Appearance
The banner was red or orange-red silk and flown from a gilded lance. According to legend, its colour stems from it being dipped in the blood of the recently-beheaded St. Denis.
The surviving descriptions of the Oriflamme are in Guillaume le Breton (thirteenth century), in the "Chronicle of Flanders" (fourteenth century), in the "Registra Delphinalia" (1456) and in the inventory of the treasury of St. Denis (1536). They show that the primitive Oriflamme was succeeded in the course of the centuries by newer Oriflammes which bore little resemblance to one another except for their colour.
Read more about this topic: Oriflamme
Famous quotes containing the word appearance:
“The complaint ... about modern steel furniture, modern glass houses, modern red bars and modern streamlined trains and cars is that all these objets modernes, while adequate and amusing in themselves, tend to make the people who use them look dated. It is an honest criticism. The human race has done nothing much about changing its own appearance to conform to the form and texture of its appurtenances.”
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“This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.”
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