1In fourteenth-century Europe many potentially contentious aspects of chivalric society came to be the subject of written treatises. The Tree of Battles (Arbre des batailles) of Honoré Bonet (or Bouvet) dealt with many of these issues, and had a rapid success, from soon after it was first published, in 1387.1 Amongst much else, it provided a set of rules for knightly conduct on (and off) the battlefield: it offered one of the earliest expositions of what came to be called the laws of war. Bonet had trained as a canonist and held the degree of Doctor of Canon Law, but he wrote in an extremely accessible way and in his vernacular, French. For such reasons, his work enjoyed a circulation that far exceeded that of the comparable and slightly earlier Tractatus de bello of John of Legnano (d. 1383), a civil law teacher based at Bologna.

2A key component of the chivalric world was heraldry, the bearing of coats of arms in a more-or-less systematic way and on a hereditary basis. Heraldry in the fourteenth century was in a state of transition, from being the unregulated display of such identifying devices or insignia by knights on the battlefield and in tournaments, to a more widely practised display which the Crown or other governing authorities had little option other than to regulate. In England, for instance, it is from the 1340s that there is the first evidence for the formal settling by external parties of disputes about the entitlement to particular coats of arms. This was at the time of the siege of Calais (1346-7), when an English army was encamped near the town, and at least three disputes arose between pairs of soldiers who bore identical coats of arms. The judge was the senior military commander, Henry of Grosmont, earl (and later duke) of Lancaster, but he and his fellow judges, who were soldiers of high standing and military experience, had been commissioned to act by the king: heraldic disputes had become too serious and complicated a matter to be left to the disputants to resolve themselves. Such examples could no doubt be multiplied, and across Europe, too: the Hundred Years’ War was just one of many causes for heraldry coming to the fore as a complicated aspect of the military life. The time was ripe for a treatise to be written in which the whole subject was clearly set out, and which could thus act as a guide to the military commanders and other judges who had to face such issues. Honoré Bonet’s Tree of Battles was the one book that most military commanders were likely to possess and is deservedly well known – but behind its text lay a much shorter and more legalistic tract: the De insigniis et armis of Bartolo da Sassoferrato. All that the Tree of Battles has to say on the subject of heraldry and the law, which amounts to a full six chapters, is derived from Bartolo’s work.2

3The Italian civil lawyer Bartolo da Sassoferrato (1313/14-1357) was certainly well equipped to write just such a work.3 He had studied law at Perugia under Cino da Pistoia (Cino di Sinibaldi) and later at Bologna under Oldradus and Jacobus de Belvisu, proceeding Doctor of Civil Law at Bologna in 1334. He then acted as assessor to the law courts in Todi and Pisa and also as a judge in the criminal courts at Bologna; he had a reputation for being harsh in his sentences. In 1343 he was invited back to Perugia, to build up the law school there. This he did, with such success as to make it a credible rival to that of Bologna. While at Perugia, he was sent on a mission to ask the emperor, Charles IV, for certain privileges for the town, and Charles granted him a coat of arms, for himself and his descendants. Bartolo famously had a longstanding interest in the way in which the law might be applied in new areas: for instance, in his commentary on Book 12 of the Codex of Justinian he discussed the whole question of nobility – its different types, its sources (whether derived from nature, i.e., based upon individual virtue, or whether received from the prince) and the significance for it of customary practice (which in effect meant heredity).4 Bartolo argued that even a man-at-arms (that is to say, one who was not a knight) who acted with valour in his profession and who served the prince was thereby ennobled, as of course was any servant of the prince whom the prince specifically ennobled – and which the prince might do by letters patent.

