural origin. Over the shield in a sixteenth-century seal of the city is a helmet with a fan-shaped metal crest, painted with a red cross as in the Arms. In the following century the City fathers seem to have imagined that this metal fan was the wing of a monster, and, as anatomists reconstruct an extinct animal from one small bone, they created a dragon to which this supposed wing belonged, and set him up to guard and support their shield. So the City of London dragons have no heraldic ancestry. In the time of Richard II the shield in the civic seal was supported by lions.

The preservation of the dragon was in accordance with the Norman kings’ policy of placating their English subjects by identifying the crown with what national sentiment existed. In this connection a device attributed to William Rufus, by the seventeenth-century herald, Guilim, may have some historical significance. Guilim wrote that It is storied that the old eagles make a proof of their young by exposing them to the Sun-beames, and such as cannot steadily behold their brightness are cast forth as unworthy to be acknowledged their Off-spring. In which respect William Rufus, King of the land, gave for his device an Eagle, looking against the sun, with this word “ Perferro “, “I can endure it”, to signify he was no whit degenerate from his puissant Father the Conquerer.” The Norman baronage would have been better pleased if William II had indeed proved himself to be a degenerate; in fact, there was a movement to place William the Conqueror’s eldest son, the weak and careless Robert, upon the English throne. William’s device was not intended to appeal to them, but rather to the English. It is true that at the start of his reign William threw himself upon the loyalty of the English, who mustered in strength to expel the rebel lords, undoubtedly feeling that however oppressive the royal hand may be it was preferable to baronial anarchy.

William Rufus

The actual Norman conquest which followed the Battle of Hastings occurred in a piecemeal fashion. This is suggested by the similarity between the Coats of Arms of certain cities and towns in widely disparate parts of England. For example, the gold and blue checkers of the Warrennes, Earls of Surrey appear in the shields of places ranging from Lewes (arms above) to Dewsbury and including Lambeth. This indicates not only the possessions granted by the Duke of Normandy to William de Warrenne, ancestor of the checker-bearing family, but also the scattered nature of their territory, and indirectly the manner in which Duke William distributed the spoils of his conquest. Faced with a clamorous demand for land by a host of adventurers, he parceled out the country as he won it, granting first small parcels and later more substantial tracts of land. The fortunate but not necessarily premeditated result of this enforced policy was that the Duke prevented his followers obtaining large tracts of land in one district, and setting themselves up as serious rivals to his monarchy.

Only in the key counties on the border of his realm, Durham, Chester, Shropshire and Kent, did William permit great semi-independent jurisdictions to arise. The mitre of the See of Durham, plumed like a helmet and with a coronet about its rim, is symbolic of the palatinate jurisdiction which William conferred upon that bishopric, the patrimony of St. Cuthbert, which “lay as a sacred boundary between England and Scotland.” The seal of Lord Crewe, a seventeenth-century Bishop of Durham, contained the figure of a fully armed man on horseback, his warlike appearance being palliated by an inscription suggesting his Arms to be of a spiritual nature: Propterea accipite armaturam Dei galeam salutis assumite et gladium spiritus. But the seal clearly referred to the soldierly character of the old-time bishops. The Palatinate was transferred to the Crown in 1836, but the Bishop of Durham still retains the coronet about his mitre.

The presence of two gold lions on red (the supposed Arms of the conqueror) in the shield of the See of Lincoln commemorates the ecclesiastical reorganization undertaken by Duke William and Lanfranc, which resulted in the transfer of the center of the vast northern bishopric from Dorchester-on-Thames to Lincoln. Pevensey, which was granted to Gilbert de Aquila and came to be known as the Honor of the Eagle, still uses as Arms a red eagle upon gold in allusion to the Norman family de Aquila.

