Heraldic badge

[1] In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, the followers, retainers, dependants, and partisans of famous and powerful personages and houses bore well-known badges – precisely because they were known and recognised.

A lavish badge like the Dunstable Swan Jewel would only have been worn by the person whose device was represented, members of his family or important supporters, and possibly servants who were in regular very close contact with him.

In 1483 King Richard III ordered 13,000 badges in fustian cloth with his emblem of a white boar for the investiture of his son Edward as Prince of Wales,[5] a huge number given the population at the time.

Other grades of boar badges that have survived are in lead, silver,[6] and gilded copper relief, the last found at Richard's home of Middleham Castle in Yorkshire, and very likely worn by one of his household when he was Duke of York.

Many of the large number of badges of various liveries recovered from the Thames in London were perhaps discarded hurriedly by retainers who found themselves impoliticly dressed at various times.

[10] Apparently beginning relatively harmlessly under Edward III in a context of tournaments and courtly celebrations, by the reign of his successor Richard II the badges had become seen as a social menace, and were "one of the most protracted controversies of Richard's reign",[11] as they were used to denote the small private armies of retainers kept by lords, largely for the purpose of enforcing their lord's will on the less powerful in his area.

Though they were surely a symptom rather than a cause of both local baronial bullying and the disputes between the king and his uncles and other lords, Parliament repeatedly tried to curb the use of livery badges.

[16] In the end it took a determined campaign by Henry VII to largely stamp out the use of livery badges by others than the king, and reduce them to things normally worn only by household servants in the case of the aristocracy.

[17] In fact modern historical analysis of the court records shows few prosecutions, but by the end of Henry's reign liveried retainers do seem to have ceased to be a major problem.

These impresas or emblems were used on the reverse of the portrait-medals that became fashionable in Italy, and used the vocabulary of Renaissance Neo-Platonism, often dropping links to the actual heraldry of the owner completely.

As well, the device was highly personal, intimately attached to a single individual, while the emblem was constructed to convey a general moral lesson that any reader might apply in his or her own life.

Particularly well-known examples of devices – so well known that the image could be understood as representing the bearer even without the motto – are those of several French kings, which were freely used to decorate their building projects.