10, 20, 50, or 100 quarterings, the shield had but four; and this being admitted and recognised, it became essential that the four most important should be shown, and consequently we find that quarterings were selected in a manner which would seem to us haphazard. Paternal quarterings were dropped and the result has been that many coats of arms are now known as the arms of a family with quite a different surname from that of the family with which they originated. The matter was of little consequence in the days when the "upper-class" and arms-bearing families were few in number. Every one knew how Stafford derived his Royal descent, and that it was not male upon male, so no confusion resulted from the Earls of Buckingham giving the Royal coat precedence before their paternal quartering of Stafford (see Fig. 756), or from their using only the Woodstock version of the Royal Arms; but as time went on the upper classes became more numerous, arms-bearing ancestors by the succession of generations increased in number, and while in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it would be a physical impossibility for any man to have represented one hundred different heiresses of arms-bearing families, in later days such became the case. The result has been the necessity to formulate those strict and rigid rules which for modern purposes must be conformed to, and it is futile and childish to deduce a set of rules from ancient and possibly isolated examples originating in and suitable for the simpler genealogical circumstances of an earlier day, and assert that it is equally permissible to adopt them at the moment, or to marshal a modern shield accordingly.
- Fig. 756.—Arms of Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham (d. 1521): Quarterly, 1 and 4, quarterly, i. and iiii., France; ii. and iii., England, within the bordure argent of Thomas of Woodstock; 2 and 3, or, a chevron gules (for Stafford). (From MS. Add. 22, 306.)
The first attempt to break away from the four quarters of a shield was the initiation of the system of grand quarters (see Figs. 755 and 756). By this means the relative importance could roughly be shown. Supposing a man had inherited a shield of four quarters and then married a wife in whom was vested a peerage, he naturally wished to display the arms connected with that peerage, for these were of greater importance than his own four quarterings. The problem was how to introduce the fifth. In some cases we find it borne in pretence, but in other cases, particularly in a later generation, we find that important quarter given the whole of a quarter of the shield to itself, the other four being conjoined together and displayed so as to occupy a similar space. These, therefore, became sub-quarters. The system also had advantages, because it permitted coats which by constant quartering had become
