The records of the visitations carried out by the heralds of the College of Arms have for centuries enjoyed wide recognition as the greatest source of genealogies of the more established levels of society in each county in early modern England. Ostensibly just a check on people’s rights to bear their own arms, and thus a check on their ancestry (so as to verify their right to bear arms by inheritance), the visitation records rapidly grew into a vast body of genealogical material. They have the exceptional value that they represent a combination of information that was supplied by the families concerned and of checks and verifications (in so far as was possible) by the heralds themselves; from 1570 onwards they were signed off by the heads of the families concerned.
Of course, a few of these genealogies have errors: not all families were scrupulously honest about children that had been born out of wedlock and suchlike matters. Used with a degree of care, however, the visitation records are a wonderful historical resource. The principal barriers to their use have been quite different: the fact that they were not readily accessible, being among the more treasured possessions of the College of Arms, and that the various published editions of them were in many cases based on corrupt and potentially erroneous manuscript copies.
Robert Yorke’s magnificent and definitive guide to the visitation records of Tudor England – that is to say, made between 1530 and 1603 – wholly supersedes all previous attempts to list these records. Manuscript by manuscript, he describes in minute detail every scrap of relevant visitational record held at the College of Arms, while not overlooking the few items that have strayed to other libraries and archives. More than this, he even names every family mentioned in every manuscript: his book is thus a guide to all the individual genealogies as well as a full and informative description of every individual visitation book.
In principle, every visitation’s record was in two parts. Every herald who was commissioned to hold a visitation in a particular county would travel around it, hundred by hundred (in effect, town by town), having first summoned the heads of the families who claimed the right to bear arms to come and show their proof of such entitlement. He would draw up a rough pedigree, show this to the head of the family, and then – at lightning speed – make a fair copy and present this to the family’s head for him to sign. The rough and fair copies, or at least the latter (generally called the office copy – originally meaning the copy to be kept in the Office or College of Arms), would after a short interval be placed in the College’s library. At the College they would all remain, unless the next herald to be commissioned to visit a particular county was authorised to borrow previous visitation records for that county to help him in his task.
Understandably, the reality was liable to be slightly different: it is one of the major long-term strengths of Yorke’s Catalogue that he has taken enormous care to elucidate the reality of what actually happened and what the many different visitation books actually recorded. For one thing, a number of visitations have been misdated: for instance, as he carefully demonstrates, manuscripts G. 12 and H. 17, relating to Kent and Norfolk, are not of 1592 and 1589 as traditionally believed, but of 1589 onwards and 1576, respectively. Corrections of this sort cannot have been easy to make, since the various manuscripts have in many cases been added to by later hands and given misleading or inaccurate titles and dates.
Underlying these corrections, and going far towards explaining how many of the errors occurred in the first place, is the detailed introduction (pp xix–liii). Under a variety of headings, this sets out almost every aspect of the process of holding and recording visitations. It includes the arcane-sounding matter of ‘disclaiming’: the formal process, documented from 1558 onwards, of publishing the names of people who claimed the right to bear a coat of arms but who could not make good that claim. In theory, such people could not then call themselves gentlemen.
Briefly touched on in the introduction but covered fully in the catalogue is one aspect of the visitation records that is of exceptional antiquarian interest: the making of church notes. This was a practice that grew and grew in the sixteenth century as the heralds used their time while in each county to make a record of coats of arms on funerary monuments and in stained glass (and in private individuals’ archives and seals). These notes gradually became so substantial as to need whole volumes by themselves, and it is a further merit of the present volume that all the visitation-related church notes are also described. Moreover, those manuscripts that contain other, extraneous texts have had them too described in full. For instance, the description of ms D.4 includes seven pages of description of such miscellaneous matters as royal, noble and episcopal funerals or burials (1476 and later), coronations, sections of chronicles, grants of crests, badges and whole coats of arms, and ordinances of war of Francis i of France, 1535. Browsing through this volume will yield all sorts of rewards.
As if all this was not labour enough, Yorke has gone a great deal further. For good measure, he has listed in Part ii (pp 475–538) a great many institutionally-held copies of visitations (in the British Library, Bodleian Library, various county record offices and elsewhere), while in separate appendices he has listed all known visitation commissions, 1530–1603 (pp 541–4), and all the visitations themselves, also in chronological order (pp 545–54). In addition there are sets of biographical notes on the heralds and others concerned in carrying out the visitations (pp 555–78) and, for good measure, summary notices of manuscripts in the College library’s presses D to H, which are not otherwise described in the volume.
This whole volume is a remarkable achievement, and the College of Arms is to be warmly commended for overseeing its compilation over what was, perforce, a long period of time and for publishing it in such a well-planned, durable and handsome format – and at a very reasonable price, too.
