(Temp Edw. I.) Arms of Sackville.
Potent-counter-potent, literally “crutch-opposite-crutch,” resembles the tops of crutches counter-placed. What the origin of this figure may have been does not appear, although the word potent, in the sense of crutch, was common in the days of Chaucer.
“When luste of youth wasted be and spent,
Then in his hand he takyth a potent.”
And again,
“So eld she was that she ne went
A foote, but it were by potent.”
Romaunt of the Rose.
(“Gules, a bend argent”)
Having thus taken a glance at the field, or ground of the heraldric shield, let us next briefly notice what are called the honourable ordinaries, one or other of which occurs in the great majority of arms, viz., the CHIEF, BEND, BEND-SINISTER, FESSE, PALE, CROSS, SALTIRE, CHEVERON, and PILE. The chief is a fifth part of the shield nearest the top; unde nomen. In the primitive bearings, which were literally coats, or rather mantles of arms, the chief might be formed by turning the upper part of the garment back in form of a collar, thus exposing the lining, which doubtless was often of a different colour from the mantle itself. A knight who might chance at a tournament to wear a scarlet mantle lined with white, would in this manner acquire as arms, ‘Gules, a chief argent.’ The bend is a stripe passing diagonally across the shield from the dexter corner; (and the bend-sinister, the contrary way,) and is, etymologically, the same word with the French bande and Saxon band.[89] This ordinary evidently represents a band or scarf worn over one shoulder, and passing under the opposite arm, and is well exemplified in the white belt worn by a soldier over his red coat. Of a similar origin is the fesse, a horizontal stripe across the middle of the shield, which represents a sash or military girdle. The term is evidently derived from the Latin fascia, through the French fasce. The pale is like the fesse, except that its direction is perpendicular. From its name it has been supposed to represent the pales, or palisades of a camp, and in support of this origin it has been remarked that, in antient warfare, every soldier was obliged to carry a pale, and to fix it as the lines were drawn for the security of the camp. This hypothesis seems to be one of those after-thoughts with which heraldric theories abound. There is no doubt that most armorial forms existed long before the invention of blazon, and that when it was found necessary to give every figure its distinctive appellation, the real origin of many bearings had been lost sight of, and the names assigned them were those of objects they were conjectured to represent.
It is far more probable that this ordinary originated in the insertion of a perpendicular stripe of a different colour from the mantle itself, an idea which is supported by the fact that the pale occupies in breadth a third of the escocheon. Two breadths of blue cloth divided by one of yellow, would produce a blazonable coat, ‘Azure, a pale or.’ When a shield is divided into several horizontal stripes of alternate colours it is called barry; when the stripes run perpendicularly it is said to be paly; and when they take a diagonal direction it is styled bendy. The love of a striking contrast of colours in costume is characteristic of a semi-barbarous state of society, and the shawls and robes of the orientals of the present day afford a good illustration of the origin of these striped bearings.[90] Such vestments were not peculiar to the military, with whom we must always associate the heraldry of the earliest times; for, so lately as the time of Chaucer, they were the favourite fashion of civilians. This author, in his ‘Parson’s Tale,’ makes that worthy ecclesiastic complain of the “sinful costly array of clothing in the embrouding, the disguising, indenting or barring, ounding, paling, winding or bending, and semblable waste of cloth in vanity.”[91]