Lambeth Arms

Duke William of Normandy had the sanction of the church for his expedition, and this is shown heraldically by the banner depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry; a red cross on a white background with a blue border. This was the flag that received the blessing of Pope Alexander. Although enjoying the support of the Church, William was by no means subservient to the Pope’s wishes, as in later years he said the following to Pope Gregory: “ Fealty I never willed to do, nor do I will to do it now. I have never promised it, nor do I find that my predecessors did it to yours.” Another Norman banner represented in the Bayeux Tapestry may have been the famous raven of the Norsemen. This emblem recalls the descent of the Normans from the fierce and adventurous Scandinavian people who harried the shores of Britain and Ireland and established themselves firmly in Northern France during the ‘dark ages’ after the fall of Charlemagne’s Empire. It suggests that the Normans acknowledged their origins and emphasizes the fact that the Anglo-Saxon kingdom finally fell not to a new and unexpected foe, but to a branch of that race which had for generations sought to conquer it.

An armed knight holding a red banner containing two golden lions ( the traditional arms of the Conqueror) supports the shield of the Delaval family, and represents Guido de la Val, said to have been a cousin of Duke William of Normandy, and to have borne his head banners at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Other families that cling to the legend of an ancestor that fought at the Battle of Hastings seek to support their claim by a liberal interpretation of the bearings in their Arms. A branch of the St. Johns who display three wagon horses’ collars profess to be descended from the master of William’s baggage- wagons; and the Ferrers family seek the origin of their name, and the horseshoes in their shield in the office of chief farrier to the Norman army. The surname Fortescue is attached to a romantic story from the Battle of Hastings. Richard le Fort, it is told, flung his shield before Duke William at a critical moment in the battle, saving William from certain death. For this service to the Duke, Fort received the addition of escue to his name, and to this day the Fortescues bear the punning motto Forte scutum salus dictum —“ A strong shield is the leader’s safeguard.” A badge of the family is a shield bearing the word “Fort”. The need for certain families to establish a Norman ancestor has been responsible for many such fables, and to correct this is an apt quote from the foremost authority on heraldic matters, Arthur Fox-Davies in his book Armorial Families: “If any ordinary individual tell you he is descended in the male line from someone who figures upon the glorious roll of Battle Abbey, or that his ancestor ‘came over with the Conquerer’, write him down a perverter of the truth at once.”

William the Conquerer

Battle of Hastings by Frank Wilkin ( 1791-1842)

When William, Duke of Normandy, wrested control of England from King Harold, heraldry was not widely practiced in even the more advanced societies in Europe. The Bayeux Tapestry, the famous pictorial record of the Norman invasion, shows decorated shields and banners, and attempts have been made to identify individuals by these shields but with not very convincing results. However Wace, writing at the time of Henry II stated:

‘They ( the Normans) had shields on their necks and lances in their hands, and all had made cognisances that one Norman might know another by, and that none others bore, so that no Frenchman might kill another.”

It is unlikely that Wace meant that the Normans bore individual cognisances, or shields, but rather there were one or two emblems in use throughout in order to distinguish William’s followers as a whole from the Saxons. His identification of all of the members of an army by a distinctive figure was no new thing. We read in St. Olaf’s Saga that at the battle of Niesse, 50 years before the battle of Hastings:

“ the most of his men had white shields, on which the holy cross was gilt; but some had painted it in blue and red.”

The reason for this clearly appears in the account of Olaf’s last battle, in 1030, when the King ordered:

“ We will have all our men distinguished by a mark, so as to be a field token upon their helmets and shields, by painting the holy cross thereupon with white colour. When we come into battle we shall all have one counter-sign and field-cry, ‘Forward, forward, Christ-men ! Crossmen ! King’s men!’”

The King himself had “ a white shield on which the Holy Cross was inlaid in gold.” So we may assume that at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 the devices on the Norman shields, if they were anything more  than merely decorative, had a partisan rather than a personal significance. The Bayeux Tapestry shows us that a dragon was a favorite figure on the Norman shields. But the dragon was clearly the English emblem. It was around the banner of the Golden Dragon of Wessex, known as “ The German Dragon” of the so-called prophecies of Merlin:

“ The German dragon shall hardly get to his holes……for a people in wood and in iron coats shall come and revenge upon him his wickedness. They shall restore the ancient inhabitants to their dwellings, and there shall be an open destruction of foreigners……After this shall succeed two dragons, whereof one shall be killed by the arrow of envy, but the other shall return under the shadow of a name. Then shall succeed the Lion of Justice, at whose roar the Gallican towers and the island dragons shall tremble” – Geoffrey of Monmouth

Why would the Normans display their enemy’s emblem? William always claimed to be King of the English by right, and the prevalence of the dragon on the shields of his followers suggests that he may have deliberately adopted the emblem of the English as an expression of his claim to be their lawful king.

