Appendix D.
GRANT OF ARMS.
(Referred to at p.35, note.)
A toutspñts et advenir qui ces pñts lettres verront ou orront Thomais Trowte autrement dit Norrey roy d’armes du norst de cestuy royalme d’Angleterre salut et dilection avec humble recomendacion: Equitie veult et raison ordonne que les hom̄es vertueulx et de noble courage soient per leurs merites par renommee remunerez et non par seulment leurs personnes en ceste vie mortelle tant breife & transitoire mes apres euls ceulx qui de leurs corpes ystront et serront procreez soient en touts placs̃ degraund honneur perpetuellemtdevant autres luisans par certaines ensignes et de monstrances d’honneur et gentillesse. C’est ascavoir de blason heaillme & tymbre a fine que a leur example autres plus sefforcent de pseverement user leurs joures en faitz d’armes et ouvres verteuces pour acquirer la renowme d’auncienne gentillesse en leurs lignes & posterité: Et pource Je Norrey roy d’armes desusdit que non pas seulmtpar commune renoume mais aussi par le report et testemoigne d’autres nobles hom̄es dignes de fois suy pour vray adverty et enforme que Alan Trowte natef de la counte de Norff. a longemt. poursuey les faicts de vertues et tant en ce quen autres ces affayres s’est porte vertuesment et honnor ablement gouverne tellement q’ill a bien deservy et est bien digne que doresnavannt perpetuellement lui et sa posteritesoyent en touts placs honurables admits, renomeez, countez, nombrez, et receivez en nombre et en la campaigne dez autreiz auncients gentils et nobleis hommes: et pour la remembrance du celle sagentilesse par sa vertue del authorite et povoir annexes et attribues a men dit office de roy d’armes Jay devise, ordonne et assignee au dit Alan Trowte par luy et sa dite posterite le blason, heaulme et tymbre, en la maniere qui sensuit c’est ascavoir ung escu d’or ung cheveron de purpure troys testes moriens de sable crounes de troyes trovels d’argent: le timbre sur le heaulme ung teste morien assis dedans ung torse entre deux eliez pale du Champ et du cheveron & emant elle de sables sommees de cinq foyles doublee d’or si come le picture en le merge cy devant le demonstre: A voyir et tenir par luy et sa dit posterite et eux on revestir a tous jourmais. En testemoiging de ce Je Norrey roy d’armes desus nomée ay signe de ma main et selle de mon seale ces p’senteis fait et donne a Londrez le viij jour de novēbre l’an de ñre seignJesus Christ mccclxxvj et l’an de ñre seignroy Edwarde le Tierce apres le conquest xvj.
This Patent was examined with the Record in the College of Arms by Charles Townley, York Herald, 29. Apr. 1745.
This Patent was examined with the Record in the College of Arms by Charles Townley, York Herald, 29. Apr. 1745.
N. B. There is a mistake in the date, either in the year of Our Lord, or of the King.
Appendix E.
Thatthe curious relic of brass found at Lewes (alluded to at p.39[336]), was the sword-pommel of Prince Richard, King of the Romans, was an easy and natural inference from its rounded form, so similar to that observed on ancient swords, and from its being found where that Prince is known to have been engaged in the great battle of 1264. Further examination, however, proves this supposition to be erroneous, and by reference to page 589, in vol. xxv of ‘Archæologia,’ itwill be seen so closely to resemble, in form, material, workmanship, and heraldic bearings, the two ancient steelyard weights found in Norfolk, and there represented, that its identity with their former use must be at once recognized. The Lewes relic is smaller than the two other weights, and is deficient in the upper part, through which the suspending hook was passed, but, as it now weighs 18½ oz., it was probably, when perfect, a 2 lbs. weight. It is remarkable that all these weights, thus found at distant localities, and all evidently of the same era, the thirteenth century, should bear the arms of the King of the Romans,[337]though in each instance intentionally varied, in order, probably, to signify more readily to the eye the intended amount of each weight when in use. Sandford (Geneal. Hist., p. 95) says that the King of the Romans did not bear the arms of his father, King John, but on the larger Norfolk specimen the three royal lions are exhibited passant, sinisterwise, a remarkable difference, of which only one other similar example is known, on the ancient stamped tiles of Horsted-Keynes Church, co. Sussex, where the Prince’s arms, as earl of Cornwall, are also extant. This Prince had a grant of the stanneries and mines of Cornwall, held by service of five knights’ fees, (vide Dugdale’s Baronage,) and Sandford says that “he got much money by farming the mint,” but he would not appear to derive from these sources any peculiar right to stamp with his own arms all the weights of the kingdom. He is also mentioned (Madox, Hist. Exch.) as sitting with others of the king’s council in the Court of Exchequer in 14oand 54oof Henry III: there was an ancient officer of that court, called a Pesour, Ponderator, or Weigher, but the family of Windesore held this office for four generations by hereditary serjeantry, during the reigns of kings John and Henry III. It would seem more probable, therefore,that these weights were stamped with his arms,[338]by the king of the Romans, in the ordinary exercise of his baronial rights, for the common use of his own officers in his widely extended domains, and especially for those of his own personal household, in order efficiently to check the entries and deliveries of the stores of food and forage necessary for the supply of his numerous retinue. The contemporary accounts of his sister, the Princess Eleanor, wife of the great Simon, earl of Leicester, in 1265 (recently published by the Roxburghe Club), show with what minute detail and accuracy such expenses in a large household were regulated, and superintended by the steward of a great personage. The steward of the king of the Romans may have been thus busily employed at Lewes in measuring out with this identical weight their scanty rations to his Cornish troops, until surprised by the hurry of the fatal battle, in which—for human bones were found with the weight near the Castle gateway—he may have continued to clutch it faithfully, even in death. Prince Richard embarked at Yarmouth in 1253, on his way to his coronation as king, at Aix-la-Chapelle, and he went to Cologne in 1267, to marry his German bride, Beatrice. On one of these occasions, when he would have been accompanied by a large suite, or on some other passage through Norfolk, which was a customary route to Germany, the two interesting weights found there may have been accidentally dropped.
