Arthur Charles Fox-Davies

“ Every soldier who wears a scarlet coat, the livery of his Sovereign, every regiment that carries its colours, every saddle-cloth with a Royal emblem thereupon, is evidence that the use of armory in battle still exists in a small degree to the present day ”

“ There is nothing peculiarly heraldic about the lion passant, statant, dormant, couchant, or salient, and though heraldic artists may for the sake of artistic appearance distort the brute away from his natural figure, the rampant is alone the position which exists not in nature; and if the argument is to be applied to the bitter end, heraldry must be taken back to the very earliest instance which exists of any representation of a lion. ”

“ But the grandson on the death of his father, during the lifetime of the grandfather, and when the grandson succeeds as heir-apparent of the grandfather, succeeds also to the label of three points, which may therefore more properly be described as the difference mark of the heir-apparent than the difference mark of the eldest son. It is necessary, perhaps, having said this, to add the remark that heraldry knows no such thing as disinheritance, and heirship is an inalienable matter of blood descent, and not of worldly inheritance. No woman can ever be an heir-apparent. ”

“ Arms have never possessed any greater value than attaches to a matter of privilege; and (with singularly few exceptions) in every case, be it of a peer or baronet, of knight or of simple gentleman, this privilege has been obtained or has been regularised by the payment at some time or other of fees to the Crown and its officers. And the only difference between arms granted and paid for yesterday and arms granted and paid for five hundred years ago is the simple moral difference which attaches to the dates at which the payments were made. ”

“ Consequently the ultimate appeal is to the taste of the public, for art, if it be not the desire to give pleasure by the representation of beauty, is nothing. Beauty, of course, must not necessarily be confounded with prettiness; it may be beauty of character. The result is, therefore, that the decorative art of any period is an indication of that which gives pleasure at the moment, and an absolute reflex of the artistic wishes, desires, and tastes of the cultivated classes to whom executive art must appeal. ”

“ But so long as the Sovereign has the power to create a new order of Knighthood, and attach thereto Heraldic insignia, so long as the Crown has the power to create a new coronet, or to order a new ceremonial, so long as new coats of arms are being called into being,—for so long is it idle to treat Armory and Heraldry as a science incapable of further development, or as a science which in recent periods has not altered in its laws. ”

“ Lord Hastings bore as badge a black bull's head erased, gorged with a coronet; Lord Stanley, a golden griffin's leg, erased; Lord Howard, a white lion charged on the shoulder with a blue crescent; Sir Richard Dunstable adopted a white cock as a badge ”

“ There is no particular moment in a man's life at the present time, the era of the great middle class, at which he visibly steps from a plebeian to a patrician standing. And when he has fought and talked the world into conceding him a recognised position in the upper classes, he naturally tries to obliterate the fact that he or "his people" were ever of any other social position, and he hesitates to perpetually date his elevation to the rank of gentility by obtaining a grant of arms and thereby admitting that before that date he and his people were plebeian. ”

“ So great and extensive at one period was the use of these badges, that they were far more generally employed than either arms or crest, and whilst the knowledge of a man's badge or badges would be everyday knowledge and common repute throughout the kingdom, few people would know that man's crest, fewer still would ever have seen it worn.
It is merely an exaggeration of the difficulty that we are always in uncertainty whether any given device was merely a piece of decoration borrowed from the arms or crest, or whether it had continued usage as a badge. ”

“ In early times there can be no doubt whatever that men did not impale, or bother about the arms of wives who were not great heiresses. A man bore his own arms, and he left his father-in-law, or his brother-in-law, to bear those of the family with which he had matched. Of course, we find many cases in which the arms of a wife figure upon the husband's shield, but a careful examination of them shows that in practically every case the reason is to be found in the fact that the wife was an heiress. ”

“ But the real value of such a shield should be judged rather by the age of the single quartering which represents the strict male descent male upon male, and a simple coat of arms without quarterings may be a great deal more ancient and illustrious than a shield crowded with coat upon coat. A fictitious and far too great estimation is placed upon the right to display a long string of quarterings. In reality quarterings are no more than accidents, because they are only inherited when the wife happens to be an heiress in blood. ”

“ If we exact these qualifications as essential, armory as a fact and as a science is a product of later days, and is the evolution from the idea of tribal badges and tribal means and methods of honour applied to the decoration of implements of warfare. It is the conjunction and association of these two distinct ideas to which is added the no less important idea of heredity. The civilisation of England before the Conquest has left us no trace of any sort or kind that the Saxons, the Danes, or the Celts either knew or practised armory. ”

