| Laughton Church. | Robertsbridge Abbey. | Modern Arms. |
Fishes, as borne in arms, have recently been made the subject of an able, most interesting, and beautifully illustrated volume.[101] In my en passant survey of the ensigns of armory it will suffice to remark that the dolphin takes the same rank among heraldric fishes as the lion occupies among quadrupeds, and the eagle among birds; after him the pike, salmon, barbel, and trout hold an honourable place, and even the herring and sprat are not deemed too mean for armory. Neither have shell-fish been overlooked: the escallop in particular, from its religious associations, has always been a special favourite.
Amphibia, REPTILES, and INSECTS sometimes occur, particularly toads, serpents, adders, tortoises, scorpions, snails, grasshoppers, spiders, ants, bees, and gad-flies. It is singular that such despised and noxious creatures as the scorpion and the toad should have been adopted as marks of honour; yet such, in former times, was the taste for allusive arms that the Botreuxes, of Cornwall, relinquished a simple antient coat in favour of one containing three toads, because the word ‘botru’ in the Cornish language signified a toad!
The HUMAN FIGURE and its parts are employed in many arms. The arms pertaining to the bishopric of Salisbury contain a representation of “our blessed Lady, with her son in her right hand and a sceptre in her left.” The arms of the see of Chichester are the most singular to be found in the whole circle of church heraldry. They are blazoned thus: ‘Azure, Prester-John hooded, sitting on a tomb-stone; in his sinister hand an open book; his dexter hand extended, with the two fore-fingers erect, all or; in his mouth a sword, fessewise, gules, hilt and pommel or, the point to the sinister.’[102] Prester or Presbyter-John, the person here represented, was a fabulous person of the middle ages, who was imagined to sway the sceptre of a powerful empire somewhere in the East, and who must have been a very long-lived personage, unless he was reproduced from time to time like the phœnix of antiquity. Many writers, during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, make mention of him. Sir John Maundevile describes his territory, which, however, he did not visit. That country, according to his statement, contained rocks of adamant,[103] which attracted all the ships that happened to come near them, until the congeries appeared like a forest, and became a kind of floating island. It also abounded in popinjays or parrots as “plentee as gees,” and precious stones large enough to make “plateres, dissches, and cuppes.” “Many other marveylles been there,” he adds, “so that it were to cumbrous and to long to putten it in scripture of bokes.” He describes the Emperor himself as “cristene,” and believing “wel in the Fadre, in the Sone, and in the Holy Gost,” yet, in some minor points, not quite sound in the faith. As to his imperial state, he possessed 72 provinces, over each of which presided a king; and he had so great an army that he could devote 330,000 men to guard his standards, which were “3 crosses of gold, fyn, grete and hye, fulle of precious stones.” It is related of Columbus that he saw on one of the islands of the West Indies, which he then apprehended to be a part of the continent of Asia, a grave and sacred personage whom he at first believed to be Prester-John. This incident serves to show that the existence of this chimerical being was credited even so lately as the close of the fifteenth century, although Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth, doubted many of the tales related of him—“de quo tanta fama solebat esse, et multa falsa dicta sunt et scripta.”[104] The best account of him is to be found in the work of Matthew Paris, the monk of St. Albans, who wrote before the year 1250. Marco Polo also mentions him in his travels.[105] Porny places him in Abyssinia under the title of Preter cham, or ‘prince of the worshippers,’ while Heckford[106] considers him a priest and one of the followers of Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople in the fifth century.
Kings and bishops occur as charges; but rarely. The heads of Moors and Saracens are more common, and belong to the category of trophies, having originated, for the most part, during the Crusades. The arms of the Welsh family of Vaughan are ‘a cheveron between three children’s heads ... enwrapped about the necks with as many snakes proper.’ “It hath beene reported,” saith old Guillim, “that some one of the ancestors of this family was borne with a snake about his necke: a matter not impossible, but yet very unprobable!” Besides heads, the armorial shield is sometimes charged with arms and legs, naked, vested, or covered with armour, hands, feet, eyes, hearts, winged and unwinged, &c. The coat of Tremaine exhibits three arms (et tres manus!) and that of the Isle of Man, three legs, as here represented. Of the former, Guillim remarks, “these armes and hands conjoyned and clenched after this manner may signify a treble offer of revenge for some notable injurie.” If we might be jocular upon so grave a subject as armory, we should consider the second coat a happy allusion to the geographical position of the island between the three kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, as if it had run away from all three, and were kicking up its heels in derision of the whole empire![107]
The VEGETABLE KINGDOM has furnished its full quota of charges. We have whole trees, as the oak, pine, pear-tree, &c.; parts of trees, as oak-branches, and starved (i.e. dead) branches, trunks of trees, generally raguly or knobbed; leaves, as laurel, fig, elm, woodbine, nettle, and holly; fruit, as pomegranates, apples, pears, pine-apples, grapes, acorns, and nuts; flowers, as the rose, lily, columbine, gilliflower, &c.; corn, as stalks of wheat and rye, and particularly garbs (Fr. gerbes) or wheatsheaves; to which some add trefoils, quatrefoils, and cinquefoils, and the bearing familiar to all in the arms of France, and called the Fleur-de-lis.
Respecting the trefoil, there can be little doubt, as Mr. Dallaway observes, that it was borrowed from the foliated ornaments of antient coronets, which again were imitations of the natural wreath. The shamrock, which is identical with the trefoil, is the national badge of Ireland. Of the quatre and cinquefoils “almost any conjecture would be weakly supported. Amongst the very early embellishments of Gothic architecture are quatrefoils, at first inserted simply in the heads of windows, between or over the incurvated or elliptical points of the mullions, and afterwards diversified into various ramifications, which were the florid additions to that style.”[108] These terms are common to both architecture and heraldry, but from which of the two the other adopted them must remain in doubt.
The non-heraldric reader will be surprised to learn that the identity of the fleur-de-lis with the iris or ‘royal lily’ has ever been called in question; yet it has been doubted, with much reason, whether an ornamented spear-head or sceptre be not the thing intended. The Boke of S. A. informs us that the arms of the king of France were “certainli sende by an awngell from heuyn, that is to say iij flowris in maner of swerdis in a felde of asure, the wich certan armys ware geuyn to the forsayd kyng of fraunce in sygne of euerlasting trowbull, and that he and his successaries all way with bataill and swereddys (swords) shulde be punyshid!” Those who imagine the bearing to be a play upon the royal name of Loys or Louis decide in favour of the flower. Upton calls it ‘flos gladioli.’[109] Perhaps it was made a flower for the purpose of assimilating it to the English rose; certainly all our associations, historical and poetical, would tell in favour of its being such; and such it was undoubtedly understood to be in the time of Chaucer, who says of Sire Thopas,
“Upon his crest he bare a tour (tower),
And therein stiked a lily flour.”