C. AND J. ADLARD, PRINTERS, BARTHOLOMEW CLOSE.
Footnotes:
[1]Yorke’s ‘Union of Honour.’
[2]The general ignorance of Heraldry even among the well-educated may be illustrated by the fact that not many months since the Commissioners of Assessed Taxes decided that a person who sealed his letters with a Thistle surrounded by the words ‘Dinna Forget,’ was liable to the charge for armorial bearings, albeit the device contained neither shield, helmet, wreath, nor any othernecessaryelement of heraldric insignia!
[3]Woodham’s ‘Application of Heraldry to the Illustration of various University and Collegiate Antiquities;’ Nos. 4 and 5 of the publications of the Cambridge Antiq. Soc.—an interesting essay, which would be none the worse if divested of a few remarks on “church principles,” “conventicles,” “Cobbett,” and the “Morning Chronicle,”—subjects as irrelevant as the whims of old Morgan, or any other heraldric writer of the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
[4]Woodham.
[5]Grimaldi. Orig. Gen. p. 82.
[6]Vide p.254.
[7]Some curious specimens (for example) of this kind of history occur in the writings of John Rous of Warwick, temp. Edw. IV. HisHistory of Englandis compiled indiscriminatelyfrom the Bibleand from monastic writers. Moses, he tells us, does not mention all the cities founded before the deluge, but Barnard de Breydenback, dean of Mayence, does! With the same taste he acquaints us, that, though the book of Genesis says nothing of the matter, Giraldus Cambrensis writes, that Caphera or Cesera, Noah’s niece, being apprehensive of the deluge, set out for Ireland, where, with three men and fifty women, she arrived safe with one ship, the rest perishing in the general destruction! Vide Walpole’s Historic Doubts.
[8]Morgan. Adam’s Shield, p. 99.
[9]Morgan. Adam’s Shield, p. 100.
[10]“God himselfe set a marke upon Cain. But you perhaps will say, that was Stigma, and not Digma, a brand, not an ornament.” Bolton’s Armories.
[11]‘Threerestsgules.’ A difference of opinion exists as to what this charge represents. Some blazon it ahorseman’s rest, and assert that it was therestin which the tilting-spear was fixed. Others contend that it was a wind instrument called the Clarion or Claricorde; while “Leigh and Boswell will have them to besufflues, instruments which transmit the wind from the bellows to the organ.” Lastly, Minsheu advises those who blazon themrests, to call them brackets ororgan-rests; and this is evidently the sense implied by Morgan.
[12]The correctness of these extracts, historically and etymologically considered, needs no comment.
[13]Numb. ii. 2. “Every man shall pitch by his own standard, with the ensign of his father’s house.”
[14]Gen. xlix.
[15]He couched as a lion....
[16]Zebulon shall be for an haven of ships....
[17]Issachar is a strong ass couching down between two burdens....
[18]Dan shall be a serpent by the way....
[19]He shall yield royal dainties....
[20]Naphtali is a hind let loose ... &c. &c. &c.
[21]Sprinkled with drops of water.
[22]Morgan gives the preamble of the Letters Patent of King Davidfor the warrant of a pedigree. It commences with “Omnibus, &c. David, Dei gratiâ Rex Juda et Israel, universis et singulis,” &c.!!
[23]Leigh’s Accedens of Armory.
[24]Boke of St. Alb. It will be seen in this extract that the origin of arms is referred to other times than those mentioned in the former quotations. Several similar discrepancies occur in the work, proving it to have been a compilation from different and conflicting authorities.
[25]Miscellaneous Collection.
[26]See vignette at the head of this chapter.
