It is doubtful, however, if at that early period there existed much if indeed any opportunity for the use of heraldic badges. At the same time, as far back as the reign of Richard I.—and some writers would take examples of a still more remote period—these badges must have been occasionally depicted upon banners, for Richard I. appears to have had a dragon upon one of his banners.
These banner decorations, which at a later date have been often accepted as badges, can hardly be quite properly so described, for there are many cases where no other proof of usage can be found, and there is no doubt that many such are instances of no more than banners prepared for specific purposes; and the record of such and such a banner cannot necessarily carry proof that the owner of the banner claimed or used the objects depicted thereupon as personal badges. If they are to be so included some individuals must have revelled in a multitude of badges.
But the difficulty in deciding the point very greatly depends upon the definition of the badge; and if we are to take the definition according to the manner of acceptance and usage at the period when the use of badges was greatest, then many of the earliest cannot be taken as coming within the limits.
In later Plantagenet days, badges were of considerable importance, and certain characteristics are plainly marked. They were never worn by the owner—in the sense in which he carried his shield, or bore his crest; they were his sign-mark indicative of ownership; they were stamped upon his belongings in the same way in which Government property is marked with the broad arrow, and they were worn by his servants. They were worn not only by his retainers, but very probably were also worn more or less temporarily by adherents of his party if he were big enough to lead a party in the State. At all times badges had very extensive decorative use.
There was never any fixed form for the badge; there was never any fixed manner of usage. I can find no fixed laws of inheritance, no common method of assumption. In fact the use of a badge, in the days when everybody who was anybody possessed arms, was quite subsidiary to the arms, and very much akin to the manner in which nowadays monograms are made use of. At the same time care must be taken to distinguish the "badge" from the "rebus," and also from the temporary devices which we read about as having been so often adopted for the purpose of the tournament when the combatant desired his identity to be concealed. Modern novelists and poets give us plenty of illustrations of the latter kind, but proof of the fact even that they were ever adopted in that form is by no means easy to find, though their professedly temporary nature of course militates against