“ Every man who held land under these conditions—and it was impossible to hold land without them—was of the upper class. He was nobilis or known, and of a rank distinct, apart, and absolutely separate from the remainder of the population, who were at one time actually serfs, and for long enough afterwards, of no higher social position than they had enjoyed in their period of servitude. This wide distinction between the upper and lower classes, which existed from one end of Europe to the other, was the very root and foundation of armory. ”

“ 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 to be differentiated, and when lordships and lands had lapsed to a bastard branch. ”

“ Let no one think that a design ceases to be a coat of arms if it is not displayed upon a shield. Many people have thought to evade the authority of the Crown as the arbiter of coat-armour, and the penalties of taxation imposed by the Revenue by using designs without depicting them upon a shield. ”

“ The corollary is therefore evident, that all who held lands of the King were gentlemen or noble, and used arms; and as a consequence all who possessed arms were gentlemen, for they would not need or use arms, nor was their armour of a character upon which they could display arms, unless they were leaders. The leaders, we have seen, were the land-owning or upper class; therefore every one who had arms was a gentleman, and every gentleman had arms. But the status of gentlemen existed before there were coats of arms, and the later inseparable connection between the two was an evolution. ”

“ The illegitimacy of birth is an insuperable bar to inheritance, and a person of illegitimate birth inherits no arms at all, the popular idea that he inherits a right to the arms subject to a mark of distinction being quite incorrect. He has none at all. There has never been any mark which, as a matter of course and of mere motion, could attach itself automatically to a shield, as is the case with the English marks of difference, e.g. the crescent of the second son or the mullet of the third. ”

“ Hitherto each period of heraldic art has had its own peculiar style and type, each within limits readily recognisable. Whether that style and type can be considered when judged by the canons of art to be good or bad, there can be no doubt that each style in its turn has approximated to, and has been in keeping with, the concurrent decorative art outside and beyond heraldry, though it has always exhibited a tendency to rather lag behind. When all has been said and done that can be, heraldry, in spite of its symbolism and its many other meanings, remains but a form of decorative art ”

“ Under the accepted interpretation of Scottish armorial law, whilst the inherent gentility conferred by a patent of arms is not denied to cadets, no right to make use of arms is conceded to them until such time as they shall elect to matriculate the arms of their ancestor in their own names. This point has led to a much purer system of heraldry in Scotland than in England, and there is far less heraldic abuse in that country as a result, because the differences are decided not haphazardly by the user himself, as is the case in England, but by a competent officer of arms. ”

“ This is now accepted as a definite rule of armory, but in reciting it as a rule it should be pointed out, first, that no man may place the arms of his wife upon an escutcheon of pretence during the lifetime of her father, because whilst her father is alive there is always the opportunity of a re-marriage, and of the consequent birth of a son and heir. No man is compelled to bear arms on an escutcheon of pretence, it being quite correct to impale them merely to indicate the marriage—if he so desires. ”

“ The widest definition of armory would have it that any pictorial badge which is used by an individual or a family with the meaning that it is a badge indicative of that person or family, and adopted and repeatedly used in that sense, is heraldic. If such be your definition, you may ransack the Scriptures for the arms of the tribes of Israel, the writings of the Greek and Roman poets for the decorations of the armour and the persons of their heroes, mythical and actual, and you may annex numberless "heraldic" instances from the art of Nineveh, of Babylon, and of Egypt. ”

“ Too little recognition is paid to the fact that in armory there are almost as many rules of exception as original rules. There are vastly more plain exceptions to the rules which should govern them.
On the subject of ordinaries, I cannot see wherein lies the difference between a bend and a lion rampant, save their difference in form, yet the one is said to be an ordinary, the other is merely a charge. Each has its special rules to be observed, and whilst a bend can be engrailed or invected, a lion can be guardant or regardant ”

“ Any one attempting to compare them, or to rank these schools of artistic thought in order of superiority, would simply be laying themselves open to ridicule unspeakable, for they would be ranked by the highest authorities of different periods in different orders, and it is as impossible to create a permanent standard of art as it is impossible to ensure a permanence of any particular public taste. ”

