Part 7 (1/2)
whilst MS. Cott. Calig. A. xviii. quotes the arms: ”_De or, a un lion rampaund de pourpre_.” The Burton coat of the well-known Shrops.h.i.+re family of Lingen-Burton is: Quarterly purpure and azure, a cross engrailed or between four roses argent. The Irish baronets of the name of Burton, who claimed descent from this family, bore a very similar coat, namely: Per pale azure and purpure, a cross engrailed or between four roses argent.
Two other colours will be found in nearly all text-books of English armory.
These are murrey or sanguine, and orange or tenne. The exact tint of murrey is between gules and purpure; and tenne is an orange-tawny colour. They are both ”stains,” and were perhaps invented by the old heralds for the perpetration of their preposterous system of abatements, which will be found set out in full in the old heraldry books, but which have yet to be found occurring in fact. The subject of abatements is one of those pleasant little insanities which have done so much to the detriment of heraldry.
One, and one only, can be said {73} to have had the slightest foundation in fact; that was the entire reversal of the escutcheon in the ceremony of degradation following upon attainder for high treason. Even this, however, was but temporary, for a man forfeited his arms entirely by attainder. They were torn down from his banner of knighthood; they were erased in the records of the College of Arms; but on that one single occasion when he was drawn upon a hurdle to the place of his execution, they are said to have been painted reversed upon paper, which paper was fastened to his breast.
But the arms then came to an end, and his descendants possessed none at all. They certainly had not the right to depict their s.h.i.+eld upside down (even if they had cared to display such a monstrosity). Unless and until the attainder was reversed, arms (like a t.i.tle) were void; and the proof of this is to be found in the many regrants of arms made in cases where the attainder has remained, as in the instances of the Earl of Stafford and the ancestor of the present Lord Barnard. But that any person should have been supposed to have been willing to make use of arms carrying an abatement is preposterous, and no instance of such usage is known. Rather would a man decline to bear arms at all; and that any one should have imagined the existence of a person willing to advertise himself as a drunkard or an adulterer, with variations in the latter case according to the personality of his partner in guilt, is idiotic in the extreme. Consequently, as no example of an abatement has ever been found, one might almost discard the ”stains” of murrey and tenne were it not that they were largely made use of for the purposes of liveries, in which usage they had no such objectionable meaning. At the present day scarlet or gules being appropriated to the Royal Family for livery purposes, other people possessing a s.h.i.+eld of gules are required to make use of a different red, and though it is now termed chocolate or claret colour by the utilitarian language of the day, it is in reality nothing more than the old sanguine or murrey. Of orange-tawny I can learn of but one livery at the present day. I refer to the orange-tawny coats used by the hunt servants of Lord Fitzhardinge, and now worn by the hunt servants of the Old Berkeley country, near London. _A propos_ of this it is interesting to note the curious legend that the ”pink” of the hunting field is not due to any reasons of optical advantage, but to an entirely different reason. Formerly no man might hunt even on his own estate until he had had licence of free warren from the Crown. Consequently he merely hunted by the pleasure of the Crown, taking part in what was exclusively a Royal sport by Royal permission, and for this Royal sport he wore the King's livery of scarlet. This being the case, it is a curious anomaly that although the livery of the only Royal pack recently in existence, the Royal Buck Hounds, was scarlet and gold, the Master {74} wore a green coat. The legend may be a fallacy, inasmuch as scarlet did not become the Royal livery until the accession of the Stuarts; but it is by no means clear to what date the scarlet hunting coat can be traced.
There is, however, one undoubted instance of the use of sanguine for the field of a coat of arms, namely, the arms of Clayhills of Invergowrie,[6]
which are properly matriculated in Lyon Register.
To these colours German heraldry has added brown, blood-red (this apparently is different from the English sanguine, as a different hatching has been invented for it), earth-colour, iron-grey, water-colour, flesh-colour, ashen-grey, orange (here also a separate hatching from the one to represent tenne has been invented), and the colour of nature, _i.e._ ”proper.” These doubtless are not intended to be added to the list of heraldic tinctures, but are noted because various hatchings have been invented in modern times to represent them.
Mr. Woodward, in Woodward and Burnett's ”Treatise on Heraldry,” alludes to various tinctures amongst Continental arms which he has come across.
”Besides the metals, tinctures, and furs which have been already described, other tinctures are occasionally found in the Heraldry of Continental nations; but are comparatively of such rarity as that they may be counted among the curiosities of blazon, which would require a separate volume.
That of which I have collected instances is Cendree, or ash colour, which is borne by (among others) the Bavarian family of Ashua, as its _armes parlantes: Cendree, a mount of three coupeaux in base or_.
