The Hall of Honor: Chaucer, Hawes, and the Conclusion to Gerard Legh's Accedens of Armory

Abstract:Gerard Legh's Accedens of Armory (1562) teaches its readers how to use heraldry to identify men and their families accurately and to assess their characters justly. Near the end of his book, Legh presents an elaborate allegory of a hall of honor which borrows from Stephen Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure and Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame. While Chaucer supplies the dream vision structure of Legh's allegory (i.e., a series of three scenes that explore the relationship between honor and fame and the herald's role in identifying and promoting the honorable armigerous man), Legh also consistently argues against Chaucer's position that fame is unrelated to deserving. Those knowledgeable in heraldic lore, Legh argues, are able to assess and represent a man's character directly and deservedly through arms, thus justifying his project of articulating the symbolic significance of armorial design.