(Lyon rampant.
Guillim.)
The circumstance of the royal arms of England containing three lions and those of Scotland one, has rendered this animal a special favourite with British armorists. Leigh and Guillim, particularly, are very minute in their remarks upon him. The French heralds object to the representation of the lion guardant, that is, with his face turned full upon the spectator, and declare that this posture is proper to the leopard, “wherein,” says Guillim, “they offer great indignity to that roiall beast, in that they will not admit him, as saith Upton, to show his full face, the sight whereof doth terrifie and astonish all the beasts of the field, and wherein consisteth his chiefest majesty, ‘quia omnia animalia debent depingi et designari in suo ferociore actu.’” The French still allude derisively to our national charge as only a leopard. That one of these dissimilar animals could be mistaken for the other affords singular evidence of the rudeness with which arms in the middle ages were delineated.
The leopard, as an heraldric charge, has been treated with more obloquy than he deserves, from the erroneous notion that he was a bigenerous animal, bred between the lion and the female panther. The bear is generally borne muzzled and ‘salient,’ leaping, or rather jumping, the posture of the animal most familiar to our ancestors, who greatly delighted in his uncouth dancing. The elephant, the wolf, one of the most elegant of heraldric devices, the fox, the rabbit, the squirrel, the monkey, the beaver, the porcupine, the cat-a-mountain, and many other wild animals borne in arms, need no comment.
The heraldric tiger furnishes another proof of the ignorance of our ancestors in the natural history of foreign animals. It is represented thus:
Among the domestic animals borne in arms are the horse, the ass, the camel, the bull, the ox, the greyhound, the talbot or mastiff, the ram, the lamb, the hog, &c.
The horse, from his associations with chivalry and war, has ever been a favourite charge. The lamb, as commonly represented, with the nimbus round its head and the banner of the cross, is termed a holy lamb. The alant or wolf-dog, an extinct species, is of rare occurrence in arms.
“Abouten his char ther wenten white alauns,
Twenty and mo as gret as any stere,
To hunten at the leon or the dere.”
Chaucer.
The alant was the supporter of Fynes, Lord Dacre.