[27]Those who wish for other examples of this fictitious heraldry may find in Ferne’s ‘Blazon of Gentrie,’ the arms of Osyris king of Egypt, Hercules king of Lybia, Macedonus, Anubis, Minerva, Semiramis, Tomyris, Delborah (Judge of Israell), Jahel the Kenite, and Judith. These six last mentioned, together with the Empress Maud, Elizabeth of Arragon, and Joan of Naples, constitute the “nine worthies amongst women.” Ferne, 220 et seq., where their arms are engraved.
Upon the accession of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England, a controversy arose between the heralds of the two nations respecting the priority of right to the first quarter in the British achievement. The Scottish officers maintained that as Scotland was the older sovereignty, its tressured lion should take precedence of the three lions-passant, or, as they called them, theleopards, of England. This was an indignity which the English heralds could not brook, and they employed Sir William Segar to investigate the antiquity of our national ensigns. Segar’s treatise on this subject, dedicated to his majesty, contains some fine examples of fictitious heraldry. He begins with the imaginary story of Brutus, king of Britain, a thousand years before the Christian era, and his division of the island between his three sons. To Locheren, the eldest, he gave that portion afterwards called England, with arms ‘Or, a Lion passant-guardant, gules.’ To his second son, Toalknack, he assigned Albania, or Scotland, with ‘Or, a Lion rampant, gules,’ which, says he, with the addition of the double tressure, continue the arms of Scotland. And to his youngest son he gave Cambria, with ‘Argent, three Lions passant-guardant, gules,’ which the princes of Wales used for a long time. Vide Nisbet’s Essay on Arm. p. 162.
Bolton (Elements of Armories, 1610, p. 14,) gives the arms of Caspar and Balthasar, two of the three kings who, guided by the ‘Star in the East,’ came to worship our Saviour at Bethlehem. He admits, indeed, that there is no ‘canonicall proofe’ of them, yet appears to think that a painting “in the mother church of Canterburie, upon a wal, on the left hand, as you enter the north ile of the first quire,” is pretty respectable authority! It was a favourite crotchet with this writer, that heraldry did not owe its origin to any particular period or nation, but that it sprang from the light of nature.
[28]Story of Thebes, p. 2.
[29]Romulus.
[30]Vide Donaldson on the Connexion between Heraldry and Gothic Architecture, &c. &c. &c.
The far-renowned shield of Achilles was covered with so great a number of figurespictorially disposed, that it resembled modern heraldry still less than those above alluded to.
[31]Essay on Armories, p. 4.
[32]From a contemporary picture at Castle-Ashby, engraved in Pennant’s Journey from Chester to London.
[33]It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader that all early nations had their national emblems, for the ox of the Egyptians, the owl of the Athenians, the eagle of the Romans, and the white horse of the Saxons (retained in the arms of Saxony and of Kent), must occur to the recollection of every one.
[34]Vide the next chapter, where arationaleof these figures is attempted.
[35]Dallaway, p. 9.
[36]Blazonis closely allied to the Anglo-SaxonBLAWAN, to blow. There are some however who deduce it from the German,blasse, a mark.—Vide Montagu’s Guide, p. 14.
[37]Planché Hist. Brit. Costume.
(Caen Tile.)
[38]Those who contend for the earlier origin of heraldry adduce a certain shield occurring in the Bayeux tapestry, and resembling a modern coat charged with a cross coupée between five roundles; but whatever may be said of the cross, the roundles are probably only the studs or rivets of the shield. Again, as there are several shields in which the ornaments are exactly alike, the arms of a family cannot be intended. They also bring forward the encaustic tiles taken up from the floor of a monastery at Caen by Mr. Henniker, and now in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries, which they presume to have been laid down at the time of the foundation of the abbey in 1064. The arms upon these, supposed to have been those of benefactors, have been proved to belong to a date considerably posterior. Among them are the arms of England, three lions passant, an ensign which had no existence till the reign of Richard I, upwards of a century later than the foundation of the monastery of Caen.
[39]Dallaway.
[40]Lybbardes—leopards. It has long been a matter of controversy between French and English armorists, whether the charges of our royal arms were originally leopards or lions. Napoleon always derisively called them leopards. The author of the ‘Roll of Karlaverok,’ described in a future page, speaking of the banner of Edward I, says it contained “three leopards courant of fine gold, set on red, fierce, haughty, and cruel.”—Nicolas’ Karlav.p. 23.
Nisbet, who, as a Scotchman, viewed English heraldry with a somewhat supercilious eye, decides in favour of leopards, and cites the ‘Survey of London,’ by John Stowe, who quotes a record of the city of London, stating that Frederick, Emperor of Germany, in 1225, sent to Henry III three living leopards, “in token of the regal shield of arms.” The same author likewise mentions an order of Edward II to the Sheriff of London, to pay the keeper of the King’s leopards in the Tower of London sixpence a day for the sustenance of the leopards.—Nisbet’s Essay on Armories, p. 163.
