In one of his last articles, the late Roger Sherman Loomis revealed the extensive confusion, both medieval and modern, which has attended the iconography of the Nine Worthies, particularly as regards the coats of arms of Hector and Alexander.¹ Although the canonical list of the three pagan, three Jewish, and three Christian heroes was first established in literature by Jacques de Longuyon's Voeux de Paon around 1312, the earliest reliable graphic depiction of Hector's heraldry is dated by Loomis about 1395.² In a manuscript of that date, a miniature illustrating Tommaso di Saluzzo's Le Chevalier Errant portrays Hector's banner as bearing a seated lion holding a sword. This image is shown by Loomis to have been repeated and confused in later murals, tapestries, and miniatures, which on occasion substitute for the sword a halberd or even wholly novel cognizances. In this note I am concerned to report that the central details of this heraldry affixed to Hector antedate the conception of the Nine Worthies and may, perhaps, have had an antiquity of the order of three centuries before its earliest pictorial expression in 1395.

My primary evidence is drawn from a medieval French poem that has come to be called the Enfances Hector by its chief modern student, Joseph Palormo.³ This poem uniquely recounts, in a little over two thousand lines, the vengeance taken by the young Hector for the death of his grandfather Laomedon at the hands of the great Hercules. The contest between the heroes is of epic proportions, and the funeral rites for the vanquished Hercules are described with great solemnity. Not only does the poem describe fully the heraldry that was later associated with Hector as one of the Nine Worthies, but details of that iconography may be, if Palermo's conclusions about the origin of the poem are correct, at least as old as the chansons de geste.

Quite early in the poem the arming of the young Hector is related in conventional fashion.⁴ At first, Hector's ensign is simply depicted as bearing a gold lion in an azure field:

But the hero's helmet is subsequently shown bearing the seated lion holding a sword that became the most characteristic emblem associated with Hector in iconography of the Nine Worthies:

A little further on other emblems are mentioned, including two more lions, one them seated:

Although all five of the complete and fragmentary manuscripts of the poem are of Italian provenance and are conjecturally dated from the early fourteenth century on, Joseph Palermo reasonably argues on linguistic and prosodic grounds that the surviving poem is an Italianization of a primitive French chanson de geste antedating Benolt de Saint-Maure's famous Roman de Troie (1160).⁵ Palermo asserts that the odd rimes and metrical irregularities are fully accounted for by assuming an original song, employing assonance, chanted to a fixed melody. He sees this original as having undergone a progressive Italianization in its language while acquiring the octosyllabic couplet form of a roman courtois as it was transmitted south of the Alps in compilations with Benoit's poem--only an Oxford manuscript fails to couple the two texts. And the narrative details of the Enfances Hector bear out the alleged independence of its original from the traditions appearing in the Roman de Troie. Aside from the fact that no other version of the Troy legend relates the central contest between Hector and Hercules, such details as I have transcribed above concerning Hector's heraldic attributes are not to be found in Benoit's poem. On the contrary, Benoit gives only the simplest version of Hector's emblem and gets the colours wrong:

On a scale less elaborate than in the Enfances Hector, such heraldic details are available in the oldest chansons de geste. To mention only the Chanson de Roland, where 'Escuz unt genz, de multes cunoisances' (3090), we may recall the grand dragon standard and images carried before the Emir⁶

But whether such details as Hector's seated lion derive from an earlier source than the fertile imagination of the first singer of the Enfances, we leave to be determined by Palermo for his announced edition of the poem.⁷ Among the well-known redactions of the Troy legend antedating Benoit's romance, he will, of course, consult not only Dares and Dictys but also the prose Excidium Troiae and the Ilias latina, written around the middle of the twelfth century by Simon Chevre D'Or. Joseph of Exeter's De bello Troiano (ca. 1187) and the Troilus of Albert of Stade (d. 1265) may also have had an influence. But whatever its ultimate origin, it is clear that a solid iconographic tradition of heraldry associated with Hector existed prior to the late medieval confusion exposed by Loomis and that the little-known Enfances Hector is at present the earliest bearer of that Worthy's emblems.

1 R. S. Loomis, 'The Heraldry of Hector or Confusion Worse Confounded', Speculum, xlii, 1967, pp. 32-35. Gives a bibliography of studies on the Worthies.

2 Loomis rejects the blundering account of the pageant at Arras in 1336, which gives Hector the imperial eagle of Caesar.

3 J. Palermo, 'Aspects "romans" des Enfances Hector', in melanges offerts a Rene Crozet a l'occasion de son soixante-dixieme anniversaire, ed. Pierre Gallais and Yves-Jean Riou, ii, 1966, pp. 1283-92. Gives a bibliography of the few earlier studies of the poem.

4 I quote from 'la plus ancienne et la plus francaise' of the copies of the Enfances, B.N. MS fr. 821 (fol. 2), for a microfilm of which I thank the Bibliotheque Nationale.

5 The Paris MS may be late 13tb century. In a forthcoming work, Boethian Fictions, I identify the translation of the Consolatio contained in it as possibly having been made in Sicily under Angevin auspices. This would give a terminus a quo of ca. 1268.

6 Cf. L. A. Mayor, Saracenic Heraldry, Oxford 1933 p.2, a. 2.

7 Palermo, p. 1283.