4Clearly Bartolo was ideally equipped to tackle the specific subject of armorial (or heraldic) bearings and comparable insignia that were linked to men’s professional activities, military or otherwise. He combined the lawyer’s theoretical knowledge with the judge’s practical expertise, and could well apply the two in tandem to this new topic. He did so, relatively late in his rather short life, perhaps in 1355, writing a tractatus or short treatise De insigniis et armis (‘About insignia and coats of arms’). The word tractatus was commonly used to describe an essay on a particular issue. According to the colophon in some manuscripts, it was left incomplete and was published in the January following Bartolo’s death – that is, in January 1358 – by his son-in-law Nicola Alessandri, himself a Doctor of Civil Law.5 It seems hazardous to imagine any significant additional material to have been added to Bartolo’s text by Nicola, given the shortness of time since Bartolo’s death, although this is argued for by Cavallar, Degenring and Kirshner.6 It may well be the case, too, that Bartolo was temperamentally prone to keep adding to his treatises, revising them over a period of years. His longest such treatise, variously entitled Tractatus testimonium or Tractatus de testibus, about testimony in court, was begun early in his career and was worked on until late in his life, and although he published a number of versions of it, his pupil Baldo degli Ubaldi thought that it was still unfinished.7

5Certainly, De insigniis is not a long treatise, even though Bartolo lengthened it by expanding its scope beyond the ‘insignia and coats of arms that are borne on banners and shields’ with which he states in the opening sentence that he is concerned. It has generally been presented in 33 paragraphs or sections, as editorially numbered. Its underlying structure or framework is quite clear, however. Bartolo opens with a discussion of the bearing of insignia and coats of arms. Some, he notes, are insignia of office (an example being the insignia of bishops), and it will be a fraud if any one who is not entitled to these bears them. Some insignia are proper to people of a particular rank, and no one else may bestow them; but it is not prohibited to use them as an accompaniment (for example, placing the insignia of a king, count or town on one’s own coat of arms as a sign of subjection – as is commonly done, he remarks) (§§ 1-2). Then Bartolo moves on to coats of arms of private individuals: these are sometimes borne by virtue of a grant by an emperor or other lord. At this point he states that he and his descendants were granted arms by the emperor Charles IV: Or a lion rampant queue fourchée gules (a red lion rampant with a forked tail, on a gold background). He also states that anyone may assume arms and insignia, which they may display on their own property (§§ 3-4). By analogy with names, where more than one person may bear the same name, there is nothing intrinsically wrong in assuming and bearing the same arms as another person, unless injury is done to him by treating the arms with contempt or in some other way harming him or by using the arms in such a way as to cause public scandal and confusion (§ 5). He then enlarges on the circumstances where it is unreasonable for a party to object to another person bearing the same coat (as when a German who goes to Rome at the time of a Jubilee – i.e., on pilgrimage – finds an Italian bearing the same coat of arms and seeks to lodge a complaint), or, per contra, where it is not allowable (§§ 6-7). In the following paragraphs he broadens out the discussion, to cover craftsmen, such as the skilled swordsmith whose marks identify his products, and the marks of notaries and of merchants, and the watermarks used by papermakers: all these marks will be protected by the law courts (§§ 7-8).

6Logically enough, Bartolo proceeds to discuss the ranking or precedence of the different ways in which people of the same rank may have received coats of arms. Imperial grants are of greater dignity, in the same way as a testament which is made before the emperor; but they have other advantages, too. On the other hand, a person of higher rank will take precedence over one of lesser position (§ 9). Coats of arms belong to a family or agnation (that is, descendants in the male line), and are transmitted to all agnates, whether or not they are heirs. They do not come to cognates or to those related by marriage (§ 10). Bastards cannot, as a general rule, use the arms – but in Tuscany the custom is to the contrary, and this custom must stand (§ 11).

7A slight digression ensues, as he considers what happens to merchants’ marks and other trademarks (such as watermarks) when a partnership ends: the principle is that the mark remains with the person who remains in the business, owns the paper-mill or is head craftsman of the shop.