”_Brunatre_, a brown colour, is even more rare as a tincture of the field; the MIEROSZEWSKY in Silesia bear, '_de Brunatre, A cross patee argent supporting a raven rising sable, and holding in its beak a horseshoe proper, its points towards the chief_.”
”_Bleu-celeste_, or _bleu du ciel_, appears occasionally, apart from what we may term 'landscape coats.' That it differs from, and is a much lighter colour than, azure is shown by the following example. The Florentine CINTI (now CINI) bear a coat which would be numbered among the _armes fausses, or a enquerir: Per pale azure and bleu-celeste, an estoile counterchanged_.”
”_Amaranth_ or _columbine_ is the field of a coat (of which the blazon is too lengthy for insertion in this place) which was granted to a Bohemian knight in 1701.”
Carnation is the French term for the colour of naked flesh, and is often employed in the blazonry of that country. {75}
Perhaps mention should here be made of the English term ”proper.” Anything, alive or otherwise, which is depicted in its natural colours is termed ”proper,” and it should be depicted in its really correct tones or tints, without any attempt to a.s.similate these with any heraldic tincture. It will not be found in the very ancient coats of arms, and its use is not to be encouraged. When a natural animal is found existing in various colours it is usual to so describe it, for the term ”proper” alone would leave uncertainty. For instance, the crest of the Lane family, which was granted to commemorate the ride of King Charles II. behind Mistress Jane Lane as her servant, in his perilous escape to the coast after the disastrous Battle of Worcester, is blazoned ”a strawberry roan horse, couped at the flanks proper, bridled sable, and holding between the feet an Imperial crown also proper.” Lord Cowper's supporters were, on either side of the escutcheon, ”a light dun horse proper, with a large blaze down the face, the mane close shorn except a tuft on the withers, a black list down the back, a bob tail, and the near fore-foot and both hind feet white.” Another instance that might be quoted are the supporters of Lord Newlands, which are: ”On either side a dapple-grey horse proper, gorged with a riband and suspended therefrom an escutcheon gules, charged with three bezants in chevron.” The crest of the family of Bewes, of St. Neots, Cornwall, is: ”On a chapeau gules, turned up ermine, a pegasus rearing on his hind legs of a bay colour, the mane and tail sable, winged or, and holding in the mouth a sprig of laurel proper.”
There are and were always many occasions in which it was desired to represent armorial bearings in black and white, or where from the nature of the handicraft it was impossible to make use of actual colour. But it should always be pointedly remembered that unless the right colours of the arms could be used the tinctures were entirely ignored in all matters of handicraft until the seventeenth century. Various schemes of hatchings, however, were adopted for the purpose of indicating the real heraldic colours when arms were represented and the real colours could not be employed, the earliest being that of Francquart in Belgium, _circa_ 1623.
Woodward says this was succeeded by the systems of Butkens, 1626; Petra Sancta, 1638; Lobkowitz, 1639; Gelenius; and De Rouck, 1645; but all these systems differed from each other, and were for a time the cause of confusion and not of order. Eventually, however, the system of Petra Sancta (the author of _Tesserae Gentilitia_) superseded all the others, and has remained in use up to the present time.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 35.]
Upon this point Herr Strohl in his _Heraldischer Atlas_ remarks: ”The system of hatching used by Marcus Vulson de la Colombiere, 1639, in the course of time found acceptance everywhere, and has {76} maintained itself in use unaltered until the present day, and these are shown in Fig. 35, only that later, hatchings have been invented for brown, grey, &c.; which, however, seems rather a superfluous enriching.” None of these later creations, by the way, have ever been used in this country. For the sake of completeness, however, let them be mentioned (see Fig. 36): _a_, brown; _b_, blood-red; _c_, earth-colour; _d_, iron-grey; _e_, water-colour; _f_, flesh-colour; _g_, ashen-grey; _h_, orange; and _i_, colour of nature. In English armory ”tenne” is represented by a combination of horizontal (as azure) lines with diagonal lines from sinister to dexter (as purpure), and sanguine or murrey by a combination of diagonal lines from dexter to sinister (as vert), and from sinister to dexter (as purpure).
[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 36.]
The hatchings of the s.h.i.+eld and its charges always accommodate themselves to the angle at which the s.h.i.+eld is placed, those of the crest to the angle of the helmet. A curious difficulty, however, occurs when a s.h.i.+eld, as is so often the case in this country, forms a part of the crest. Such a s.h.i.+eld is seldom depicted quite upright upon the wreath. Are the tincture lines to follow the angle of the smaller s.h.i.+eld in the crest or the angle of the helmet? Opinion is by no means agreed upon the point.
