Detective Inspector Rebus, what does your name mean?

Detective Inspector John Rebus is the star of the excellent detective novels created by the Scottish writer Ian Rankin. Did the inspector ever realise what his surname meant?

King’s College Cambridge found books of riddles and word puzzles that were published in the C16th e.g A Little Book of Riddles (1656). Anagrams and acrostics appeared in books and even high-brow literary journals got involved. Famous writers, poets and statesman such as Jonathan Swift, David Garrick, Horatio Walpole and William Cowper created puzzles for their own entertainment and the amusement of their clever contemporaries.

Jacob Levernier described visual puns, rebuses and codes in late medieval art where “a good pun was its own reword.” Evidence for patrons’ interest could be found in images that drew on witty and often scholarly word play. Creative homonyms and lively rebuses appeared in sculpture, painting and archit­ecture. But Lever­nier was specifically interested in studies that were applied to sculpture whose imagery and message could be correlated to their architectural space.

So what was a rebus? It was a visual pun or allusional device that used pictures to represent words, and especially parts of words. It was a favourite form of heraldic expression used from the late C15th to denote surnames. The ex­ample that most appealed was the rebus of Bishop Walter Lyhart of Nor­w­ich, con­sisting of a stag/hart lying down in water. “Hart” and “lying down” together represented Lyhart.

Sir Ralph Shelton's rebus in Norfolk

Sir Ralph Shelton rebuilt the church at Shelton in Norfolk and in his will of 1497, he asked that his personal devices appear on every roof corbel and niche, as well as the nave aisle windows. The rebus used an "R" plus a "shell" plus a "tun/barrel", together representing the patron of the church: R. Shelton

The rebus alluded to the name, profession or personality of the bearer, and said in Latin Non verbis, sed rebus i.e not by words but by objects. Of all professions, rebuses were most popular amongst churchmen. John Goodall gave the example of John Islip, Abbot of Westminster (1500-53) whose rebus showed an “eye” with a man “slipping” from a tree. 

There were many sculpted “owl” rebuses on the walls, ceiling and tomb in the chantry chapel of Bishop Oldham (d1519), in Exeter Cathedral. Some versions had the word “dom” on a scroll hanging from the owl’s mouth, just in case the viewer needed help in being to read the bishop’s surname. 

Canting arms were heraldic bearings that represented the bear­er's name in a visual pun or rebus eg for Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the arms contained images of “bows” and of “lions”. But a family might have a rebus as a personal identification device, entirely separate from the family’s formal armorials. For example in the mid C16th Sir Richard Weston’s arms used: Ermine, on a chief azure five bezants. His rebus, on the other hand, was a “tun” i.e a barrel, used to designate the last syllable of his surname. It was displayed on terracotta plaques on his Surrey mansion.

I presume that only the wealthy would require architectural sculpture carved on the front of their homes, and only the very literate would be interested in esoteric word games using three languages – Latin, French and English. The rebus might have been a common literary form of the age but Nils Thomasson published his book in 1661 that set out the rules for creating rebuses. Most importantly, a picture of an object could not be used to represent that word, since that took no intelligence to decipher at all

The V & A Museum has a modern example of a book plate.  This C19th rebus, consisting of “trees” and “bees” was a simple rendition of the author's name Ashbee.

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In 2007, the author Ian Rankin appeared in an BBC Four series, exploring the origins of his famous character, Inspector John Rebus. Called Ian Rankin's Hidden Edinburgh, Rankin looked at the origins of the character and the events that led to his creation. I would be keen to know if Rankin discussed the hero’s surname. After all the enigmatic inspector was a complex character who was not fully understood by his colleagues or friends.