[41]Dallaway; but Nisbet (Armories, p. 61,) alludes to earlier examples abroad.
[42]Salverte. Essai sur les Noms d’Hommes, (Paris, 1824.) vol. I, p. 240.
[43]Dall. pp. 31-32. The offering of trophies to the Deity is of a much earlier origin, and it was derived from the nations of antiquity. The Old Testament furnishes us with several instances, the classics with many more: “It was very common,” says Robinson, “to dedicate the armour of the enemy, and to suspend it in temples.”—Vide Homer, Iliad, vii. 81, “I will bear his armour to Troy, and hang it up in the temple of Apollo;” and Virgil, Æn. vii, describes a temple hung round with
——“helmets, darts and spears,And captive chariots, axes, shields, and bars,And broken beaks of ships,the trophies of their wars.”Dryden, vii. 252.
But, what is more to our purpose, “It was also customary to dedicate to the gods their own weapons, when they retired from the noise of war to a private life.” (Rob. Archæolog. Græc.) From I Sam. xxi, 9, it appears that David, after his victory over Goliath, had dedicated the Philistine’s sword to God as a trophy. “Behold it is here,” says the priest, on a subsequent occasion, “wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod.” In I Chron. x, 10, we read that the Philistines put the armour of Saul “in the house of their gods, and fastened his head in the temple of Dagon;” and, in xxvi, 27, we are told that “out of the spoils won in battles did they (the Israelites) dedicate to maintain the House of the Lord.”
[44]Hist. Poet. i, 302.
[45]The second book of Upton’s treatise, written in the fifteenth century, is entitled ‘OfVeterans, now called Heralds.’
[46]Nicolas’ Karlaverok, p. 4.
[47]Nicolas’ Karlaverok, p. 44. The charge here blazoned, a cross patée, is, in fact, a cross patonce.
[48]Ibid., Notes, p. 368.
[49]Waterhouse’s Discourse, p. 77.
[50]Let it not be understood from this remark that I mean in the slightest degree to advocate war as a means of acquiring national greatness. The war which Edward waged against France was totally unjustifiable; and the desolating civil wars which followed the misgovernment of his pusillanimous grandson Richard, were (as many of our subsequent wars have been) a disgrace to the very name of England.
[51]Strutt’s Roy. and Eccl. Antiq.
[52]Holinshed.
[53]The engraving above is from Royal MS., 14 E. iii. Brit. Mus.
[54]Decline and Fall, v. 6, p. 59.
[55]Apparently the village of Retiers, near Rennes, in Brittany.
[56]De Controversia in Curia Militari inter R. de Scrope and R. Grosvenor, Milites, Rege Ricardo Secundo, 1385-1390. E Recordis in Turre, Lond. Asservatis, vol. i, p. 178.
[57]Vide Historical and Allusive Arms; Loud. 1803, p. 43, et seq. Anecdotes of Heraldry and Chivalry; Worcester, 1795.
[58]Hutchinson’s Cumberland, vol. i, p. 314. The arms borne by a junior branch of the Blencowes are ‘Gules, a quarter argent,’ the original coat of the family. The baron of Graystock’s grant is sometimes borne as a quartering. The arms of his lordship, from which it is borrowed, were ‘Barry of six,argentandazure, over all threechapletsgules.’ According to a family tradition, Adam de Blencowe was standard-bearer to the Baron. Vide West’s Antiquities of Furness, quoted by Hutchinson.
[59]Montagu’s Study of Heraldry, Appendix A.
[60]One of the earliest grants of Arms preserved in the Heralds’ Coll. is printed in the Appendix. It is of the time of Edward III.
[61]“Nihil sibi insignii accidisse quia nec ipse nec majores sui in bello unquam descendissent.” Waterhouse, quoted by Dallaway.
[62]Dallaway.
[63]This was calleddimidiation.
[64]The dimidiated coat represented on p.36, is not the arms of a family, but those of the corporation of Hastings. Here three demi-lions are conjoined with three sterns of antient ships—a composition compared with which the griffin, cockatrice, and every otherhybridof a herald’s imagination sinks into insignificance. That this singular shield is a dimidiation of two antient coats cannot be doubted. Three ships, in all probability, formed the original arms of the town—the dexter-half of the royal arms of England having been superimposed in commemoration of some great immunity granted to this antiently important corporation.
[65]Query—Might not some of our English maidens, who are verging somewhat on theantique, resort to this mode of advertising for a husband with advantage? The odious appellation of “old maids” would then give place to the more courteous one of “Ladies of the half-blank shield.”
[66]Nisbet’s Essay on Armories, p. 70.
[67]A lineal ancestor of Sir John Shelley, Bart. The date of the lady’s death is 1513.
