This well-researched and referenced work covers all aspects of knightly display on the battlefield, from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. While England is the central focus, the net is cast widely across Europe and the many examples cited by this study come not just from the chronicles and other sources typically used for battle study, but also from romance and epic literature, which is used to reveal how, in their own period, such symbols were understood.

Successive chapters tackle major themes, with the explanations providing a sensible balance between practical demands of the battlefield and the ritual and psychological aspects of the symbols. First is heraldic display, where matters of identification and esprit de corps are compared to the wish of knights to be recognized when performing great deeds. Second are the badges and devices which develop, as heraldic display becomes more complex, in part to distinguish the members of the retinues, which become important in the system of late medieval recruitment. Next, Jones considers the tools of command and control. The visual symbols include the banner, which identifies the commander and the location to which his troops should rally. While consecrated banners gave spiritual support in the face of the enemy, such religious symbolism is revealed as a minor component of martial display compared to the iconography of honour and status. The audible displays include not just trumpets and drums but also the battle cry – complementing the field sign in distinguishing friend from foe. Lastly comes the display value of arms and equipment: of sword, horse and especially armour. Form is explained as determined principally by technical and tactical considerations, though other influences, such as civilian fashion, are also acknowledged, but the interesting insights appear when Jones considers the psychological results of the donning of armour – for both the wearer and others.

He gives us a picture of the knight in armour and on horseback, with his heraldic displays, as a physical symbol of status and authority. But this is not a rounded picture, because physical evidence is given only a limited place. For example, the function and effectiveness of a banner or a badge on the battlefield will have been determined, in part, by its size, where it was displayed and in what numbers. What, one wonders, was the purpose of such tiny livery badges as the gilded silver boar, recently recovered from Bosworth, and the silver cockerel from Towton? Such things are not mentioned by Jones.

The final chapter attempts to contribute to the ‘military revolution’ debate. Here he fails to convince: it feels a little like a study, unnecessarily, seeking a major purpose. The lack of a correlation of change in martial symbols with the fundamental changes in fourteenth-century warfare is claimed as reflecting continuity of tradition on the medieval battlefield. Could it be that the evidence he has marshalled simply lacks sufficient resolution and time depth to reveal the truly important changes? What, one wonders, might have been the conclusion, had this analysis continued to the end of the seventeenth century, through a period where the evidence is far better and where other major changes in warfare are seen?