Heraldry hit Europe during a 30-year period in the mid-12th Century. How the rules became so rapidly codified and so widely accepted still has historians baffled. Lions were among the earliest and most frequent charges, probably due to their Christian allegorical significance. Lions passant guardant¹ were originally called leopards (lupars in early Norman English), and the lions of England are still occasionally called leopards. In early iconography, they lack manes and look a lot more like leopards. By the 14th Century the leopards had definitely evolved into lions (at least in art if not in heraldic terminology). A two-lion shield was retrospectively assigned to the early Norman kings of England, but there is no evidence that William I and his immediate heirs knew anything about this.

The First Evidence

The earliest solid evidence for the English heraldic lion is both textual and iconographic. According to the chronicler Jean de Marmentier, Henry I knighted his son-in-law Geoffrey of Anjou in 1127 on the occasion of the latter's wedding, and bestowed on him a blue shield painted with gold lions. The shield can be seen on Geoffrey's tomb which is now in a museum in Le Mans, France. The lions are also found on the shield of Geoffrey's grandson, William Longespee, and this is one of the earliest bits of evidence that these heraldic devices had become hereditary. The earliest known example of a heraldic shield depicted on a seal is 1136, and there is some speculation that battlefield heraldry evolved from seals rather than the conventional wisdom that heraldry was a military invention.

Henry I

Henry I (1100 - 1135) was known as the 'Lion of Justice' and started a royal menagerie at Woodstock, Oxford, UK which included lions, allegedly the first seen in England - at least since Roman times. His seal had no lions, but his shield may have borne one and later two. Some have conjectured that the second lion came from his marriage to the daughter of Godfrey of Louvaine, whose seal had a lion. The theory that the third lion came from Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Henry II (1154 - 1189) is now somewhat discredited, but her seal certainly is known to have had three lions on a shield. The joining of devices through marriage is called 'marshalling'.

Significance of the Crusades

Matthew Paris, the earliest chronicler of a Roll of Arms, credits Henry II's eldest son Henry with three lions on his shield. Henry II's son John had two lions, and the three lions as royal arms first definitely appear in the second royal seal of Richard I late in his reign (1198). That this redesign of the seal came after Richard's crusading escapades may be significant. Richard's shield during the crusades is conjectured to have been red with two gold lions, like his father's. All artistic portrayals of Richard with three lions are derived from the royal seal at the end of his reign, but there is no solid evidence of Richard's lions prior to the second royal seal. The lions remained thereafter a symbol of England and were soon quartered with the French fleur de lys, 1340 - 1801, to represent England's claim to the French throne.