[ANSTHRLD] College of Arms

[Diane Rudin]

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[ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003, I wrote:


[cloaks of office]
>> Officers? Nope. Heralds? Nope. Anyone other than knights? I'd
>> love to see it. (Oh, and the badge on knights' cloaks goes on the
>> shoulder, not a big one on the back.)

For which Daniel asked the following clarification:



>Left front breast or both front breasts, right, not on the back
>shoulder(s)?

Upshot of the following discussion:  No, not on the back shoulder(s), nor on both breasts, but also not exactly where "left front breast" would make a modern person put it, but a little up and back from that spot.



Discussion:  When I made Robin's Laurel cloak on this model, I applied the laurel wreath centered over the left side seam on the upper arm.  This was based on looking at portraits, where it looks kinda on the side.  Afterwards, reading my copy of *British Heraldry:  From Its Origins to c.1800* (an exhibit catalog, compiled & edited by Richard Marks and Ann Payne, London:  British Museum Publications Limited, 1978), I found the following in chapter VII "The Orders of the Garter and of the Bath", p. 122:  "From at least the early fifteenth century the mantle has been embroidered with the cross of St George enclosed in a Garter on the left shoulder."  Pictorial evidence in this book and in other portraits supports it being placed slightly higher than the part of the body most people today think of as the "breast" (although in period it encompassed pretty much everything from neck to waist), although the Garter Mantle of Christian IV, King of Denmark and Norway, 1606, has it placed over the upper left arm, just below the shoulder point and just forward of the side seam.  (Actual surviving Garter mantle pictured!  Buy this book!)  This matches the spot where the thing actually lands most of the time because the things were never worn fully closed during ceremonies.  (Also pictured:  a garter surviving from c. 1489, the oldest known surviving English patent of arms (what we in the SCA call an achievement "scroll"), many many drawings of period heraldry & heralds, etc.  All this at about 1/2-inch thick!  Buy this book!)  So I'm going to remove the Laurel wreath from Robin's cloak, refurbish the velvet, and stitch the wreath back down in the more properly correct position, five inches forward from where it is currently stitched.



--Serena



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