and sometimes in the crescent moon, but the crescent moon must not be confused with the ordinary heraldic crescent.
In concluding this class of charges, we may fitly do so by an allusion to the shield of Sir William Herschel, with its appropriate though clumsy device of a Telescope.
As may be naturally expected, the insignia of sovereignty are of very frequent occurrence in all armories, both English and foreign. Long before the days of heraldry, some form of decoration for the head to indicate rank and power had been in vogue amongst, it is hardly too much to say, all nations on the earth. As in most things, Western nations have borrowed both ideas, and added developments of those ideas, from the East, and in traversing the range of armory, where crowns and coronets appear in modern Western heraldry, we find a large proportion of these devices are studiously and of purpose delineated as being Eastern.
With crowns and coronets as symbols of rank I am not now, of course, concerned, but only with those cases which may be cited as supplying examples where the different kinds of crowns appear either as charges on shields, or as forming parts of crests.
Crowns, in heraldry, may be differentiated under the Royal or the Imperial, the Eastern or antique, the Naval, and the Mural, which with the Crowns Celestial, Vallery and Palisado are all known as charges. Modern grants of crowns of Eastern character in connection with valuable service performed in the East by the recipient may be instanced; e.g. by the Eastern Crown in the grant to Sir Abraham Roberts, G.C.B., the father of Field-Marshal Earl Roberts, K.G.
In order of antiquity one may best perhaps at the outset allude to the arms borne by the seaport towns of Boston, and of Kingston-on-Hull (or Hull, as the town is usually called), inasmuch as a tradition has it that the three crowns which figure on the shield of each of these towns originate from a recognised device of merchantmen, who, travelling in and trading with the East and likening themselves to the Magi, in their Bethlehem visit, adopted these crowns as the device or badge of their business. The same remarks may apply to the arms of Cologne: "Argent, on a chief gules, three crowns or."
From this fact (if the tradition be one) to the adoption of the same device by the towns to which these merchants traded is not a far step.
One may notice in passing that, unlike what from the legend one would expect, these crowns are not of Eastern design, but of a class wholly connected with heraldry itself. The legend and device, however, are both much older than these modern minutiæ of detail.
The Archbishopric of York has the well-known coat: "Gules, two keys in saltire argent, in chief a regal crown proper."
