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Knightly Effigies - What do their poses mean (if anything)?

Posted: 08 Apr 2018, 16:56
by Chris Green
Not strictly speaking heraldry, but most heraldists who have access to medieval churches can't resist looking around them for heraldry, and of course for tombs. There is a lingering belief that the armoured images on tombs must "mean" something. In this blog, the writer Elizabeth Chadwick drives several destriers through the notion.

http://the-history-girls.blogspot.se/2016/02/cross-your-legs-and-hope-to-die-what.html

Re: Knightly Effigies - What do their poses mean (if anything)?

Posted: 09 Apr 2018, 10:04
by Martin Goldstraw
I have an interesting book in my collection which whilst not strictly speaking exclusively about effigies, it does touch on them.

Monumental Brasses by John Page-Phillips

Page-Phillips goes into great detail about the way in which brasses and (by implication) other effigies and monuments, both male and female, can be dated by the prevailing fashion. Most useful for dating the different types of armour.

Re: Knightly Effigies - What do their poses mean (if anything)?

Posted: 10 Apr 2018, 17:28
by Edward Hillenbrand
Interesting. In the US we have the same type of urban legend with horses and their riders: 1 hoof in the air wounded, 2 killed in action. Apparently this holds "generally" true at the Gettysburg Battlefield with their 478 (last count) monuments, but is not always the case as Longstreet's Statue shows one hoof raised when in fact Ol' Pete was not wounded at that battle and Sedgwick's horse has all four hoofs planted on the ground when he was killed at Sptosylvania in 1864. At least in this case we can ascribe the story to "Gettysburg: The Complete Pictorial of Battlefield Monuments by D. Scott Hartwig and Ann Marie Hartwig (1988)". Where they got their information from I don't know, but I would hazard the guess of the Gettysburg staff since that is where I learned it from on my first visit there in 1978.