11.
ARMS. ANIMALS AND HERALDRY by Mark Hanson
Man has used animals symbolically for
hundreds of years, primitively sacrificing
or deifying and worshipping all manner of
creatures. These early pagan practises
probably gave rise to the use of animals
symbolising qualities which perhaps a tribal
leader, king or emperor would hope to emulate.
It is probably this that first led to the use
of lions (king of the beasts) or eagles (the
lion's avian counterpart) being depicted,
perhaps first as the leader's insignia and
later as the tribal insignia. So it is that
we find the eagle at the head of the Roman
legions and later lion, raven, dragon and a
leopards head among the earliest recorded
insignia of the Saxon and Danish kings. The
lion is also believed to have been the royal
badge of the Norman kings.
Prior to and for some time after the
Norman Conquest the use of emblems was hap-
hazard. There was no concept of hereditary
coats of arms though emblems may well have
been passed down from father to son in
unchanged form. It was probably as a means
of identifying friend from foe in battle or
more plausibly to identify the combatants in
the jousting tournaments that the "gentle
science" of heraldry was born, bringing a
systematic order to the use of insignia for
the identification not only of families but
of an individual's status within that family.
Until this time relatively few emblems
were being used but with so many families
granted arms and cadency (the differencing
of arms within a family), a plethora of
emblems or "charges" as they became known
came about.