[160] “Let England amuse herself with idle fancies, and imagine that her kings are kings of France; but that there be Frenchmen who are ignorant enough, or bad subjects enough, to quarter the arms of France with those of England, that is a thing which such zealous subjects as M. d’Argenson, and the other police magistrates, ought by no means to permit.”
[161] Thos. Delaune’s Present State of London, 1681.
[162] These badges consisted of the master’s arms, crest, or device, either on a small silver shield or embroidered on a piece of cloth, and fastened on the left arm of servants. A ballad in the Roxburgh collection thus alludes to this custom:[163]—
“The nobles of our Land
were much delighted then,
To have at their command
a Crue of lustie Men,
Which by their Coats were knowne,
of Tawnie, Red, or Blue;
With crests on their sleeves showne
when this old cap was new.”
“Time’s alteration;
or,
The old man’s rehearsall what brave days he knew
A great while agone, when his old cap was new.”
Rox. Ball., i. fol. 407.
Stow gives us a good picture of a great nobleman’s retinue in the good old time, before the nobility took to hotel-keeping:—“The late Earl of Oxford, father to him that now liveth, has been noted within these forty years, to have ridden into this city and so to his house by London Stone, with eighty gentlemen, in a livery of Reading tawny, and chains of gold about their necks, before him, and one hundred tall yeomen in the like livery to follow him, without chains, but all having his cognisance of the blue boar embroidered on their left shoulder.” These badges fell into disuse in the reign of James I.
[164] Wright’s Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages, p. 333.
[165] “At Plombières he ordered me to leave with his hostess, according to the fashion of the country, an escutcheon of his arms in wood, which a painter of that town made for a crown and the hostess had it carefully hung upon the wall outside the house.”