8The next broad section is concerned with how coats of arms and other insignia are to be painted, affixed and borne. Where they represent known objects, whether animals or not, they must show the essence of the object. If it is an animal, they should show it in its noblest action or position and exhibiting its greatest vigour. If the animal is by nature wild, as is a lion, then it will be represented rampant (erect, on its hind legs), with gnashing teeth and clawing feet, so as to display its strength (§§ 13-16). In a comment that Lorenzo Valla was later to ridicule, Bartolo declares that an animal represented on a banner should always have its head facing the staff, so that its head will be at the front of the banner (in the field) (§ 14). Animals that are not by nature wild should be shown in their own noblest posture – running, in the case of a horse, and walking in the case of a lamb; but always with the right foot forward, because the right side is the source of motion (§§ 17-19). In terms of the general layout or design of a coat of arms, he states that the right (heraldic dexter) and the top are nobler than the left and bottom (§ 23).8

9All the issues or questions considered so far were in a sense inescapable, practical ones that were bound to crop up in daily life, and Bartolo may himself have had experience of many of them. He then turns, however, to a more speculative or theoretical area, of colour. Here his focus is on the question of which colours are to be worn, and why: his answers are far from dogmatic, as he presents, for instance, different ways of assessing nobility (§§ 24-27).

10Abruptly he briefly changes direction, reverting to the question of how coats of arms are to be worn, and interjecting a long digression on how Hebrew writing may be said to be rational because it goes from right to left, although actually (Christian) writing, which moves towards the right side, is more rational because the written words are to be read from left to right (§ 29). Slightly incoherently, he explains that a coat of arms is like a seal matrix, in that it is to be understood as if back to front (§§ 29-30) – and so the principal or nobler part of a shield is that which is in front of its bearer’s right side (§ 31). Rather obviously, he then explains that if a coat of arms is depicted on a wall, the same principle of the right side being the noble side is nevertheless taken to apply, and so the coat of arms is represented in the same way as on a shield. However, he then complicates matters by suggesting that if coats of arms are painted around the figure of a prince, in the middle of a wall, then the coats on both sides of that figure should be turned towards the prince (in disregard of the question of left or right). This, evidently, is so that the faces or nobler parts of the coats are all facing the prince, in line with the general principle of respect (§ 33).

11As a guide to heraldic design and painting, this was all totally unprecedented. It must have seemed remarkable at the time, in the elaborate minuteness with which so many issues are considered. Bartolo’s laying down of the rules to be followed is clear, and yet at times tentative, with the occasional “I think” included in his statements. One has the sense that he is seeking to establish a general pattern from first principles, and at times struggles to achieve this end, although he must surely have been guided by some heraldically well versed advisers.

Reception: the heraldic world

12Ultimately, it was for heralds – whom, one assumes, were not at all the intended or anticipated audience – that the De insigniis made its greatest appeal. As historians of their own expertise, always imbued with a lawyer-like tendency to view the past as part of a continuum with the present (not least because coats of arms are of an undying nature, endlessly transmitted to successive generations), heralds were perhaps bound to appreciate its precocity. It had, too, the attraction for them that it took its subject matter more seriously than did Bartolo’s later adapters, the popularists like Honoré Bonet or Christine de Pisan. Bartolo had the advantage, too, of both the strength of his reputation and the detail with which he had gone into a number of issues that were to remain contentious for centuries to come. Heraldic writers were accordingly very ready to acknowledge him as their master and to cite him by name.9 He was also followed silently – for instance, in the early-fifteenth-century heraldic treatise now known as the Argentaye Tract10 – while at least one heraldic writer shamelessly purported to cite him when actually misquoting him. John de Bado Aureo in his Tractatus de armis (c. 1394) poses the question: “Who can grant arms?” and answers, “The king, prince, king of arms or herald, as Bartolus says”.11 And yet Bartolus was at pains to make clear that the granting of arms was certainly not limited to these people (and, indeed, he does not even mention the possibility that a herald can grant arms – that being a later development).

