Sir John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie (1586)
Sir John Ferne (c. 1560–1609) was an administrator whose most prestigious post was to serve as recorder of Doncaster. Admitted to the Inner Temple in 1576/7, Ferne devoted much of his time to the study of heraldry. His only publication was The Blazon of Gentrie (1586), which is remembered today for being one of the treatises identified with certainty as having been consulted by William Shakespeare. In a similar manner to Roger Ascham’s Toxophilus, The Blazon of Gentrie is conceived as a dialogue between a herald, a knight, a divine, a lawyer, an antiquary, and a ploughman. They discuss the original principles of nobility, military distinctions, and orders of knighthood.
Early modern heraldic treatises and handbooks in particular invited readerly engagement. Woodcut illustrations of escutcheons would frequently be labelled with tinctures, enabling readers and collectors to apply the relevant colours to their copies. As such, many existing copies of The Blazon of Gentrie are illuminated in a similar manner to this copy at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. While each escutcheon within this particular copy has been neatly coloured, only a selection of the coloured leaves are displayed here. The only handwritten annotations in this copy are a series of directions to the reader regarding the faulty pagination.
The Blazon of Gentrie (1586) had already become a rare book by the late 1640s. An autograph inscription in one British Library copy of the work by the antiquary Sir Peter Leycester (1614–1678), First Baronet, dated 5 February 1649, records that he purchased it for 10 shillings ‘at second hand, a booke now very scarce, & out of Print’.1
Notes
- British Library, 9917.ccc.3. (first flyleaf). ↩
Further Reading
Day, J. F. R., ‘Primers of Honor: Heraldry, Heraldry Books, and English Renaissance Literature’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 21.1 (1990), 93–103
Healy, Simon, ‘Ferne, Sir John (c. 1560–1609)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/9350
History of Parliament Online entry for ‘FERNE, John (c. 1553–1609)’, originally published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1604–1629, ed. Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris (2010), http://www.histparl.ac.uk/volume/1604-1629/member/ferne-john-1553-1609
Longstaffe, Stephen, ‘Jack Cade and the Lacies’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 49.2 (1998), 187–190