Heraldic Handbooks and the Discourse of Chivalric Allegory: The Case of the Eltham Challenge Letters of 1400

Abstract

This article examines a curious set of thirteen allegorical challenge letters associated with King Henry IV’s Christmastime festivities at Eltham Palace in 1400 and the five heraldic handbooks in which these letters survive. The Eltham challenge letters attest to late-medieval English heralds’ conscious engagement with myth, allegory, and chivalric literature and offer new insights on their cultural and literary ambitions. The article begins with a general account of heralds’ duties in the late Middle Ages and argues that their development of a specialized sphere of knowledge and bookishness—in other words, their written systematization of blazonry, detailed record keeping, and establishment of an institutional library—were concomitant with their growing professionalization and authority. Heralds’ bookishness also included the production of relatively consistent heraldic manuals, such as the five in which the Eltham letters survive. In each of these five witnesses, the Eltham letters are copied as part of a semi-standardized cluster of eight heraldic texts. By studying the family of manuscripts containing this cluster, it is possible to gain a sense of which texts were widely known and deemed practically or ideologically important by heralds. The article then turns to a detailed discussion of the Eltham letters themselves. An edition of the letters collating all known witnesses is offered as an Appendix . The style of the Eltham letters is overtly one of chivalric allegorical romance, a genre of medieval allegory which has rarely been studied and which reveals a great deal about heralds’ literary ambitions. This article demonstrates that heralds and their texts played an important role in the socio-literary chivalric discourse of the later Middle Ages in England.