6 - ‘What Banner Thine?’ The Banner as a Symbol of Identification, Status and Authority on the Battlefield

Summary

The outcome of the battle of Hastings saw many momentous changes for England. It heralded a new king, a new dynasty, and arguably a new government and culture. Wace records how these circumstances were first celebrated. With Harold dead and his standard on the ground ‘Duke William asked for his own banner to be carried to the place where the standard had been and had it raised on high there; that was a sign that he had conquered …’ To all intents and purposes, the Anglo-Norman realm was ushered in with the wave of a flag.

This may sound somewhat flippant, but banners were of great importance, playing a number of roles on eleventh and twelfth-century battlefields both practical and symbolic. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss some of these.

The basic function of the banner was to display the identity of its bearer, or rather its owner (the distinction is an important one). As such it is perhaps the earliest form of display for the purpose of individual identification in the medieval period, predating heraldic devices by almost fifty years. In fact banners are amongst the earliest of any form of martial display, their origins stretching back before the Romans into ancient Egypt. Flags of the type seen in the medieval period, hanging not from crossbars but attached directly to the shaft of the lance, may have originated with the nomadic cultures of central Asia, coming to Europe through the late- and post-Roman migration from the east (although the details of the process are far from clear). The ancient nature of banners was recognised in the medieval period, where we find a number of banners being tied into ancient antiquity. The Oriflamme, the sacred banner of the realm of France and of St Denis, was said to have been Charlemagne’s, and The Song of Roland gives it an even more ancient and spiritual pedigree in that ‘Saint Peter owned it and it was called Romaine, but from Monjoie it has received a change in name.’