But though this system of representing colours by ”hatching” has been adopted and extensively made use of, it is questionable whether {77} it has ever received official sanction, at any rate in Great Britain. It certainly has never been made use of in any _official_ record or doc.u.ment in the College of Arms. Most of the records are in colour. The remainder are all without exception ”tricked,” that is, drawn in outline, the colours being added in writing in the following contracted forms: ”O,” or ”or,” for or; ”A,” ”ar,” or ”arg,” for argent; ”G,” or ”gu,” for gules; ”Az,” or ”B” (for blue, owing to the likelihood of confusion between ”ar” and ”az,” ”B” being almost universally used in old trickings), for azure; ”S,” or ”sa,” for sable; ”Vt” for vert, and ”Purp” for purpure. It is unlikely that any change will be made in the future, for the use of tincture lines is now very rapidly being discarded by all good heraldic artists in this country.
With the reversion to older and better forms and methods these hatchings become an anachronism, and save that sable is represented by solid black they will probably be unused and forgotten before very long.
The plain, simple names of colours, such as red and green, seemed so unpoetical and unostentatious to the heralds and poets of the Middle Ages, that they subst.i.tuted for gold, topaz; for silver, pearl or ”meergries”; for red, ruby; for blue, sapphire; for green, emerald; and for black, diamond or ”zobel” (sable, the animal, whence the word ”sable”). Let the following blazonment from the grant of arms to Modling bei Wien in 1458 serve as example of the same: ”Mit namen ain Schilt gleich getailt in fa.s.se, des ober und maister tail von Rubin auch mit ainer fa.s.se von Berlein, der under thail von grunt des Schilts von Schmaragaden, darinneain Pantel von Silber in Rampannt”--(_lit._ ”Namely, a s.h.i.+eld equally divided in fess, the upper and greater part of ruby, also with a fess of pearl, the under part of the field of the s.h.i.+eld of emerald, therein a panther of silver, rampant”); that is, ”Per fess gules and vert, in chief a fess argent, in base a panther rampant of the last.”
Even the planets, and, as abbreviations, their astronomical signs, are occasionally employed: thus, the _sun_ for gold, the _moon_ for silver, _Mars_ for red, _Jupiter_ for blue, _Venus_ for green, _Saturn_ for black, and _Mercury_ for purple. This aberration of intellect on the part of mediaeval heraldic writers, for it really amounted to little more, had very little, if indeed it had any, English official recognition. No one dreams of using such blazon at the present time, and it might have been entirely disregarded were it not that Guillim sanctions its use; and he being the high priest of English armory to so many, his example has given the system a certain currency. I am not myself aware of any instance of the use of these terms in an English patent of arms.
The furs known to heraldry are now many, but originally they were only two, ”ermine” and ”vair.” Ermine, as every one knows, is of {78} white covered with black spots, intended to represent the tails of the animal. From ermine has been evolved the following variations, viz. ermines, erminois, pean, and erminites. ”Ermines” is a black field with white ermine spots (the French term for this is _contre-hermin_, the German, _gegen-hermelin_). A gold background with black ermine spots is styled erminois, and pean is a black ground with gold ermine spots. Planche mentions still another, as does Parker in his ”Glossary of Heraldry,”
namely, ”erminites,” which is supposed to be white, with black ermine spots and a red hair on each side of the spot. I believe there is no instance known of any such fur in British armory. It is not mentioned in Strohl's ”Heraldic Atlas,” nor can I find any foreign instance, so that who invented it, or for what purpose it was invented, I cannot say; and I think it should be relegated, with abatements and the _seize quartiers_ of Jesus Christ, to the category of the silly inventions of former heraldic writers, not of former heralds, for I know of no official act which has recognised the existence of erminites. The German term for erminois is _gold-hermelin_, but there are no distinctive terms either in French or German heraldry for the other varieties. Thus, erminois would be in French blazon: d'or, seme d'hermines de sable; pean would be de sable, seme d'hermines d'or. Though ermine is always nowadays represented upon a white background, it was sometimes depicted with black ermine spots upon a field of silver, as in the case of some of the stall plates of the Knights of the Garter in St. George's Chapel at Windsor. Ermine spots are frequently to be found as charges. For instance, in the well-known coat of Kay, which is: ”Argent, three ermine spots in bend between two bendlets sable, the whole between as many crescents azure.” As charges two ermine spots figure upon the arms recently granted to Sir Francis Laking, Bart., G.C.V.O. The ermine spot has also sometimes been used in British armory as the difference mark granted under a Royal Licence to a.s.sume name and arms when it is necessary to indicate the absence of blood relations.h.i.+p. Other instances of the use of an ermine spot as a charge are:--