“A foole’s bolte is soone shot, and fleeth oftymes fer;
But the foole’s bolte and the mark cum few times ner.”[114]
From sedentary games are borrowed playing-tables, dice, chess-rooks, &c.
War has naturally supplied heraldry with a numerous list of charges, as banners, spears, beacons, drums, trumpets, cannons, or chamber-pieces, ‘murthering chain-shot,’ burning matches (of rope), portcullises, battering-rams, crossbows, swords, sabres, lances, battle-axes, and scaling-ladders; also shields, generally borne in threes, helmets, morions, gauntlets, greaves (leg armour), horse-trappings, bridles, saddles, spurs, horse-shoes, shackles, cum multis aliis. Many of these, though disused in modern warfare, will require no explanation, but a few others whose use is less obvious may be added, as swepes, caltraps, and water-bowgets.
The swepe, sometimes called a mangonel, and as such borne in the canting arms of Magnall, was a war-engine, used for the purpose of hurling stones into a besieged town or fortress; a species of balista.
| Murthering chain-shot. | Caltrap. | Beacon. | Swepe. |
In the celebrated lampoon upon Richard, king of the Romans, who was obliged, at the battle of Lewes, to take refuge in a windmill, the following lines occur:
“The Kynge of Alemaigne wende to do full wel,
He saisede the mulne for a castel;
With hare sharpe swerdes he ground the stel,
He wende that the sayles were mangonel!”[115]
The caltrap was a cruel contrivance for galling the feet of horses. It was made of iron, and so constructed that, however it might fall, one of its four sharp points should be erect. Numbers of them strewed in the enemy’s path served to retard the advance of cavalry, and a retreat was sometimes secured by dropping them in the flight, and thus cutting off the pursuit. Its etymology is uncertain, cheval-trap and gall-trap have been suggested with nearly equal claims to probability.
Water-bowgets, or budgets, date from the Crusades, when water had often to be conveyed across the sandy deserts from a great distance. They are represented in various grotesque forms as—
