Crowns are for Coroun. Yarde had yard-wands; Bordoun a burdon or pilgrim’s staff.
Of horse-furniture we have the stirrups of Scudamore and Giffard, the horse-barnacles of Bernake, and the horse-shoes borne by many branches and tenants of the house of Ferrers.
Of musical instruments there are pipes, trumps and harps for Pipe, Trumpington and Harpesfeld. Hunting horns are common among families bearing such names as Forester or Horne. Remarkable charges are the three organs of Grenville, who held of the house of Clare, the lords of Glamorgan.
Combs play on the name of Tunstall, and gloves (wauns or gauns) on that of Wauncy. Hose were borne by Hoese; buckles by a long list of families. But the most notable of the charges derived from clothing is the hanging sleeve familiar in the arms of Hastings, Conyers and Mansel.
Chess-rooks, hardly to be distinguished from the roc or roquet at the head of a jousting-lance, were borne by Rokewode and by many more. Topcliffe had pegtops in his shield, while Ambesas had a cast of three dice which should each show the point of one, for “to throw ambesace” is an ancient phrase used of those who throw three aces.
Although we are a sea-going people, there are few ships in our armory, most of these in the arms of sea-ports. Anchors are commoner.
Castles and towers, bridges, portcullises and gates have all examples, and a minster-church was the curious charge borne by the ancient house of Musters of Kirklington.
Letters of the alphabet are very rarely found in ancient armory; but three capital T’s, in old English script, were borne by Toft of Cheshire in the 14th century. In the period of decadence whole words or sentences, commonly the names of military or naval victories, are often seen.
Blazonry.—An ill-service has been done to the students of armory by those who have pretended that the phrases in which the shields and their charges are described or blazoned must follow arbitrary laws devised by writers of the period of armorial decadence. One of these laws, and a mischievous one, asserts that no tincture should be named a second time in the blazon of one coat. Thus if gules be the hue of the field any charge of that colour must thereafter be styled “of the first.” Obeying this law the blazoner of a shield of arms elaborately charged may find himself sadly involved among “of the first,” “of the second,” and “of the third.” It is needless to say that no such law obtained among armorists of the middle ages. The only rule that demands obedience is that the brief description should convey to the reader a true knowledge of the arms described.
The examples of blazonry given in that part of this article which deals with armorial charges will be more instructive to the student than any elaborated code of directions. It will be observed that the description of the field is first set down, the blazoner giving its plain tincture or describing it as burely, party, paly or barry, as powdered or sown with roses, crosslets or fleurs-de-lys. Then should follow the main or central charges, the lion or griffon dominating the field, the cheveron or the pale, the fesse, bend or bars, and next the subsidiary charges in the field beside the “ordinary” and those set upon it. Chiefs and quarters are blazoned after the field and its contents, and the border, commonly an added difference, is taken last of all. Where there are charges both upon and beside a bend, fesse or the like, a curious inversion is used by pedantic blazoners. The arms of Mr Samuel Pepys of the Admiralty Office would have been described in earlier times as “Sable a bend gold between two horses’ heads razed silver, with three fleurs-de-lys sable on the bend.” Modern heraldic writers would give the sentence as “Sable, on a bend or between two horses’ heads erased argent, three fleurs-de-lys of the first.” Nothing is gained by this inversion but the precious advantage of naming the bend but once. On the other side it may be said that, while the newer blazon couches itself in a form that seems to prepare for the naming of the fleurs-de-lys as the important element of the shield, the older form gives the fleurs-de-lys as a mere postscript, and rightly, seeing that charges in such a position are very commonly the last additions to a shield by way of difference. In like manner when a crest is described it is better to say “a lion’s head out of a crown” than “out of a crown a lion’s head.” The first and last necessity in blazonry is lucidity, which is cheaply gained at the price of a few syllables repeated.
Modern Heraldry.—With the accession of the Tudors armory began a rapid decadence. Heraldry ceased to play its part in military affairs, the badges and banners under which the medieval noble’s retinue came into the field were banished, and even the tournament in its later days became a renascence pageant which did not need the painted shield and armorial trappers. Treatises on armory had been rare in the days before the printing press, but even so early a writer as Nicholas Upton had shown himself as it were unconcerned with the heraldry that any man might see in the camp and the street. From the Book of St Albans onward the treatises on armory are informed with a pedantry which touches the point of crazy mysticism in such volumes as that of Sylvanus Morgan. Thus came into the books those long lists of “diminutions of ordinaries,” the closets and escarpes, the endorses and ribands, the many scores of strange crosses and such wild fancies as the rule, based on an early German pedantry, that the tinctures in peers shields should be given the names of precious stones and those in the shields of sovereigns the names of planets. Blazon became cumbered with that vocabulary whose French of Stratford atte Bowe has driven serious students from a business which, to use a phrase as true as it is hackneyed, was at last “abandoned to the coachpainter and the undertaker.”
With the false genealogy came in the assumption or assigning of shields to which the new bearers had often no better claim than lay in a surname resembling that of the original owner. The ancient system of differencing arms disappeared. Now and again we see a second son obeying the book-rules and putting a crescent in his shield or a third son displaying a molet, but long before our own times the practice was disregarded, and the most remote kinsman of a gentle house displayed the “whole coat” of the head of his family.
The art of armory had no better fate. An absurd rule current for some three hundred years has ordered that the helms of princes and knights should be painted full-faced and those of peers and gentlemen sidelong. Obeying this, the herald painters have displayed the crests of knights and princes as sideways upon a full-faced helm; the torse or wreath, instead of being twisted about the brow of the helm, has become a sausage-shaped bar see-sawing above the helm; and upon this will be balanced a crest which might puzzle the ancient craftsman to mould in his leather or parchment. A ship on a lee-shore with a thunderstorm lowering above its masts may stand as an example of such devices. “Tastes, of course, differ,” wrote Dr Woodward, “but the writer can hardly think that the épergne given to Lieut.-General Smith by his friends at Bombay was a fitting ornament for a helmet.” As with the crest, so with the shield. It became crowded with ill-balanced figures devised by those who despised and ignored the ancient examples whose painters had followed instinctively a simple and pleasant convention. Landscapes and seascapes, musical lines, military medals and corrugated boiler-flues have all made their appearance in the shield. Even as on the signs of public houses, written words have taken the place of figures, and the often-cited arms exemplified to the first Earl Nelson marked, it may be hoped, the high watermark of these distressing modernisms. Of late years, indeed, official armory in England has shown a disposition to follow the lessons of the archaeologist, although the recovery of medieval use has not yet been as successful as in Germany, where for a long generation a school of vigorous armorial art has flourished.
Officers of Arms.—Officers of arms, styled kings of arms, heralds and pursuivants, appear at an early period of the history of armory as the messengers in peace and war of princes and magnates. It is probable that from the first they bore in some wise their lord’s arms as the badge of their office. In the 14th century we have heralds with the arms on a short mantle, witness the figure of the duke of Gelderland’s herald painted in the
