‘Qui gerit S’: he who wears the S. Thus is Henry Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, described by John Gower in his Cronica Tripertita, a metrical chronicle written at the close of the fourteenth century as a sequel to Vox Clamantis. The poem proceeds to compare the device, and by association the individual it represents, to a heavenly gift. For Gower, the collar of SS was clearly the most widely recognised means of identifying the earl. For the next century and a half the livery collar would attract similar attention from many a commentator, chronicler and artisan. Its authority, its potency as a royal symbol and what it represented clearly mattered.

In early January 1400, after parliament had ruled that all livery collars save those of the king were no longer to be worn, Raulyn Govely, an esquire of John Holland, earl of Huntingdon, refused to remove his lord's collar while he was still living. This political act of defiance did not last long; the earl was beheaded soon after for his involvement in the Epiphany Rising against Henry IV. Against the demands of several of the king's representatives, Govely adamantly stated that no individual would convince him to remove his collar. The artefact demonstrably represented a close bond between Govely and his lord, a bond which would only be broken by death. In the intervening centuries the SS collar in particular has attracted antiquarians and historians, principally concerned with its stylistic development and the allusive, and elusive, meaning of the ‘S’. The 150 years after the collar's introduction in England in the late fourteenth century witnessed the item's epoch. The livery collar developed into a salient and abundant artefact, treasured by its recipients. It would become a significant aspect of the gift-giving milieu of the fifteenth-century aristocracy and would find its way into the ceremonial of the highest echelons of society. It was more than an eye-catching piece of finery: its symbolic value was not lost on contemporaries.