The Standard of Richard the Lionheart
Lions and Leopards and Dragons, oh my!
There were lions in the Tower that spring and summer.
—The first line of As a Black Prince on Bloody Fields, a novel of Edward the Black Prince, Thomas W. Jensen. Highly recommended!
This is a short note about the standard — the banner — of Richard the Lionheart, as he might have carried it into battle. His banner, unsurprisingly, has lions. We’ll take a short diversion into heraldry and lions, and leopards, and dragons. But first, some music of the period. Go ahead, push play.
St. Nicholas of Bari leads our fleet
and men Champagne lift their banner,
cry the marquis "Monferrat and the lion!"
and the Flemish counts cry "Flanders" while strongly slashing;
let each strike with sword and break his lance,
—Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, c. 1200
Medieval nobles typically carried banners into battle, and used them for decoration of halls, shields, or tunics. Each had their own design, unique to the person. ‘Medieval personal branding’, so to speak.1 In battle, the banners gave troops something to rally around, and during a large siege, they might also function as form of navigation, so one could see where the various parties were camped.
The standard of Richard the Lionheart is usually described as ‘three lions passant gardant’. We’ll get to what that means in a moment, but it looked something like this:
And it is true, Richard did use such a design. Per Wikipedia, ‘The first documented use of royal arms dates from the reign of Richard I (1189–1199)’.2 But the history is slightly more complicated - he did not always use this design, with three lions.
The earliest surviving representation of an escutcheon, or shield, displaying three lions is that on the Great Seal of King Richard I…which initially displayed one or two lions rampant, but in 1198 was permanently altered to depict three lions passant, perhaps representing Richard I's principal three positions as King of the English, Duke of Normandy, and Duke of Aquitaine.3
The Great Seal of 1195 shows Richard with the three lions on his shield. This is during the era when he was re-establishing himself after the Crusade and his following captivity, and distancing his brother John from the throne, so the new arms may have been his way of rebranding himself. As such some suggest4 the three lions are to show that he is the third of Henry’s sons and thus the rightful ruler. Given his relationship with Henry the Young King, his brother, it must have galled him to have to acknowledge him.
We can dig a little deeper than just Wikipedia. In fact, the histories of the era to make mention of banners from time to time. From the Annals of Roger of Hoveden (our edition from Amazon here), we read:
In the month of September, on the third day after the exaltation of the Holy Cross, when the king of England and his army had passed the straits of Merle, and the duke of Burgundy with the Templars and Franks was keeping the rear-guard, and the king of England had hoisted his standard in the midst of them, and had delivered his dragon2 to Peter de Pratelles to carry, against the claim of Robert Trussebut, who had claimed to carry the same according to the right of his predecessors…
This is after the Siege of Acre in 1191. Apparently, not only was Richard carrying a Dragon then, but people are competing to carry it! I am not entirely sure I am reading this correctly. I assume that it means Richard’s standard was the dragon. An alternative reading is that he was carrying a standard and a dragon. Any experts out there want to comment?
What’s with the dragon anyway?
The kings of England often carried dragons into battle. They had been doing so since perhaps as early as the 5th century, when the English Saxons carried the White Dragon into battle against the Red Dragon of Wales.56 The famous Bayeux Tapestry shows the White Dragon associated with the dying Harold, as William the Conqueror becomes King of England. It’s not a particularly impressive dragon, but still.
The dragon is also closely associated with St. George, the patron saint of England, as we discussed here:
OK, what about the Lions then?
Richard came to be closely associated with lions (as were many other kings, of course). But in particular, he was known as the Lionheart for his fierceness and courage in battle, including in contemporary histories. There is also a legend, likely created by a Middle English romance written long after Richard’s death, that after being captured returning from the Holy Land, Richard kills a lion with his bare (bear?) hands, then rips out the heart and eats it. Apocryphal, most certainly.
Returning to recorded history, by the time of his death the three lions passant gardant had become the emblem of English royalty, and his brother John would adopt after Richard’s death.
It might seem strange that lions were chosen as the avatar of royalty, given the paucity (see what I did there?) of lions in medieval Europe. Lions were essentially extinct in Europe by this time. One can see artists’ unfamiliarity with them in the rather strange depictions of them in medieval art; one assumes the artist had never seen the animal they were drawing.7
But lions were known in Europe, and mostly held by kings in private zoos. Some were indeed held in the Tower of London, as our opening quote mentions. See for example National Geographic’s account of the discovery of lion and leopard skulls there.
Lions, leopards, and heraldry
One sometimes sees lions on banners referred to as leopards. This is confusing to the modern ear, and does not mean what you think. The animals are lions. The term leopard is heraldric, implying posture, not genetics. The term leopard is heraldric shorthand for a lion passant guardant.8 What is that, you may ask? Some quick definitions for commonly seen words (from this excellent glossary):
rampant: the posture of an animal rearing up
passant: the posture of an animal walking by, the head facing the direction of travel
passant guardant: the posture of an animal walking by, the head facing the viewer
sinister: the left. the ‘sinister hind leg’ is the back left leg.
You may have heard the term lioncel. This is not another species :). If more than one lion is present in a display, they are often called lioncels, not lions.
https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/the-laudable-lion-of-the-medieval-mind/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_England
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_England
https://www.theheraldrysociety.com/articles/why-three-leopards/
The battle of Red and White dragons can be found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, c. 1136), and associated with the stories of Arthur.
https://wearetheenglish.com/the-white-dragon-42-w.asp
https://daily.jstor.org/why-are-medieval-lions-so-bad/
https://www.heraldsnet.org/saitou/parker/Jpglossl.htm#Lion