than does the armory of any other country. That theory is much nearer the ideal theory than the English one, but unfortunately for the practical purposes of modern heraldic needs, it does not answer so well. At the present day, therefore, a Scottish crest is not marked in any way.
Most handbooks refer to a certain rule which is supposed to exist for the differencing of a coat to denote illegitimacy when the coat is that of the mother and not the father, the supposed method being to depict the arms under a surcoat, the result being much the same as if the whole of the arms appeared in exaggerated flaunches, the remainder of the shield being left vacant except for the tincture of the surcoat. As a matter of fact only one instance is known, and consequently we must consider it as a new coat devised to bear reference to the old one, and not as a regularised method of differencing for a particular set of circumstances.
In Ireland the rules are to all intents and purposes the same as in England, with the exception of the occasional use of a sinister baton instead of a bendlet wavy sinister upon the crest. In Scotland, where Royal Licences are unknown, it is merely necessary to prove paternity, and rematriculate the arms with due and proper marks of distinction.
It was a very general idea during a former period, but subsequently to the time when the bend and bendlet sinister and the bordure were recognised as in the nature of the accepted marks of bastardy, and when their penal nature was admitted, that whatever mark was adopted for the purpose of indicating illegitimacy need only be borne for three generations. Some of the older authorities tell us that after that length of time had elapsed it might be discarded, and some other and less objectionable mark be taken in its place. The older writers were striving, consciously or unconsciously, to reconcile the disgrace of illegitimacy, which they knew, with heraldic facts which they also knew, and to reconcile in certain prominent families undoubted illegitimacy with unmarked arms, the probability being that their sense of justice and regard for heraldry prompted them to the remark that some other mark of distinction ought to be added, whilst all the time they knew it never was. The arms of Byron, Somerset, Meinill, and Herbert are all cases where the marks of illegitimacy have been quietly dropped, entire reversion being had to the undifferenced original coat. At a time when marks of illegitimacy, both in fact and in theory, were nothing more than marks of cadency and difference from the arms of the head of the house, it was no venality of the heralds, but merely the acceptance of current ideas, that permitted them to recognise the undifferenced arms for the illegitimate descendants when there were no legitimate owners from whose claim the arms of the others needed
