Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/720

686 HERALDRY [HISTOEICAL Arcliceologia. It was against the embroidery of the surcoat that the severe sumptuary enactments of Richard and Philip Augustus were main!} 7 directed. The importance attached to armorial bearings is strongly shown in the uses to which they were applied. A sovereign who wished to assert his claim to a kingdom placed its arms upon his shield. In 1479 when Alphonso of Portugal resigned his claim to Castile, he was required to lay aside its armorial ensigns. It appears that when Edward III. assumed the French lilies, he at first did so simply as re presenting his mother, who was an heiress, and placed her arms in his second quarter ; when, however, he claimed the kingdom of France in her right, he removed the lilies to the first quarter as representing the more important king dom. A grant of arms at the hand of a sovereign had great value. Among the more solid bribes which Louis XI. bestowed upon the courtiers of Edward IV. occurs a grant of three fleurs-de-lys to a knight of the Croker family. Thus also when Juan de Orbieta captured Francis I. on the Ticino, he was rewarded by a grant of arms from Charles V.,. though of so complex a character as to do little credit to Spanish heraldry. In later times John Gibbon, the heraldic author, having a quarrel with two maiden ladies of his name, obtained a licence to convert the scallops in their common coat into the black balls called ogresses, a most heraldic revenge. Armorial bearings were largely painted, enamelled, and embroidered upon personal ornaments, furniture, and weapons. The sword of Edward, prince of Wales (died 1483), is a curious example of this ; it bears on its pommel the words " aves fortes " and five shields : (1) England, (2) the duchy of Cornwall, (3) England and France with a label, (4) Mortimer quartering Ulster, (5) the earldom of Chester. In the middle is the cross of St George. The citizens of London were bound to provide their banner bearer, Lord Fitz Walter, with " a saddle with his arms," and the seal of one of that family, about 1300, shows the arms upon the back or rest of his war saddle. The seal of Sir Hugh le Despenser (1292) also so shows his arms. Various bequests of plate and furniture with arms occur in the 14th century. In 1368 William, Lord Ferrars of Groby, bequeathed his green bed " with his arms thereon, and his furniture bearing the arms of Ferrars and Ufford, impaled." In 1380 Edward Mortimer devised "a notre tres chier friere John Gilbert, evesque de Hereford, line plate de argent pour espices et enamille"s ove les armes de Mortimer en la face." Richard, earl of Arundel, in 1392, bequeathed a canopy of the arms of Arundel and Warren quarterly. In 1399 Eleanor Bohun, duchess of Gloucester, had a psalter with her father s arms upon the clasps. In the Decorated and Per pendicular styles of architecture shields of arms are common ornaments. Those of benefactors were set up in church windows in glass, and those of a family in their houses. In the Scrope roll is a list of sixty-six churches in which the Scrope arms were set up, and the histories of Dugdale and Burton show us that nearly every church in Warwick shire and Leicestershire had a multitude of arms on its windows. Those still remaining in the east windows of Bristol cathedral are early and good examples of the arms of great barons, Berkeley, Clare, and Warren. They are also seen upon floor tiles of the same period. As arms became hereditary, and their use ceased to be confined to the battle-field, but was largely extended to seals and ornaments, it was natural that some notice should be taken of the arms of females, and that the wife s coat should be combined in some way with that of the husband, especially when she was the last of, and represented, her family. This seems first to have been managed by giving the wife a separate shield. The kings of France so bore the arms of Navarre after the marriage with the heiress of that kingdom. Another very early plan was to form a composite coat. Thus the old coat of Willoughby was fretty, but on their marriage with Bee of Eresby they adopted the coat of Bee, and Sir John Willoughby (13th Edward III.) bears the cross moline of Bee, but the wings of his crest are fretty for Willoughby, and on either side is a buckle taken from the arms of Eoscelin, his wife. Rose of Kilravock bore "or, 3 water budgets sable," but on a marriage with the heiress of Chisholm they added " a boar s head couped gules " from her arms. So also Halyburton of Pitcur, who bore " or, on a bend azure 3 lozenges of the field," after a marriage with another Chisholm heiress, added to their coat " 3 boars heads erased sable." Bohun, who bore " azure, a bend argent, cotised or, between G lion- eels rampant of the third," is thought to have added the bend on the occasion of a marriage with Maud, daughter and heir of Milo, earl of Hereford. As this, however, led to complexity and indistinctness in the bearings, and the introduction of a second shield was obviously inconvenient, the method of impalement was devised, by which the sinister half of the shield was appropriated to the lady s arms, at first under the process known as dimidiation. When, however, the lady was an heiress, a different plan was adopted which ultimately led to quartering or the marshal ling of many coats in one shield, a practice, when pushed to any extent, quite inconsistent with the original use of coat armour. This also led to a corresponding alteration in the shape of the shield, which was expanded to contain the arms of each heiress who had married into the family, together with such other heiresses as her family had previ ously been allied with, so that when a Percy heiress married a Seymour, she added her heiress ancestors arms with her own arms to those of her husband, expanded in a similar fashion by the previous matches of his family. Thus the great shield of a family became a compendium of the family pedigree which, to those who could read its language, con veyed a considerable mass of semi-historical information. The defect of this system was that it only took account of heiresses, and did not provide for the purity of the whole descent, so that under it the children of a man of no birth who married a great heiress, would display all her quarter- ings, and no account would be taken of the absence of any on his side ; and further, if it happened, as was actually the case in the last century with the Rodneys of Rodney-stoke, that a family, though ancient, had never intermarried with an heiress, they could display no quarterings. In France and Germany and to some extent in Scotland a far more perfect system was pursued. There the genea logical escutcheon included the arms of every ancestor and ancestress, whether an heiress or not; thus one generation gave two coats, two generations four coats, and so on. " Seize quartiers " gave evidence of pure blood for four generations, and thirty-two quarters, the qualification for a canon of Strasburg, for five. As the combinations out of which the early coats were formed were limited, it occasionally happened that two persons of the same nation bore the same arms, and this gave rise to disputes which, as matters connected with military discipline, came under the jurisdiction of the earl marshal. One of the earliest of these disputes is mentioned in the roll of Caerlavrock " Le beau Bryan de Fitz Aleyne, De courtesie, et de honneur pleyn, Ivi o bauiere barree, De or et la gouls bien paree, Dont le chalenge estoit le pointz, Par entre lui et Hue Poyntz, Ki portoit eel ni plus ni moins, Dont merveille avoit meinte et meins."

Cases of a similar character were decided between