CITY OF LONDON COAT OF ARMS 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...
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...
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...
