King’s Arms Review: The Most Loyal Name in the Land

The King’s Arms is one of the oldest and most common of all pub names – a straightforward declaration of loyalty to the Crown

The King’s Arms in Wandsworth holds eighteen hundred and fifty-two reviews and a 4.4 – a large, solid sample – and it bears one of the oldest, most common and most straightforwardly loyal of all pub names: the King’s Arms, a simple declaration of loyalty to the Crown, flying the royal heraldry over the door.

The loyal name

“The King’s Arms” is one of the most common and traditional of all English pub names – found in towns and villages across the entire country, and reaching back centuries. The “Arms” refers to a coat of arms – here, the royal arms of the King – and to display the “King’s Arms” was to declare loyalty to the Crown, to fly the royal heraldry, to associate the pub with the monarch and the established order. In an age when such declarations mattered, naming your pub “The King’s Arms” was a public statement of loyalty and respectability.

The name belongs to the great family of royal and heraldic pub names this survey has traced throughout – the King’s Head, the Crown, the Rose and Crown, the Prince of Wales, the Victoria, and all the rest. These loyal, royal names reflect the deep and long connection between the pub and the established order of Crown and country – the pub as a respectable, loyal, patriotic institution, flying the royal colours. “The King’s Arms” is perhaps the most straightforward of them all – simply the arms of the King, loyalty declared plainly.

The royal arms

The “arms” in question – the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom – is one of the most elaborate and meaningful pieces of heraldry in the world. It features the three lions of England (which we met at the Black Lion in the Kensington survey), the rampant lion of Scotland, and the harp of Ireland, quartered together, supported by the English lion and the Scottish unicorn, and bearing the mottoes “Dieu et mon droit” (“God and my right”) and “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Shamed be he who thinks evil of it,” the motto of the Order of the Garter). It is a heraldic summary of the whole realm and its history, and to fly the “King’s Arms” was to display this royal emblem in miniature over the pub door.

King or Queen

One charming feature of royal pub names is that they must sometimes change with the monarch. A “King’s Arms” or “King’s Head” becomes, in strict logic, a “Queen’s Arms” or “Queen’s Head” when a queen reigns, and vice versa – though in practice, many pubs simply keep their name through the changes of monarch, so that “King’s Arms” pubs happily continued through the long reigns of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II. With a king once again on the throne, the “King’s Arms” is, at present, strictly correct once more. The name has weathered the comings and goings of many monarchs over the centuries, a constant declaration of loyalty through all the changes of the Crown.

There is something appealing in the sheer, unpretentious loyalty of the name. It makes no clever claim, invokes no god or beast or distant kingdom; it simply declares loyalty to the King, flying the royal arms over the door, as pubs have done for centuries. It is tradition and loyalty distilled – the King’s Arms, plain and true, one of the most enduring names in the whole tradition of the English pub.

The pub

A large, popular pub doing a fair 4.4 across a large and real sample, bearing the ancient and loyal name of the King’s Arms – flying the royal heraldry, declaring loyalty to the Crown, in the oldest tradition of the English pub.

Verdict

Large, popular, and named with the most traditional and loyal of pub names – the King’s Arms, the royal heraldry over the door, loyalty to the Crown declared plainly.

Have a pint at the King’s Arms, and raise it under the royal heraldry – the three lions, the unicorn, the ancient mottoes – in one of the oldest and most loyal traditions of the English pub.

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]