[68]In the great hall at Fawsley, co. Northampton, the seat of Sir Charles Knightly, Bart., is a shield containing the unprecedented number of 334 quarterings. Vide Baker’s Northampton, vol. i, p. 386.
[69]Vide Appendix.
[70]In the Temple Church, London. Tomb of Sir Geoffrey de Magnaville. Vide woodcut at the head of the Preface.
[71]Boke of St. A. and Dall.
[72]The arms of the See of Hereford at this day are identical with those of Thomas Cantilupe, who held the episcopate in the thirteenth century, and was canonized as St. Thomas of Hereford, 34oEdward I.
[73]It is almost unnecessary to observe that the expression ‘a merchant’s mark’ is by no means appropriate; for such devices were employed in a great variety of ways. They appear, primarily, to have been used as signatures by illiterate though wealthy merchants, who could not write their names. At a later date they were employed formarkingbales of goods. Within the last century, many flockmasters in the South of England used them for marking sheep. Although the illiterate of our own times substitute a + for their proper names, it was far otherwise two centuries ago, when they generally made a rude monogram, orpeculiarmark, analogous to the merchant’s mark of earlier date.
[74]Dallaway.
[75]C. S. Gilbert’s Hist. Cornw. vol. i, Introd. to Herald.
[76]Historical and Allusive Arms, p. 347.
[77]Montagu, Study of Heraldry. But this is, perhaps, an isolated instance of such early date, for Dame Julyan Berners, more than a century later, says, “There be vi differences in armys; ij for the excellent and iiij for the nobles; Labelle and Enborduryng for lordis; Jemews, Mollettys, Flowre delyce and Quintfoyles for the nobles,” (i. e. gentry).
[78]Cited by Dall. p. 127.
[79]Memoirs, p. 287. Cott. MS., Calig. A. xviii.
[80]Vide my English Surnames, 2d edition, p. 194 et seq.
[81]Montagu, p. 42.
[82]If Heraldry had to be establishedde novo, something of the sort might be done, by giving each family a patent right to a particular ordinary, provided the ordinaries were much more numerous than they are. But as nearly every ordinary and charge is common to many families, Dugdale’s system cannot possibly be carried out.
[83]Hugh Clark’s ‘Introduction to Heraldry,’ which may be purchased for a few shillings, contains everything necessary to a thorough knowledge of the art of blazon.
[84]Spenser uses this word:
“How the red roses flush up in her cheeks,And the pure snow with goodlyvermeilstain.”
[85]Roll of Karlaverok, p. 26.
[86]In the ‘Secretes of Master Alexis of Piedmont’ are many recipes for making this article.
[87]There is an extraordinary difference of opinion respecting the Mediæval Latin,Sinopis. Ducange, with the authorities quoted above, make its colour green; but thesinoper, or ruddle of commerce, is of a dark red or purplish hue. In one of the Cottonian MSS. Nero, c. vi, fol. 156, is the following account of it: “Sinopim, colorem videlicet illum cujus tres sunt species, videlicetrubea,subrubea, et inter has media, invenerunt primitus, ut scribit Ysidorus viri regionis Ponticæ in urbe eorum quam solent ipsi Sinopem vocitare.”
[88]Page 205.
[89]It is a prevailing error that the bend sinister is a mark of dishonour, as betokening illegitimacy; this seems to have arisen from its having been confounded with the baton, which bearing differs from it both in being much narrower, and in being cut off from the borders of the escocheon.
[90]Among the sovereign states whose armorial ensigns are formed of such stripes are Cyprus, Hungary, Saxony, Austrasia, Burgundy, Arragon, and Germany under the descendants of Louis the Debonaire. The private families who bear armories so formed are innumerable.—Brydson, p. 66.
[91]These, as Mr. Planché (Hist. Brit. Costume, p. 151,) observes, are mostly heraldric terms. Ounding, orundeing, signifies a waved pattern or edge.
[92]Blaauw’s Barons’ War.
[93]Mylneris, miller’s; yrne, iron; mylnys, mills; mylne-ston, mill-stone.
[94]Furetiere, quoted by Dall.
[95]Accid. fol. 121.
[96]By a statute of temp. Edw. II. (apud Winton) every person not having a greater annual revenue in land than 100 pence, was compelled to have in his possession a bow and arrows, with other arms both offensive and defensive; but all such as had no possessions (in land), but could afford to purchase arms, were commanded to have a bow with sharp arrows if they resided without the royal forests, and a bow with round-headed arrows if their habitation was within the forests. The words of the statute are, “Ark et setes hors de foreste, et en foreste ark etpiles.” The word pile is supposed to be derived from the Latin ‘pila,’ a ball; and Strutt supposes this kind of missile to have been used topreventthe owners from killing the king’s deer. In the following reign archery, as a pastime of the common people, began to be neglected, which occasioned the king to send a letter of complaint to the sheriffs of London, desiring them to see that the leisure time upon holidays was spent in the use of the bow. In the thirty-ninth year of this reign, 1365, the penalty incurred by offenders was imprisonment at the king’s pleasure. The words of the letter are, “arcubus et sagittis, velpilettisaut boltis,” with bow and arrows, or piles or bolts.Vide Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes. Edit. Hone, pp. 54, 55.
