The Livery Collar: Politics and Identity During the Fifteenth Century

Summary

Qui gerit S tandem turmam comitatur eandem Nobilis ille quidem probus et juvenis fuit idem Sic quasi de celis interfuit ille fidelis.

‘Qui gerit S’: he who wears the S. Thus is Henry of Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, described by John Gower in his Cronica Tripertita, a metrical chronicle written at the close of the fourteenth century as a sequel to his Vox Clamantis. The poem proceeds to compare the device, and by association the individual it represents, to a heavenly gift. For Gower, the collar of SS was clearly the most widely recognised means of identifying the earl. For the next century and a half the livery collar would attract similar attention from many a commentator, chronicler and artisan. References to livery collars occur in government records such as the exchequer accounts, in contemporary chronicles and in correspondence; individuals wearing them are mentioned in the Paston correspondence, for example. Its authority, its potency as a royal symbol, and what it represented clearly mattered. Although the evidence is scant, it appears that it was given to royal household servants, officers in the localities such as sheriffs, and perhaps to those who had demonstrated their loyalty on the battlefield. During the second half of the fifteenth century there were two types of collar: the Lancastrian collar of SS, as seen on the brass commemorating Nicholas Kniveton (d.1500) at All Saints’ church, Mugginton, Derbyshire (Fig. 1), and the Yorkist collar of alternate suns and roses, worn by Sir John and Lady Donne in Hans Memling’s ‘Donne Triptych’, introduced by Edward IV in about 1461 (Fig. 2). From the evidence on extant monuments, nearly 400 individuals or their families chose to have them depicted on their church monuments from the late fourteenth to the mid sixteenth centuries.

This paper examines three salient aspects of the collar’s use. Its significance for contemporaries will be addressed, particularly its role as a symbol of royal authority and dignity. Collars on church monuments will then be explored as a starting point for conducting an investigation of linked individuals, in order to explore political and other types of shared identities. It is argued that livery collars were used on church monuments as a manifestation, and indeed perpetuation, of the collective identity of the deceased and their kin.