Heraldry, Corporate Identity, and the Battle for Symbolic Capital in Late Medieval London

Abstract

While scholars of guilds and fraternities take great interest in the texts, objects, and performances that bound late medieval guilds together and created a sense of collective identity, the place of their corporate heraldry remains relatively underexplored. By analysing grants of arms obtained by London guilds between 1439 and 1530, this article argues that corporate heraldry was not just a convenient means of identification but was meant to be seen as a semantically dense visual communication of corporate identity. Grants, confirmations, and augmentations of arms presented the heraldic signs they conferred as official acknowledgments and visual representations of their recipients’ symbolic capital of honour. The connection between heraldry, identity, and corporate honour also found its expression in the prominent display of corporate arms on central stages of corporate self-representation such as halls, churches, and rituals. This proud heraldic display of corporate identity, just like the pursuit of grants of arms, reflected a need for weapons in an intensifying battle for symbolic capital that the guilds of late medieval London faced, perhaps as a result of economic difficulties that marked the later fifteenth century.