Reel Heraldry: Anne of the Thousand Days, Part 7

Today I'm going to complain about another bit of heraldry that appeared in the 1969 movie Anne of the Thousand Days.

I am doing this not because the arms involved are incorrect, or because they are an anachronism (that is, something that is chronologically out of place).

No, the issue here is an anachorism, a geographical misplacement, the incorrect assignment of a person, event, or object to a location where it clearly does not belong.

Take a look at this screenshot and see if you can tell me what it is that is out of place:

You can click on the image above to see the larger photograph, but I expect that many of you will recognized the hangings in the background even from the small image here.

Yes, those are the Unicorn Tapestries, a series of late-15th-century tapestries, now housed at The Met Cloisters in New York City.

Woven in wool, silk, and metallic threads, they depict a sweeping, magical narrative rich in both secular romance and Christian symbolism:

The Story: The tapestries follow a party of noblemen and hunters as they stalk, capture, and resurrect a mythical unicorn.

The Climax: In The Unicorn in Captivity (the most famous of the series), the beast sits peacefully alive, chained to a pomegranate tree within an enchanted garden.

The tapestries were woven in the Southern Netherlands (likely Brussels) between 1495 and 1505.

That much for the background. Now for the anachorism:

The coats of arms on the tapestries are those of the Le Vistes, a French noble family from Lyon. Their arms are Gules on a bend azure three crescents argent.

So, the Unicorn Tapestries are perfectly in period for the time setting of this movie. They are not an anachronism.

However ... I can conceive of no way that these tapestries would have been hung in any palace, much less a royal one, in England at that time. Thus, they are shown in a place other than where they belong. They are an anachorism.

And anyone who has the least bit of familiarity with the Unicorn Tapestries, upon seeing them set here in a Royal palace in England, is going to be pulled right out of the movie and go, "Nuh uh! No way!"

As I was, and as I did.

So much heraldry in this movie. And so much really good heraldry in this movie. And then to be pulled right out of it with something like this.

Yes, I know that I am not really this movie's audience, and that most of the people who have seen it, or who might see it in the future, wouldn't know the difference. But that same argument could be used for every other bit of heraldry to be found there. "No, we don't need to use Anne Boleyn's (or Cardinal Wolsey's, or for that matter, even King Henry VIII's) real coat of arms. Most of the people watching this will never know the difference."

Phooey! They got a bunch of it right. It wouldn't have taken much more effort to get all of it right. Just sayin'.