“ Probably the freedom—amounting in many cases to great laxity—with which in English heraldic art the positions and attitudes of supporters are changed, is the one point in which English heraldic art has entirely ignored the trammels of conventionalised officialism. There must be in this country scores of entrance gates where each pillar of the gateway is surmounted by a shield held in the paws of a single supporter, and the Governmental use of the Royal supporters in an amazing variety of attitudes, some of which are grossly unheraldic, has not helped towards a true understanding. ”

“ As the conventional slashings of the lambrequin hinted at past hard fighting in battle, so did the conventional torse hint at past service to and favour of ladies, love and war being the occupations of the perfect knight of romance. How far short of the ideal knight of romance the knight of fact fell, perhaps the frequent bordures and batons of heraldry are the best indication. At first, as is evident from the Garter plates, the colours of the torse seem to have had little or no compulsory relation to the "livery colours" of the arms. ”

“ It is singularly unsafe to draw deductions, to be applied to the arms of others, from the Royal Arms, for these generally have laws unto themselves.
The bend sinister in its bare simplicity, as a mark of illegitimacy, was seldom used, the more frequent form being the sinister bendlet, or even the diminutive of that, the cottise. There is no doubt, of course, that when a sinister bend or bendlet debruises another coat that that is a bastardised version of an older coat, but examples can be found of the sinister bend as a charge which has no reference whatever to illegitimacy. ”

“ I know of no instance of a grant to a man of arms to bear in right of a deceased wife. It is for these occasions of memorial and record that methods have been devised to show a man's marriage with several wives. They certainly were not devised for the purpose of enabling him to bear and use for contemporary purposes the arms of a series of dead women, the representation of whom is no longer vested in himself. ”

“ We have the relics of savagery which caused a man to be nicknamed from some animal. The conjunction of the two produces the effort to apply the opportunity for decoration and the vanity of the animal nickname to each other.
We are fast approaching armory. In those days every man fought, and his weapons were the most cherished of his personal possessions. The sword his father fought with, the shield his father carried, the banner his father followed would naturally be amongst the articles a son would be most eager to possess. Herein are the rudiments of the idea of heredity in armory ”

“ If the husband ever obtains a grant of arms, the date of them will be subsequent to the present time; but supposing such a grant to be obtained, the children will inevitably inherit the scores of quarterings which belong to their mother. Now it would be ridiculous to suppose that such a shield is better or such a descent more enviable than the shield of a family such as I first described. Quarterings are all very well in their way, but their glorification has been carried too far.
A shield which displays an augmentation is of necessity more honourable than one without. ”

“ The Sovereign is of course the fountain of honour, and though ordinary grants of arms are made by Letters Patent under the hands and seals of the Kings of Arms, by virtue of the powers expressly and specifically conferred upon them in the Letters Patent respectively appointing them to their offices, a grant of arms is theoretically a grant from the Crown. The privilege of the possession of arms in the ordinary event is left in the discretion of the Earl Marshal, whose warrant is a condition precedent to the issue of a Grant. ”

“ In early Victorian days there was no lack of educated people, and because they liked the particular form of decoration associated with their period, who is justified in saying that, because that peculiar style of decoration is not acceptable now to ourselves, their art was bad, and worse than our own? If throughout the ages there had been one dominating style of decoration equally accepted at all periods and by all authorities as the highest type of decorative art, then we should have some standard to judge by. ”

“ 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. ”

“ War was elevated to the dignity of a sacred duty, and the implements of warfare rose in estimation. It is easy to understand the glory therefore that attached to arms, and the slow evolution which I have been endeavouring to indicate became a concrete fact, and it is due to the Crusades that the origin of armory as we now know it was practically coeval throughout Europe, and also that a large proportion of the charges and terms and rules of heraldry are identical in all European countries. ”

“ Now no crest has ever been granted where the right to arms has not existed or been simultaneously conferred, and therefore, whilst there are still many coats of arms legally in existence without a crest, a crest cannot exist without a coat of arms, so that those people, and they are many, who vehemently assert a right to the "crest of their family," whilst admitting they have no right to arms, stand self-convicted heraldically both of having spoken unutterable rubbish, and of using a crest to which they can have no possible right. ”

“ It is absurd to suppose that an actual shield was painted with the crudity to be met with in the Rolls of Arms. It is equally absurd to accept as unimpeachable models, Garter plates, seals, or architectural examples unless the purpose and medium—wax, enamel, or stone—in which they are executed is borne in mind, and the knowledge used with due discrimination. ”