Hunting, Heraldry, and the Fall in the Boke of St. Albans

Abstract

The Boke of St. Albans (1486) has long been recognized as a landmark in early English printing and appreciated as a rich source of Middle English vocabulary. Its most striking feature, however, has often gone overlooked: the combination in one volume of works on heraldry with those on hunting and hawking. This article examines the historical and social contexts of both hunting and heraldry in late fifteenth-century England to suggest why these two independent subjects would have been brought together at this moment. The essay then considers closely the first of the Boke’s heraldic tracts, the Liber Armorum, analyzing in particular its use of Genesis in defining the nature of gentility. The social arguments forwarded in the Liber Armorum, with its exacting definitions of a gentleman, provide another answer as to why hunting and heraldry were related and why both subjects seemed to require specialized vocabularies of precision.