A by-product of civil war during the fifteenth century was the demand for more emblems to signal personal qualities and allegiances, as gentry sought to improve their social status, and the rapid development of the ethos and trappings of heraldry to meet this demand. An English translation of the Tractatus de Armis, made in the following century in a fine manuscript version, supports this view. This translation, illustrated with the heraldic beasts and blazons it describes, is followed in the codex by an English chronicle of monarchs, starting with the arrival in England of the legendary Brutus, and illustrated with each monarch’s retrospectively-created coat of arms.^[46] These illustrations suggest that contemporaries saw heraldic properties as a way of confirming and validating the account of England’s heroic origins set down in chronicles such as the Brut. The maker of the codex includes a discussion of the arms of Brutus, legendary founder of Britain, and his three sons (Locrine, Camber and Albanact, founders of England, Wales and Scotland respectively): a lion rampant with a double head and red lilies on a field of gold.^[47] Again we find Bartholomew referred to as confirmation that the lion, as emblem of England, had the necessary supremacy over all other beasts. Nevertheless, like the hart, the lion had potentially conflicting associations.

The two-faced character of the lion derived from its dual function in the Bible as vengeful and merciful.^[48] Bartholomew cites Physiologus on its Christ-like properties: it is merciful, gentle and of kingly demeanour; nobly-maned and generous in sharing its food; its body has good medicinal virtues.^[49] He reserves all the lion’s vices, such as cruelty, gluttony, anger, madness and lechery, for his separate chapter on the lioness, citing Pliny and Isidore, Aristotle and Avicenna.^[50] Bartholomew provides more information on the leopard, transmitting Isidore’s account of it as a very cruel beast engendered in adultery between a lioness and a pard, and adding the opinion of Aristotle that the leopard’s method of chasing prey is confused and unnatural. The leopard is one of those unchivalrous creatures which, like the fox and the snake, masters strong ones by craftiness and not by strength. In Trevisa’s words: ‘And so the lasse beste haþ ofte þe maystrye of the strengere beste by deceipte and gyle … and dar nouʒt rese on him opentliche in the feelde, as Homerus seiþ.’^[51] This was valuable knowledge at the time of the Hundred Years’ War, since the leopard was one of the emblems of France.

De Bado Aureo presents the properties of the lion appropriate for the royal emblem of England. The ‘nature and kind of the lion’, although it could be represented in other ways by this time, is in the translated Tractatus unequivocally that which ‘the king of England is wont to show’ as the ‘three lions passing of gold in a field of red’, with the kingly attributes implied by the charge and blazon. The author is able to put the French leopard firmly in its place as a derogatory emblem suitable for those born in adultery; or, being like the mule an infertile hybrid, for prelates.^[52] We can see, by comparing his selections from Bartholomew on the lion and the hart, how De Bado Aureo presented the properties of these creatures in such a way as to make them accord with the heraldic and personal function they already performed for Richard II, for whose queen he claimed to be writing.