[97]Nisbet.
[98]Vide p. 47, Arms of Echingham, &c.
[99]‘Gules, a tri-corporated lyon issuant out of the three corners of the field, and meeting under one head in fesse,or,’ was the coat-armour of Edmund Crouchback, second son of Henry III. This is the earliest specimen ofdifferencingI have met with.
[100]This is the usual notion of the old armorists, but Bossewell gives a different statement: “The pellicane feruently loueth her [young] byrdes. Yet when thei ben haughtie, and beginne to waxe hote, they smite her in the face and wounde her, and she smiteth them againe and sleaeth (kills) them. And after three daies she mourneth for them, and then striking herself in the side till the bloude runne out, she sparpleth it upon theire bodyes, and by vertue thereof they quicken againe.”—Armorie of Honour, fol. 69. On the brass of Wm. Prestwick, dean of Hastings, in Warbleton church, co. Sussex, there is a representation of a pelican feeding her young with her blood, and the motto on a scroll above,
‘Sic Epus dilerit nos,’—‘Thus hath Christ loved us.’
[101]The Heraldry of Fish, by Thomas Moule, Esq. London, 1842.
[102]Vide cut at the head of this chapter.
[103]Loadstone.
[104]Op. Maj. edit. Jebb. 232.
[105]Halliwell’s Sir John Maundevile, p. 319.
[106]Succinct Account of Religions and Sects, sect. 4, No. 42.
[107]Some of the Greek coins of Sicily bear an impress of three legs conjoined, exactly similar to this fanciful charge, except that they are naked, and have at the point of conjunction a Mercury’s head.
[108]Dallaway.
[109]The flower of the ‘sword-grass, a kind of sedge.’Dict.
[110]A work on the Fleur-de-Lis, in 2 vols. 8vo (!), was published in France in 1837.
[111]The following jest on thefleur-de-lismay amuse some readers. Sir William Wise “having lente to the King (Henry VIII) his signet to seale a letter, who having powdred eremites engrayl’d in the seale, [qy. ermine?—Several families of Wise bear this fur:] ‘Why, how now, Wise,’ quoth the King, ‘What? hast thoulicehere?’ ‘And if it like your Majestie,’ quoth Sir William, ‘alouseis a rich coate, for, by giving the louse, I part armes with the French King, in that he giveth thefloure de lice.’ Whereat the king heartily laugh’d, to heare how pretily so byting a taunt (namely, proceeding from a Prince,) was so sodaynely turned to so pleasaunte a conceyte.” (Stanihurst’s Hist. of Ireland in Holinshed’s Chron.) Nares thinks that Shakspeare, who is known to have been a reader of Holinshed, took his conceit of the ‘white lowses,’ which ‘do become an old coat well,’ in the Merry Wives of Windsor, from this anecdote. (Heraldic Anom. vol. i, p. 204.)
[112]Essay on Armories, p. 10.
[113]Chevaux-de-frise (in fortification), large joists of wood stuck full of wooden spikes, armed with iron, to stop breaches, or to secure the passes of a camp.—Bailey’s Dict.
[114]Heywood’s Epigrams and Prov. 1566. No. 13.
[115]Wende, thought;mulne, mill.
[116]Modern naturalists place it in the class cryptogamia, and give it the name ofTremella nostoc.
[117]In reading this list it will be seen that it contains several monsters not of the ‘Gothick’ but of the Classical era, as the chimera, harpy, and sagittary; but it is a curious and characteristic fact that the purely classical monsters were never great favourites in heraldry.
[118]Nisbet on Armories, edit. 1718; pp. 12-13.
[119]Workes of Armorie, folio 66.
[120]Cocatryse, basilicus,cocodrillus! Prompt. Parv. Camd. Soc.
[121]Hence sometimes called the basilisk, from the Greek βασιλισκος.
[122]Mallet (Northern Antiquities, ch. ix) says, “The thick misshapen walls winding round a rude fortress, on the summit of a rock, were often called by a name signifyingSerpentorDragon. Women of distinction were commonly placed in such castles for security. Thence the romancers invented so many fables, concerning princesses of great beauty guarded by dragons and afterwards delivered by young heroes, who could not achieve their rescue till they had overcome those terrible guards.”
[123]Anon, Parag.
[124]Brydson’s Summary View.
[125]Probably, also, by frightening their horses, to throw their ranks into confusion.
[126]By an oversight in the drawing some small vestiges of wings have been omitted.
[127]Barons’ War, p. 168.
[128]‘Sir Degore.’ Warton’s Hist. Poet., p. 180, ibid.
