In contrast to the use of hidden properties of animals for social and political comment, we find the Tudors promoting the public display of the national flower as a dynastic symbol with unambiguously positive properties. After the death of the Boar at Bosworth, the new king, Henry VII, in 1485 adopted the rose as emblem of the Tudor dynasty; joined with the white rose of York in his marriage to Edward’s daughter, Elizabeth, it became the Tudor rose that would restore the garden of England despoiled by the wallowing swine.[57] Bartholomew had praised the rose as first of all flowers, and Trevisa continues the emphasis on its virtues:
Among alle floures of þe worlde þe flour of þe rose is chief and bereþ þe prys, and þerfore ofte the chief partie of man, þe heed, is crowned with floures of rose, as Plius seith, and bycause of veirnes and swete smylle and sauour and vertu. For by fayreness þey fedith þe sight, and pleseþ þe smylle by odour, and þe touche by neysshe and softe handelynge, and wiþstondeþ and socoureþ by vertu aʒeins many sicknesses and yueles, as he seiþ, and acordeþ to medicine boþe grene and druye.[58]
In 1486, we find this authoritative view of the rose invoked for an important civic purpose; the pageant for the reception of Henry VII into York, in which the conjoining roses were to play a central part as symbol and emblem of the marriage and new dynasty:
at the entrie of the Citie and first Bar of the same, shalbe craftely conceyved a place in maner of a heven, of grete joy and anglicall armony; under the heven shalbe a world desolate, full of treys and floures, in the which shall spryng up a roiall rich rede rose convaide by viace, unto the which rose shall appeyre another rich white rose, unto whome so being togedre all other floures shall lowte and evidently yeve suffrantie, shewing the rose to be principall of all floures, as witnesh Barthilmow, and therupon shall come fro a cloud a croune covering the roses.[59]
The entry in the York civic records confirms that there was a sufficiently general awareness of Bartholomew in the upper ranks of York, for his name to lend credence to the emblematic rose as a symbol of flourishing supremacy, one that would turn England from ‘a world desolate’ beneath the overarching ‘heven of grete joy and anglicall armony’, into an earthly garden in which the populace rejoice.[60] This glimpse of Bartholomew presented as an authority at the start of Henry VII’s reign supplements other evidence that Henry was eulogised in terms of the rose, especially the Tudor rose that united the houses of Lancaster and York and restored the garden of England. To be effective, the eulogy had to be based on a sufficiently general belief in the rose as a symbol of fertility and supremacy, and it is arguable that the currency of ‘Properties’ helped to establish and develop such a shared understanding, and to make it an effective dynastic emblem. As mentioned earlier, Bartholomew’s chapter on the rose combines properties of the flower as religious symbol, medicinal herb and source of confidence in the land that produced it. Thus Bartholomew’s text filtered down in fragmentary fashion through successive borrowings and translations.[61] As new social and political situations arose over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, writers adapted the stable core of source material available in ‘Properties’ to meet fresh contingencies.
Because of the multivalent meanings underlying things of the natural world, heraldic emblems, or cognisances, could work both for and against their bearers. An emblem’s very allusiveness and multivalence made it possible to make, through personal identification with it, a blatant claim to the loftiest attributes it implied; but also made it possible for others to subvert that claim by treating the same attributes as negative. To be able to participate as non-contemporary observers in this serious play of allusion and counter-allusion, we need access to the layers of potential meaning available to the players. Properties can be a starting point in our attempts to understand what people were expressing in their recorded responses to immediate events.