Bayeux Tapestry death of King Harold

A familiar site in Westminster Abbey is the Coat of Arms of Edward the Confessor which stand in many places in his greatest monument. Edward the Confessor (1003-1066) was the son of Aethelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy and is widely acknowledged as the last king of the House of Wessex. He ruled from 1042 to 1066. Edward’s successor Harold Godwinson was defeated by William Duke of Normandy, which led to the England’s domination by the Normans. Edward the Confessors Arms consist of a golden cross”flory” and five gold doves on a blue shield; Azure, a cross flory or between five doves of the same.

The thirteenth century heralds that devised this shield based it on a coin of the Confessor, containing the cross usual to the reverse side of English money, but in the quarters four doves instead of the customary pellets. A dove surmounts the scepter in Edward’s seal, and it is clear that he regarded this bird, emblem of piety and gentleness, as his special symbol. Though posthumously conferred, Edward’s Arms are of some importance on account of their medieval and modern associations. They have been incorporated in the Arms of Westminster Abbey, Westminster School., Westminster City, the Borough of Eye in Suffolk, the West Suffolk County Council; they are even found in Canada, where they appear in the shield of the See of New Westminster. They were adopted by the Abbey of Dunfermline, founded by the great-niece of Edward the Confessor, who became the wife of Malcolm Canmore. They were also the basis of the Arms of Edmund Rich, the sainted Archbishop of Canterbury, founder of St. Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, which still bears a red cross “patonce” and four black martlets ( birds)  on gold; Or a cross patoncesable between four martlets of the same.

Malcolm Canmore

To some of Edward the Confessor’s royal predecessors the heralds assigned modifications of his Arms- a gold cross with only four doves for the kings from Edgar onwards, and the cross flory alone for some of the earlier kings, including Alfred. University College, Oxford, which claims Alfred as its founder, departs from heraldic tradition by using as Arms the cross and four doves attributed to Alfred’s successors. The presence of Edward’s Arms in the roof of Westminster Hall is a memorial not directly to the confessor but to Richard II, rebuilder of the hall, who showed such respect for Edward as to bear his banner in battle and marshal his Arms on the royal shield. Another emblem attributed to Edward the Confessor is a hand grasping a ring; the ring he gave as alms to an old pilgrim at the consecration of St. John’s Church at the place subsequently called Havering, Essex. The pilgrim was St. John himself, who later sent the ring back to King Edward with word that he should “dispose of his goods, for within six months he shall be in the joy of Heaven with me, when he shall have his reward for his chastity and good living.”

Westminster School Arms

Today most people who posses a Coat of Arms regard it as no more than an interesting relic of an ancestral past; privately they may feel a sense of pride and satisfaction in the evidence of noble forbearers. However personal Heraldry is no longer indicative of class or privilege. The writer Stubbs has noted that in earlier times however “the coat armour of every house was a precious inheritance, which descended, under definite limitations and with distinct differences, to every member of the family: a man’s shield proved his gentle or noble birth, illustrated his pedigree, and put him on his honour not to disgrace the bearings which his noble progenitors had worn”. The Coat of Arms was the shrine of personal honor, as closely associated with its owner as own name, and a man was doubly disgraced if he suffered an armorial degradation. An armorial degradation was the stripping of ones Arms due to some heinous act. In the reign of Edward II, the two Lords Despenser were purposely dressed in their full coat of Armour before they were hanged, drawn and quartered.