[129]Barons’ War, p. 169.
[130]“Regius locus fuit interdraconemet standardum.”
[131]Barnes’s Hist. Edw. III.
[132]Vide Promptorium Parvulorum, Camd. Soc. voc.griffown. Leigh’s Accedens, &c.
[133]Æn. iii, 212, &c.
[134]Vide Vignette at the head of this Chapter for Maundevile’s representation of an Ipotayne.
[135]Kitto’s Pictorial Bible, Job xxxix.
[136]Vide Congregational Mag. 1842 or 43.
[137]Kitto, ut sup.
[138]“What reason,” asks Morgan, “can be given why the three brothers, Warren, Gourney, and Mortimer, should every one bear a severall coat, and derive (hand down) their sirnames to posterity, all of them yet retaining the metal and colour of or and azure, the onechecky, the otherpally, and the otherbarry?” Armilogia, p. 41.
[139]Huge.
[140]Accedens, fol. 194 et seq.
[141]Heralds.
[142]Accedens, fol. 7.
[143]Sphere, Nobility Native, p. 101.
[144]Ibid.
[145]Bibl. Herald, p. 168.
[146]Accedens, fol. 90.
[147]Ib. fol. 92.
[148]Accedens, fol. 98.
[149]Display, p. 230.
[150]Ibid. p. 203.
[151]Ibid. p. 215.
[152]These seem originally to have been arms of office. Their “character was strictly emblematical, and their import obvious, consisting, as they generally did, of a representation of the various official implements or ensigns.” “Little doubt can be entertained but that much of our personal heraldry is derived from such a source.” (Woodham’s Application of Heraldry to the Illustration of Collegiate Antiquities, p. 79.)
[153]Between 1240 and 1245. (LXIV in Coll. Arm.)
[154]Chaffinch.
[155]Sphere of Gentry.
[156]Vide cut at the head of the present chapter.
[157]Vide English Surnames, p. 72, second edit.
[158]Gibbon, Bluemantle pursuivant, who flourished subsequently to Camden, made a collection of “Allusive Arms” containing some thousands of such coats. His MS. is in the College of Arms.
[159]Vide the Chapter of Rebuses, appended to my ‘English Surnames,’ second edit. p. 261.
[160]It is a fact not unworthy of notice that Nicholas Breakspeare (Pope Adrian IV) and William Shakspeare both bore canting-arms; the former, ‘Gu, a broken spear, or;’ and the dramatist, ‘Argent, on a bend sable, a spear of the first.’
[161]Debrett, edited by Wm. Courthope, Esq. [now Rouge-Croix.]
[162]Essai sur les Noms, &c., I, 240.
[163]Brydson’s Summary View of Heraldry, pp. 98-9.
[164]Menestrier.
[165]Study of Heraldry, p. 70.
[166]Berry, Encycl. Herald.
[167]The ducal coronet antiently denoted command, and the chapeau, dignity; but in their modern application they have no such meaning.
[168]Edward III is the first monarch who introduced a crest (the lion statant-guardant) into his great seal. But this cannot be regarded as the first instance of the use of crests, for they appear nearly half a century earlier upon the seals of Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster. That they were in common use in Chaucer’s time is obvious from the poet’s description of the one borne by Sire Thopas, the tower and lily. Vide page 81.
[169]The crest of Exmew is generally blazoned as ‘a dove supporting a textrby a branch of laurel.’ As to the letter, it is certainly an X, not an R; and the bird is quite as much like a sea-gull, orMEW, as a dove. Hence a rebus upon the name was doubtless intendedx-MEW! The crest of Bourchier shows the manner in which the crest was affixed to the helmet.
[170]Herald-painters of the present day neglect this rule, and generally paint the mantlings red, doubled or lined with white or ermine.
[171]In the seal of Ela, Countess of Salisbury, who was born in 1196, two lions rampant, or rathercrawling, are introduced to fill up the spaceson each side of the lady’s effigies. It is engraved in Sandford’s Geneal. Hist.
[172]The following are the royal supporters, as given in Sandford’s Genealogical History: Richard II, two angels; Henry IV, swan and antelope; Henry V, lion and antelope; Henry VI, two antelopes; Edward IV, lion and bull; Edward V, lion and hind; Richard III, two boars; Henry VII, dragon and greyhound; Henry VIII, lion and dragon; Edward VI, lion-guardant crowned and dragon; Mary, eagle and lion; Elizabeth, as Edward VI; James I, &c. lion and unicorn, as at present.
[173]According to Nisbet, the earliest royal supporters of England were two angels. The transition from one angel to two, and from two angels to two quadrupeds is very natural.
[174]C. S. Gilbert’s Cornwall, pl. 3.
[175]Ormerod’s Cheshire.
[176]Archæologia, vol. xxx.
[177]Hone’s Table Book.
[178]In the above sketch I have ventured to supply the head which in the original is wanting.
