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RR 2015/194 Dictionary of British Arms: Medieval Ordinary. Volume Four Edited by Thomas Woodcock and Sarah Flowers The Society of Antiquaries of London London 2014 cxvii + 584 pp. ISBN 978 0 85431 297 9 £95 $165
Keywords Heraldry, Medieval history, United Kingdom
Review DOI 10.1108/RR-02-2015-0027
There is a class of reference books so specialised that most librarians will never use them, but which, to those who need to do so, supply the last word on their chosen subject. In this class is the Dictionary of British Arms (which is scarcely a dictionary in any normal sense of the term). The problem which it addresses is that whereas, if a researcher knows the name of an armigerous person, there are well-known reference books in which the appropriate coat of arms can be found, the position is much more difficult if one encounters only the arms (engraved on a seal, say) and wishes to know to whom they belonged. The first book to provide a solution was Papworth's Ordinary of British Armorials (Papworth, 1961), first published in 1874 and not superseded until the present work appeared. Papworth, however, had not listed his sources and was known to have included numerous...