13There are about 120 manuscripts of the Tractatus extant today,12 but this is a far smaller number than those of Bonet’s “Tree of Battles” let alone of Christine de Pisan’s Livre des faits d’armes. It is noticeable that of those for which a specific late medieval or Early Modern ownership is known, several belonged to heralds. For example, the Tudor herald Robert Glover (d. 1588), Somerset Herald of Arms, owned a copy, in French translation (now British Library, MS Stowe 668). It is striking that another copy, also in French translation, was in the collection of books that the herald Thomas Benolt (d. 1534), Clarenceux King of Arms, bequeathed to form a library for his successors in office.13

14Bartolo’s treatise had an obvious appeal for heralds in his extensive and carefully considered treatment of the significance of colours. This was a topic that had hardly been touched on in the very few earlier (and admittedly short) armorial treatises, such as that De heraudie in a St Albans Abbey formulary-register (Cambridge University Library, MS Ee.4.20, ff. 160^v-161^v)14 but Bartolo treated it in what must certainly be called a generous way, presenting some of the different approaches that might be taken in weighing up the merits of the different colours. This was not his principal legacy to heraldic theorising, however – and indeed he came to be overtaken in this area by later approaches, such as that of relating colours to precious minerals, in the fifteenth century.15

15Rather, De insigniis was valued especially for its careful and thorough approach to certain of the ever-recurrent armorial issues that both shaped and were developed by the law of arms in the course of the second half of the fourteenth century and the whole of the fifteenth: the right to grant arms and the capacity to receive them, and the resolution of disputes when two people each claimed the right to bear the same coat of arms. In both France and England, these disputes were now seen as coming within the jurisdiction of the constable and marshals of the kingdom, and to be justiciable according to the civil law, as varied by local (i.e., national, or in some countries, regional) custom. It must have been thanks in large part to Bartolo that the law that was considered appropriate for all cases concerning armorial devices was the civil law, not the common law. The fact that what might be called same-coat disputes were likely to arise within an army that was out of the country (and thus beyond the jurisdiction of the common law) must have strengthened this acceptance for the English, but it is still reasonable to say that it was owing to Bartolo that within a generation or two of his treatise being published, the court of the Constable of England decided to resolve armorial and other disputes by following civil law procedures: it was a decision that substantially increased the cost of litigation, since one consequence was that expert civilians (commonly, Doctors of Civil Law) had to be engaged by the two parties to each case, along with a limitless number of witnesses. Lengthy proceedings in the Court of Chivalry thus ensued, rather than the battlefield justice that might otherwise have been the means of resolution.

16Equally, it might have been objected by the professional kings of arms and heralds that Bartolo had in effect set in stone, as an unalterable principle, that men could assume a coat of arms on their own authority. Bartolo may have felt that he was being strikingly loyal to the imperial position by the extent to which he stressed the superior nature of formal grants from a prince, since he was writing at a time when imperial and princely grants were only just beginning to be made. But over the next hundred to a hundred and fifty years it came to be accepted throughout Europe that the prince was the supreme and preferable grantor of arms (as also of nobility) and that it was only by virtue of some delegation of authority from him that kings of arms and perhaps heralds of arms could do so themselves. The fact that Bartolo had asserted the subject’s right to assume his own coat of arms was thus an awkward inconvenience to the professional heralds, for what he had stated could hardly be gainsaid by a later generation.

17Bartolo’s interest in colour fitted somewhat awkwardly with heraldic practice, since it has always been a fundamental tenet of heraldry that specific colour shades are not part of the essence of any coat of arms. Save for purposes of identification, colour has not greatly interested heralds. As today’s website of the College of Arms in London states, “There are no fixed shades for heraldic colours. If the official description of a coat of arms gives its tinctures as Gules (red), Azure (blue) and Argent (white), then, as long as the blue is not too light and the red not too orange, purple or pink, it is up to the [heraldic] artist to decide which particular shades they think are appropriate.”16 In the fourteenth century, as for centuries to come, colours were made from natural dyes, and it would have been futile to select a particular shade of any colour. Perhaps in consequence of this, there was no consensus across cultures as to the meaning of certain colour terms, such as scarlet, purple or perse.

