The first association between the Plantagenet family and a heraldic beast does indeed appear to have involved a lion rather than a panther. A lion rampant appears on the funeral plaque of Henry II’s father, Geoffrey of Anjou, at Le Mans, shown on Geoffrey’s shield. It can be identified with the lion said by John of Marmoutier to have been displayed on Geoffrey’s shield during his lifetime.⁹⁴ Whatever his own aspirations to mimic the attributes of the lion, the king of beasts, Henry II seems to have been known in France and to his Capetian rivals as the vulpecula or ‘little fox’, a beast whose ruddy colouring matched Henry’s own but that in popular lore (derived from the vulpes paruulas que demoliuntur vineas of the Song of Solomon 2:15) was widely associated with heresy and treachery.⁹⁵ This in itself may nonetheless suggest a desire in Capetian France to puncture the pretensions of the Plantagenet dynasty and hence supply evidence of a pre-existing identification between Henry II and the king of beasts. A similarly deliberate downplaying of his family’s leonine pretensions may explain the claim, made by Gerald of Wales, c. 1217, that like pards and lions, John and his allies fled from the very scent of the flower of France.⁹⁶ By this time the English court already boasted a livery that included heraldic elements. As early as the siege of Bedford, for example, perhaps as early as 1138, conspirators plotting to enter the royal camp to kill King Stephen had been obliged to change their horses, saddles and shields, presumably because all of these objects were in some way marked so as to distinguish royal from non-royal knights.⁹⁷ By the 1180s, we have evidence for court heralds equivalent to the later kings of arms.⁹⁸ The so-called ‘Folkingham brooch’, an exquisite late twelfth-century badge showing a lion, has generally been described as an object of private baronial provenance. Might it not in reality be the earliest surviving livery badge associated with an officer of the Plantagenet court?⁹⁹ The transformation of Geoffrey Plantagenet’s lion into the later ‘leopards’ of England is a phenomenon that has attracted much attention, that is perhaps hinted at in Gerald of Wales’ likening King John and his allies to pards and lions, and that was certainly under way by the 1230s when Matthew Paris records the three leopards sent by the Emperor Frederick II to King Henry III in imitation of the arms of England.¹⁰⁰ In 1251, Henry III commanded that a robe for his own use be decorated with ‘three small leopards’ on both the front and the back.¹⁰¹