Like physicians, the heralds were cultivated, professional and pragmatic readers who found an invaluable source of knowledge in ‘Properties’.^[33] The evident increase in heraldic display in written and graphic forms during the fifteenth century coincides with production of manuscript copies of Properties, and of other manuscripts based on ‘Properties’ or Properties, made in workshops and in the home.^[34] At the time when Trevisa was working on his prose translations, cognisances and emblems appear in literature and art as weapons in the propaganda wars between Richard II and his critics. Later, during the conflict between Lancastrian and Yorkist factions, ‘Properties’ could supply or confirm properties of creatures as a basis for some important political image-making.

The Tractatus de Armis by Johannes De Bado Aureo, a work contemporary with Trevisa’s translation of ‘Properties’, demonstrates Richard II’s participation in heraldry and the part that Bartholomew continued to play in its formal expression, during and after his reign.^[35] The writer of this Latin treatise cites Bartholomew on the properties of certain animals and birds depicted in arms.^[36] ‘Bartholomew of the property of things’ is De Bado Aureo’s most frequently-cited source, at times referred to by name but often closely though selectively quoted. He notes Bartholomew’s agreement with other sources — Aristotle, Isidore, Pliny, and the heralds ‘ffranciscus’ [de Foveis] and ‘dominus Bartholus [di Sasso Ferrato]’ — regarding the boar, the horse, the bear, the dragon and the dove.^[37] Following technical information on the hierarchy of colours, the Tractatus lists the beasts and birds that are, by that time, suitable to be borne as arms (lion, leopard, pard, hart, boar, dog, dragon, horse, bear, eagle, falcon, owl, dove, crow, swan, cock, gryphon, martlet, pike and crab) and explains what character traits or life events a particular emblem might betoken.^[38]

De Bado Aureo dedicates his treatise to Richard II’s queen, Anne of Bohemia (d.1394). For these patrons it was necessary to present their most prominent emblems, the lion of England and Richard’s personal emblem, the white hart, in the best possible light. He had a complex array of properties to draw upon, derived from a range of sources. By the late Middle Ages the bestiary sources on both leo, the lion, and cervus, the hart or stag, spanned the eras from pre-Christian to contemporary times. We can see from secular literature — fables, secular bestiaries, heraldic treatises, romances and allegories, and moralised hunting treatises — that both the lion and the stag acquired great significance during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The stag accrued a wealth of significance from many different sources, including ‘Properties’, and became in its various forms one of the most widely adopted personal emblems in the later Middle Ages. For noblemen and women who enjoyed the actuality of the chase, secular and erotic associations were added to the stag’s significance as a symbol of Christian endeavour and purity.^[39] The lion, bestiary symbol of Christ as all-powerful king, is thought to be the oldest animal symbol used as a European monarch’s emblem. The lion’s character as a Christian symbol — the Lion of Judah — became further defined through its heraldic association with kingship, and by contrast with its disreputable bestiary relatives, the lioness, the pard and the leopard.^[40] Controversy over the emblem shows how the blazon, which could be recorded in an unequivocal verbal format, was a more reliable possession than its variable graphic representations.

Bartholomew had given the scriptural and bestiary accounts of the stag seeking the water brooks, extracting and trampling serpents, helping its companions across water, hiding its hind and her young, and hiding itself while its new antlers grew.^[41] But the stag also had some negative connotations of timidity from classical literature, and Bartholomew slips Aristotle’s statement that the stag is the friend of the fox into the chapter on vulpis; timidity being perhaps an adjunct of guile. In De Bado Aureo’s account, the stag’s yearly moult and withdrawal while it grows new and bigger antlers, becomes a sign of increasing wisdom, peaceableness and wealth in the bearer of the emblem who was ‘poor in first age and substance’. The image would have been appropriate to Richard’s long minority under the domination of powerful adults, and compatible with the style of kingship that he adopted.^[42] De Bado Aureo’s selective account of the properties of the hart shows us how Richard was able to proclaim his kingship to be wise, mature, peaceable and discreet through the heraldic emblem he and his followers displayed.^[43]