18Bartolo himself was evidently unsure about aspects of his proposed colour-hierarchy, with gold as the most noble colour and black as the least, and his schema did not find favour. But the idea that different colours might have different meanings did become a recurrent theme in European heraldic theorising, especially in Italian treatises.17 In England (or possibly Wales) John de Bado Aureo’s treatise devoted many pages to a discussion of colours and their nobility: 18 this just might support the contention that the author was the Welsh bishop John Trevor II, as ecclesiastics were naturally attuned to thinking in terms of colour changes for their vestments and altar-cloths during the liturgical year.19 The fifteenth-century approaches, with their association of colours with the qualities or virtues of gemstones or, occasionally, planets all represented a veering away from Bartolo. The heraldic writer known only by the name of his office, Sicily Herald, wrote a whole book entitled ‘Blason des couleurs’, in which he set out a fresh scheme of colour meanings;20 this in turn was satirised by Francois Rabelais in Gargantua (c. 1532), even though Rabelais was ready to accept that colours might have meanings that were based on nature and philosophy.21

Reception: the attack on Bartolo by Valla

19Bartolo came in time to be stigmatised for being the leader of the school of Italian jurists, glossators of the Corpus iuris civilis, who were seen by humanists, especially in France – where Rabelais was one of the later and most influential critics – as writers of an ugly, unCiceronian Latin and as scholars who were in a sense impure because of the way in which they had sought to place contemporary matters within a juristic framework that was based on the Roman civil law. French humanists also held against the mos italicus its tendency to laud the role of the emperor and thereby reduce the autonomy of mere kings, such as the king of France. Bartolo was too clearly a supporter of imperial authority. An early one of these humanistic onslaughts came as it happened from the Italian anti-Aristotelian Lorenzo Valla (c. 1406-1457): in response to praise that he claimed to have heard for the Tractatus de insigniis, in 1433, he penned a virulent letter almost twice as long as the text itself to his friend Catone Sacco, a lawyer at the university of Pavia, who passed it on to Pier Candido Decembrio.22 It is a very overblown piece of writing, and perhaps should be seen simply as a jeu d’esprit. It made a few scholars react by expressing sympathy for what Bartolo had been trying to do, but its negativity cannot have done Bartolo’s work any favours. On the other hand, Valla’s failure to grasp the nature of heraldry, such that the reader is bound to be left with the feeling that he neither knew about heraldry nor was concerned to treat the matter seriously must ultimately also have been damaging to his own reputation.

Reception: De insigniis since the nineteenth century

20Bartolo was unusual among legal commentators in the extent to which he was interested in applying the principles and methodology as well as the specific rulings of the civil law to contemporary social topics – both issues, such as the right to bear armorial devices, and social conditions, such as the nature of nobility. The sheer volume and range of his writings have perhaps counted against him: he was astonishingly prolific.23 Less obviously, however, the humanistic criticisms of him and his followers have at times returned, or been voiced afresh. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century the German legal historian Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779-1861) attacked him for his very contemporaneity – his focus on the topics and writings of his own age – and thus for failing to devote himself to the Corpus iuris civilis by itself.24 Instead of seeking to adapt the law to problems that were unknown in the ancient world, Bartolo had written on the issues of his own day, such as political parties (his Tractatus de Guelphis et Gebellinis) and coats of arms (Tractatus de insigniis et armis). Like the Renaissance humanists, the critics continued to hold his practical, scholastic style of Latin against him. A new critical dimension was added, too: his emphasis, so natural for any student of the civil law, on the authority of the princeps.

21Such negativity towards Bartolo has hardly reduced over the last hundred years, even though the chronological primacy of his De insigniis has certainly been recognised. The most recent (and very thorough) scholarly discussion of the medieval Italian jurists’ glosses and commentaries on rights of ownership in artistic and intellectual property, by Marta Madero, is notable for its relative silence about Bartolo. He is declared to have ‘enjoyed great notoriety toward the end of his short life’ and the De insigniis is mentioned only once, for his treatment of the nobility of different colours (here, his explanation that colours are more or less noble either according to what they represent, such as gold indicating sunlight, or according to what they are in se, white being noblest because closest to light).25 Bartolo’s approach to colour did not accord with the general juristic treatment of colours with which Madero is concerned, where colour is seen in terms of the cost of materials and, to a lesser extent, ‘aesthetic value’;26 but of course the Tractatus de insigniis was not intended to present a general treatment of colour, being written specifically to set out a legal framework for heraldic devices.