The right to the exclusive use of a particular Coat of Arms was jealously guarded. When, in 1375, Sir Richard le Scrope and Sir Robert Grosvenor were found to be using the same Arms, Azure a bend or (A blue shield with a gold diagonal line), since pride prevented either of them from voluntarily relinquishing their Arms, Richard II decided that the dispute should be settled by a duel. Grosvener lost and had to change his Coat of Arms. He added a silver border to differentiate from those of le Scrope who complained that this change was insufficient. Grovesner then took for Arms a sheaf of wheat upon a blue shield Azure a garb or which was derived from the Arms of the old Earldom of Chester. The sheaf of wheat is still borne on the Arms of the Duke of Westminister.

Schwerin Castle located near Meclenburg in the old East Germany is a fairytale Castle set on a small island in a lake within the city of Schwerin. For many years the Castle was home to the Dukes and Grand Dukes of Mecklenburg. The Castle currently serves as the seat of the state parliament for the state of Meclenburg-Vorpommern. Thew Castle dates to the 10^th century when first reports of a castle in the locale are recorded in 973. The Polabian Slavic tribe founded a fort for defence on the strategically situated island.In 1160, the fort became a target of Germanic noblemen planning to expand their territory eastward under the leadership of Henry the Lion (1129–1195).However, the German conquerors recognised the strategic and aesthetically interesting location of the island and started building a new fort. The foundation of the city of Schwerin took place in the same year. Schwerin became seat of a bishopric.In 1167, Henry gave the County of Schwerin to his vassal Gunzelin von Hagen, and the rest of the country around the city was returned to Niklot’s son Pribislav, forming a ducal hereditary line that lasted until 1918.  Under Duke Johann Albrecht I. (1525–1576), the fort became a castle, and the defensive functionality of the fortress was replaced with ornamentation and concessions to comfort. The use of terracotta during the Renaissance was dominant in North German architecture, and Schwerin’s terracotta was supplied from Lübeck. Johann Albrecht rebuilt the chapel in the castle in 1563 and it became the first protestant church in the state. . The architecture was inspired by churches in Torgau and Dresden. The Venetian Renaissance gate, its gable showing the carrying of the cross, was made by Hans Walther (1526–1600), a sculptor from Dresden.Windows on the northern face show biblical illustrations by well-known Dutch artist Willem van den Broecke (called “Paludanus”) (1530–1580).

The architect Ghert Evert Piloot  made plans to rebuild the castle in the style of the Dutch Renaissance in the early 17^th century, however, these plans were put on hold due to the 30 Years War. His plans were partially carried out after the war when the house above the castle kitchen and that above the chapel were razed and replaced with Dutch Renaissance style facades in the 1630s. In the nineteenth century Grand Duke Friedrich (1800–1842) decided to rebuild the castle, and ordered his architect Georg Adolph Demmler (1804–1886) to do so. A few months later, construction was halted by his successor, Friedrich Franz II (1823–1883), who wanted a complete reconstruction of the historic site. Only some parts of the building from the 16th and 17th century were kept. Dresden architect Gottfried Semper (1803–1879) and Berlin architect Friedrich August Stüler (1800–1865) could not convince the grand duke of their plans. Instead, Demmler included elements of both of them into his plan, but would find inspiration in French Renaissance castles. It became the most admired master work of the student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel.. He also planned a government building in 1825-26 located at Schlossstraße (today the State Chancellery).His successor Stüler, again, changed a few things, and included a statue of Niklot on horseback, and the pompous cupola. For the interior design, Heinrich Strack (1805–1880) from Berlin was chosen.  There was a fire in the castle in December 1913. The revolution in 1918 resulted in the abdication of the Grand Duke, but only the exterior reconstruction had been completed. It later became a museum and in 1948 the seat of parliament. The German Democratic Republic, opposed to nobility, used it as a college for kindergarten teachers from 1952-1981. Then it was a Museum again until 1993. The Orangerie had been a technical museum since 1961. From 1974 on, some renovated rooms were used as an art museum. Since late 1990, it is once again a place of government and representation as the seat of the parliament of State of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Since then, massive renovation efforts have been conducted and are, due to the complexity of a castle of this size, still in progress.