CHAPTER IV.
Chimerical Figures of Heraldry.
| “Manye merveylles there ben in that regioun.” Sir John Maundevile. |
The days of the Crusaders were the days of romance. “From climes so fertile in monsters as those through which these adventurers passed,” observes Dallaway, “we cannot wonder that any fiction was readily received by superstitious admirers, whose credulity nothing could exhaust.” The narrations of those warriors who had the good fortune to revisit their native lands were eagerly seized upon by that new class of literary aspirants, the Romance writers, by means of whose wonder-exciting productions, giants, griffins, dragons, and monsters of every name, became familiarized to all. For ages the existence of these products of a “gothick fancy” was never called in question. The early travellers, such as Marco Polo and our own renowned Sir John Maundevile, pandered to the popular taste, and what those chroniclers of ‘grete merveyles’ reported in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was religiously believed in the sixteenth, and hardly questioned even in the seventeenth. In the early part of this period, indeed, it can scarcely be expected that the multitude at least should have been disabused of the delusion, when the existence of witchcraft was considered an essential part of the common creed,—when a learned herald, like Guillim, could write a tirade against “divellish witches that doe worke the destruction of silly infants, and also of cattel,”—and when the supreme magistrate of these realms could instigate the burning of deformed old women, and write treatises upon “Dæmonology,” which, among other matters, taught his loyal and undoubting subjects that these maleficæ were wont to perform their infernal pranks by means of circles, some of which were square, and others triangular! It was reserved for the advancing light of the eighteenth century to break the spell, and scatter these monsters to the winds. This, however, was not to be done at once; for our grandfathers, and even our fathers, gathered their knowledge of popular natural history from a book which contained minute descriptions of the dragon, ‘adorned with cuts’ of that remarkable hexapede, for the edification of its admiring readers!
Under the category of Heraldric Monsters the following deserve especial notice:—
| The | Allerion |
| Chimera | |
| Cockatrice | |
| Dragon | |
| Griffin | |
| Harpy | |
| Lyon-Dragon | |
| Lyon-Poisson | |
| Mermaid | |
| Montygre | |
| Martlet | |
| Opinicus | |
| Pegasus | |
| Sphinx | |
| Sagittary | |
| Satyr | |
| Unicorn | |
| Wyvern | |
| Winged Lyon | |
| Winged Bull.[117] |
The allerion is a fabulous bird without either beak or legs, described by some writers as very small, like a martlet, while others give him the size of an eagle. The name is derived from the circumstance of his being destitute of all his extremities except the wings (ailles). Three such birds, according to the chroniclers of the middle ages, were shot with an arrow from a tower, by Godfrey of Boulogne, duke of Lorraine, at the siege of Jerusalem, during the first crusade; and three allerions upon a bend, in honour of that event, are borne as the arms of the duchy of Lorraine to this day.[118]
The chimera is, to use the words of Bossewell, “a beaste or monstre hauing thre heades, one like a Lyon, an other like a Goate, the third like a Dragon.”[119]
The cockatrice[120] is a cock, with the wings and tail of a dragon. The best account of him is given by Leigh: “Thys though he be but at ye most a foote of length yet is he kyng of all serpentes[121] of whome they are most afrayde and flee from. For with his breath and sight he sleath all thynges that comme within a speare’s length of him. He infecteth the water that he commeth neare. His enemy is the wesell, who when he goeth to fight with ye cockatrice eateth the herbe commonlye called Rewe, and so in fight byting him he dyeth and the wesell therewith dyeth also. And though the cockatrice be veneme withoute remedye whilest he liueth, yet when he is dead and burnt to ashes, he loseth all his malice, and the ashes of him are good for alkumistes, and namely, in turnyng and chaungeyng of mettall.” To this latter remark he adds, “I have not seene the proofe thereof, and yet I have been one of Jeber’s cokes.”