22Even if too often scorned or ignored by non-heraldists, the Tractatus has nevertheless attracted a surprising amount of editorial interest. The first modern edition, by Felix Hauptmann (Bonn, 1853), presented the text with a same-page translation into German, and although based on printed editions (principally that of 1493), was of lasting value thanks to his painstaking identification of each of Bartolo’s references to the Corpus iuris civilis.27 A British edition followed, by the Welsh heraldist Evan J. Jones. This is not entirely satisfactory. Jones’s base text seems to have been based on an unexplained combination of the mid-seventeenth-century text given by Edward Bysshe28 with a collating of British Library, MSS Arundel 489 (Italian; dated 1426) and Add. 29901 (English; fifteenth century, and Fesch’s edition.29 He presented it as an untranslated appendix at the back of his slightly contentious edition of certain later treatises by English or Welsh writers.

23Much more recently an elaborate edition with an English translation was published by three legal scholars in the United States: Osvaldo Cavallar, Susanne Degenring and Julius Kirshner: A Grammar of Signs: Bartolo da Sassoferrato’s Tract on Insignia and Coats of Arms (Berkeley, Calif., 1994).30 This presents the fruits of collating a formidably substantial number of manuscripts (and 22 pages of variant readings are printed), but it has to be said that the results are disappointingly inconclusive, while the collated manuscripts are in most cases late and, one suspects, of low textual value. Only one dates from the fourteenth century. All save seven (five in the Vatican and two in Madrid) are from Germany or Prague. No manuscripts have been consulted in the Bibliothèque nationale de France or the British Library – but the latter alone has at least five: the two that were used by Jones, and also Cotton MS Nero A. viii, ff. 122-127 (English, early fifteenth century), Add. MS 19977, ff. 6^v-13^v (Italian; dated 1476, but seemingly actually of later date) and Add. MS 28791, ff. 2-4^v (abridged version). This edition has, moreover, the weakness that its editors seem not to have been interested in heraldry as such, and in their introduction, substantial though this is, they largely ignore its wider heraldic context,31 while yet setting it in a well-considered Italian politico-historical context. They dismiss Bartolo’s treatment of colours, declaring that “it seems to us that the whole discussion of colors is fantastic”, and make the suggestion that it was ‘derived from an optical treatise devoted to technical and theoretical questions rather than practical issues’.32 It is certainly a very fair point that Bartolo is technically incorrect in referring to white, rather than silver, as the other metallic colour with gold, just as it is slightly odd that he omitted the colour green (ill-favoured though it has always been in heraldry). They rightly point out that green was the colour of the Ghibelline party,33 but seem unaware that green was not uncommonly used as a livery – which is a wholly different area from heraldry.34

24Overall, the attitude of the editors is marked by a distinct lack of sympathy or understanding for Bartolo, which leads them to devote a large part (p. 8-25) of their introduction to a discussion of whether or not Bartolo did in fact receive a grant of arms from Charles IV, even though he expressly states in the Tractatus that he did. They conclude that “it should now be beyond doubt that the imperial grant never actually occurred,”35 although their argument is largely one from silence: the lack of a coat of arms on Bartolo’s late-sixteenth-century tomb and the non-survival of the grant in the town archives of Perugia, where there is a notarial copy (made in 1710) of an imperial diploma granting two other privileges to Bartolo. However, one can easily envisage why these latter two concessions were preserved (even though only as transcripts), since they had a public significance, whereas the grant of arms was a private matter. Family archives and notarial records are very different entities.36

25The most recent edition of the De insigniis, by Mario Cignoni, is a far less ambitious production37. He is a heraldist, and has not attempted to do more than present the Latin text as printed in Lyons, 1550, followed by an Italian translation and preceded by a short introduction. An edition, or at least an analysis of the text, that places it satisfactorily in a broad heraldic as well as legal context is still awaited. Bartolo’s work most certainly merits that attention.