[179]Montagu, Guide, p. 48.
[180]The coat-armour of a great family was of too sacred a character to be used as the personal ornament or distinction of their retainers, the private herald only excepted; and it was long ere this functionary was allowed to invest himself in his master’s armorials.
[181]Vide Chapter IX.
[182]Viz. Warbleton Priory, Robertsbridge Abbey, and the churches of Thundridge, (co. Herts.), Crowhurst, Burwash, Laughton, Chiddingly, Ripe, East Hothly, Wartling, and Dallington. As a proof of the value of heraldric insignia in ascertaining the founders of antient buildings, it may be remarked that, so far as I am aware, the Buckles which adorn the whole of thechurcheshere enumerated, furnish the only evidence (and most irrefragable evidence it must certainly be admitted to be) that the family of Pelham were concerned in their erection or enlargement. There arehistoriesas well as ‘sermons’ ‘in stones!’
[183]From a Paper on the ‘Pelham Buckle’ read before the first meeting of the Archæological Association at Canterbury, 11th September, 1844.
[184]Montagu.
[185]The dogs here alluded to were greyhounds, a Yorkist badge.
[186]Guide, p. 59.
[187]Still retained in the collar of SS.
[188]Vide Chapter XI.
[189]The ‘Hawthorn’ is probably the ‘crown in a bush,’ used in conjunction with the lettersH. R.as the badge of Henry VII. This badge originated in the finding of the crown of Richard III in a bush after the battle of Bosworth-Field. (Vide Fosbroke’s Encycl. of Antiq. p. 757.)
[190]Montagu, p. 75, from a MS. in the Pepys. Lib. Cambridge.
[191]Vide Exodus, iii, 14.
[192]Vide Judges, vii, 18.
[193]ByMontjoyeis supposed to be intended the national banner, on which the figure of some saint was embroidered.
[194]The motto of the royal arms, ‘Dieu et mon droit,’ is older, and is ascribed to Richard I.
[195]Guide, p. 56.
[196]The modern motto of the family is ‘Crede Biron.’
[197]‘Per linguam bos inambulat.’ Ant. proverb.
[198]Vide ‘The Principal Historical and Allusive Arms borne by Families of the United Kingdom; collected by an Antiquary,’ quarto, Lond. 1803. Moule says, “But few copies of the work were sold, and the remaining impressions were destroyed in the fire at the printing-office, which has rendered ita particularly scarce book.” (Bibl. Herald., p. 497.) On this account I am induced to make extensive use of the volume, and to carry this chapter much beyond my original intention.
[199]Archæologia, xxix.
[200]Harl. MS. 2035.
[201]“Arthgal, the first Earl of Warwick, in the days of King Arture, and was one of the Round Table; this Arthgal took aberein his arms, for that, in Britisch, soundeth a bere in English.” (Leland’s Collect.)
[202]A very similar coat of arms, borne by the Lloyds of Denbighshire, Barts., is said to have originated under similar circumstances in 1256.
[203]Hist. and Allusive Arms.
[204]Ibid.
[205]Fun. Mon., p. 629.
[206]Vide ‘English Surnames,’ 2d edit. p. 100.
[207]Vol. ii, p. 87, edit. 1768.
[208]Enumerated at p.146.
[209]The vignette at the head of the present chapter was copied from a brick at Laughton Place. The inscription, which is in relievo, is W. P. (William Pelham) LAN DE GRACE 1534 FVT CEST MAYSON FAICTE.
[210]The painting is upon panel. An engraving of it is given in Bigland’s Gloucester, vol. i, p. 312. Hist. and Allus. Arms, p. 52.
[211]Hist. and Allus. Arms, p. 60.
[212]I use the present tensebear, although in many cases the families may have become extinct.
[213]Gough’s Camden, vol. i, p. 89.
[214]Bowles—‘Azure, a crescent argent, in chief the sun or.’Smith—‘Vert a cheveron gules between three Turks’ heads couped in profile proper, their turbans or.’ This was an augmentation borne quarterly with the antient arms of Smith.
[215]Supporters of Sir William Draper, K. B. (Hist. and Allus. Arms, p. 227.)
[216]Vide Robertson, Smollet, Stewart, &c.in loco; Grose’s Antiq. of Scotland, &c.
[217]Hist. and Allus. Arms, pp. 316-18.
[218]The name of Carlos is presumed to have become extinct; that of Penderell is by no means so. The representative of the family still continues to receive the pension of 100 marks originally granted to Richard Penderell. Several members of the family, in various conditions in life, have been connected for some generations with the county of Sussex. One of them, a few years since, kept an inn at Lewes, bearing the sign of theRoyal Oak.
[219]A lion rampant within a double tressure, &c.
[220]A unicorn.
[221]Sable, a cheveron between three astroits, or mullets, argent. (Historical and Allusive Arms.)
[222]Ibid.