Fig. 64. Crest, etc. of Sir John Astley, from a MS. c. 1420.
The crest was, of old time, almost always something that could actually be set upon a helm, and such objects as naturally were too large or too heavy were modelled in boiled leather, wood, or other light material: like the fine crest borne at the funeral of Edward prince of Wales, now over his tomb at Canterbury, which is a leopard standing upon a cap of estate and modelled in leather covered with stamped gesso (fig. [65]); or the soldan's head of carved wood that surmounts the funeral helm of George lord Cobham, in Cobham church, Kent (fig. [66]).
Fig. 65. Crest of Edward prince of Wales, 1376, of leather and stamped gesso, from his tomb at Canterbury.
Fig. 66. Funeral helm and wooden crest of George Brooke lord Cobham (ob. 1558) in Cobham church, Kent.
Such impossible crests as the pictorial scenes and other absurdities granted by the kings-of-arms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even back to Elizabethan days, would not have been thought of at an earlier period, when heraldry was a living art.