knights who did not. Camden quotes a grant made in 1391 to Sir William Moigne, who was a chivaler but innocent of heraldic achievements. In 1407, there was a trial in the Court of Chivalry between Lord Grey of Ruthyn and Sir Edward Hastings,[1] and on both sides witnesses were sworn who were noble or gentle by descent, but did not claim to be armigerous. Amongst these Roger Tunstale, Mayor of Bedford, John Boteler, Esquire, of the same county, John Lee, Esquire, of Buckinghamshire, William Parker and Thomas Lound, of Bedfordshire, were all gentlemen of ancestry.[2] Another deponent, descended e stirpe nobiliy explained that no such ensigns had come to him, because neither he nor his ancestors had ever gone to the wars.[3] Sir Henry Spelman, whose Aspilogia was written about the year 1595, observes that, until the age of Henry VI., many not ignoble families in our own country were without coat-armour, and that in Ireland, which was the image of England in earlier days, some great houses were still, as he puts it, asymboli.[4] At the heralds' visitations in the sixteenth century the Mildmays of Essex, descended from a knightly race which could be traced[5] back to the time of Richard Coeur de Lion, the St. Pauls of Campsall in Yorkshire, and the Flemings of Wakefield, with pedigrees ranging back to the reign of Edward III., could offer no proof of arms. Their families, at least for some generations, had not found it necessary to use them.
Turning to the early grants of arms, we shall find further proof that gentility and heraldry were not necessarily connected with each other. The letters of nobility which were openly sold by the French monarchs, as early as 1340, to any who were willing to pay the stipulated price, did not usually contain amongst their provisions an assignment of heraldic bearings. Some of the recipients already possessed arms, some chose them for themselves, and others did not trouble to bear them at all.[6] The earliest English grants[7] are in their essence letters
- ↑ Young mentions a MS. in the possession of Henry le Strange of Hunstanton, which contains further particulars of the evidence and interrogatories. It is very desirable that this should be published.
- ↑ C. F. Young, Grey and Hastings (1841), p. 29; Selden's Titles of Honour, p. 875.
- ↑ Bysshe, Spelman (1654), p. 40.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ By the heralds. I take no responsibility.
- ↑ Rymer's Fœdera (new ed.), iii. pt. i,p. 550; Bysshe's Upton (1654), p. 58.
- ↑ Rymer's Fœdera, see the index to the syllabus, under 'Arms.'
