The Curiosities of Heraldry

by Mark Antony Lower

The gorgeous decoration of the male costume with the ensigns of heraldry soon attracted the attention and excited the emulation of that sex which is generally foremost in the adoption of personal ornaments. Yes, incongruous as the idea appears to modern dames, the ladies too assumed the embroidered coat of arms! On the vest or close-fitting garment they represented the paternal arms, repeating the same ornament, if femmes soles, or single women, on the more voluminous upper robe; but if married women, this last was occupied by the arms of the husband, an arrangement not unaptly expressing their condition as femmes-covertes. This mode of wearing the arms was afterwards laid aside, and the ensigns of husband and wife were impaled on the outer garment, a fashion which existed up to the time of Henry VIII, as appears from the annexed engraving of Elizabeth, wife of John Shelley, Esq.[67] copied from a brass in the parish church of Clapham, co. Sussex. The arms represented are those of Shelley and Michelgrove, otherwise Fauconer; both belonging, it will be seen, to the class called canting or allusive arms; those of Shelley being welk-shells, and those of Fauconer, a falcon.

Quartering is a division of the shield into four or more equal parts, by means of which the arms of other families, whose heiresses the ancestors of the bearer have married, are combined with his paternal arms; and a shield thus quartered exhibits at one view the ensigns of all the houses of which he is the representative. In modern times this cumulatio armorum is occasionally carried to such an extent that upwards of a hundred coats centre in one individual, and may be represented upon his shield.[68] The arms of England and France upon the great seal of Edward III, and those of Castile and Leon in the royal arms of Spain, are early examples of quartering. The first English subject who quartered arms was John Hastings, Earl of Pembroke, in the fourteenth century.

In this century originated the practice of placing the shield between two animals as supporters, for which see a future chapter.

The application of heraldric ornaments to household furniture and implements of war is of great antiquity. I have now before me the brass pommel of a sword on which are three triangular shields, two of them charged with a lion rampant, the other with an eagle displayed. This relic, which was dug up near Lewes castle, is conjectured to be of the reign of Henry III.[69] Arms first occur on coins in one of Edmund, King of Sicily, in the thirteenth century; but the first English monarch who so used them was Edward III. The first supporters on coins occur in the reign of Henry VIII, whose ‘sovereign’ is thus decorated. Arms upon tombs are found so early as 1144.[70]

Among the ‘curiosities’ of heraldry belonging to these early times may be mentioned adumbrated charges; that is, figures represented in outline with the colour of the field showing through; because the bearers, having lost their patrimonies, retained only the shadow of their former state and dignity.[71]

Monasteries and other religious foundations generally bore arms, which were almost uniformly those of the founders, or a slight modification of them.[72] Dallaway traces this usage to the knights-templars and hospitallers who were both soldiers and ecclesiastics. The arms assigned to most cities and antient boroughs are borrowed from those of early feudal lords: thus the arms of the borough of Lewes are the chequers of the Earls of Warren, to whom the barony long appertained, with a canton of the lion and cross-crosslets of the Mowbrays, lords of the town in the fourteenth century. Some of the quaint devices which pass for the arms of particular towns have nothing heraldric about them, and seem to have originated in the caprice of the artists who engraved their seals. Such for example is the design which the good townsmen of Guildford are pleased to call their arms. This consists of a green mount rising out of the water, and supporting an odd-looking castle, whose two towers are ornamented with high steeples, surmounted with balls; from the centre of the castle springs a lofty tower, with three turrets, and ornamented with the arms of England and France. Over the door are two roses, and in the door a key, the said door being guarded by a lion-couchant, while high on each side the castle is a pack of wool gallantly floating through the air! What this assemblage of objects may signify I do not pretend to guess.

Persons of the middle class, not entitled to coat-armour, invented certain arbitrary signs called Merchants’ Marks, and these often occur in the stonework and windows of old buildings, and upon tombs. Piers Plowman, who wrote in the reign of Edward III, speaks of “merchauntes’ markes ymedeled” in glass. Sometimes these marks were impaled with the paternal arms of aristocratic merchants, as in the case of John Halle, a wealthy woolstapler of Salisbury, rendered immortal by the Rev. Edward Duke in his ‘Prolusiones Historicæ.’ The early printers and painters likewise adopted similar marks, which are to be seen on their respective works.[73] A rude monogram seems to have been attempted, and it was generally accompanied with a cross, and, occasionally, a hint at the inventor’s peculiar pursuit, as in the cut here given, where the staple at the bottom refers to the worthy John Halle’s having been a merchant of the staple. The heralds objected to such marks being placed upon a shield, for, says the writer of Harl. MS. 2252 (fol. 10), “Theys be none Armys, for every man may take hym a marke, but not armys without a herawde or purcyvaunte;” and in “The duty and office of an herald,” by F. Thynne, Lancaster Herald, 1605, the officer is directed “to prohibit merchants and others to put their names, marks, or devices, in escutcheons or shields, which belong to gentlemen bearing arms and none others.”

At the commencement of the fifteenth century considerable confusion seems to have arisen from upstarts having assumed the arms of antient families—a fact which shows that armorial bearings began to be considered the indispensable accompaniment of wealth. So great had this abuse become that, in the year 1419, it was deemed necessary to issue a royal mandate to the sheriff of every county “to summon all persons bearing arms to prove their right to them,” a task of no small difficulty, it may be presumed, in many cases. Many of the claims then made were referred to the heralds as commissioners, “but the first regular chapter held by them in a collective capacity was at the siege of Rouen, in 1420.”[74]