The circumstance of the royal arms of England containing three lions and those of Scotland one, has rendered this animal a special favourite with British armorists. Leigh and Guillim, particularly, are very minute in their remarks upon him. The French heralds object to the representation of the lion guardant, that is, with his face turned full upon the spectator, and declare that this posture is proper to the leopard, “wherein,” says Guillim, “they offer great indignity to that roiall beast, in that they will not admit him, as saith Upton, to show his full face, the sight whereof doth terrifie and astonish all the beasts of the field, and wherein consisteth his chiefest majesty, ‘quia omnia animalia debent depingi et designari in suo ferociore actu.’” The French still allude derisively to our national charge as only a leopard. That one of these dissimilar animals could be mistaken for the other affords singular evidence of the rudeness with which arms in the middle ages were delineated.

The leopard, as an heraldric charge, has been treated with more obloquy than he deserves, from the erroneous notion that he was a bigenerous animal, bred between the lion and the female panther. The bear is generally borne muzzled and ‘salient,’ leaping, or rather jumping, the posture of the animal most familiar to our ancestors, who greatly delighted in his uncouth dancing. The elephant, the wolf, one of the most elegant of heraldric devices, the fox, the rabbit, the squirrel, the monkey, the beaver, the porcupine, the cat-a-mountain, and many other wild animals borne in arms, need no comment.

The heraldric tiger furnishes another proof of the ignorance of our ancestors in the natural history of foreign animals. It is represented thus:

Among the domestic animals borne in arms are the horse, the ass, the camel, the bull, the ox, the greyhound, the talbot or mastiff, the ram, the lamb, the hog, &c.

The horse, from his associations with chivalry and war, has ever been a favourite charge. The lamb, as commonly represented, with the nimbus round its head and the banner of the cross, is termed a holy lamb. The alant or wolf-dog, an extinct species, is of rare occurrence in arms.

“Abouten his char ther wenten white alauns,
Twenty and mo as gret as any stere,
To hunten at the leon or the dere.”
Chaucer.

The alant was the supporter of Fynes, Lord Dacre.

Most of the above were probably borne emblematically, but the stag, deer, boar, &c., seem to be trophies of the chase, especially when their heads only occur. The heads and other parts of animals are represented either as couped, cut off smoothly, or erased, torn off as it were with violence, leaving the place of separation jagged and uneven. The boar’s head may have been derived from the old custom of serving up a boar’s head at the tables of feudal nobles. This practice is still observed in the hall of Queen’s College, Oxford, on Christmas-day, when an antient song or carol, appropriate enough to the ceremony, though not very well befitting the time and the place, is sung. It begins thus:

“The boar’s head in hand bear I,
Bedeck’d with bays and rosemary,
And I pray you, my masters, be merry,
Quot estis in convivio.
Caput apri defero
Reddens laudes Domino.”

The presentation of a boar’s head forms the condition of several feudal tenures in various parts of the country. As an heraldric bearing, and as a sign for inns, it is of very antient date. Of its latter application the far-famed hostelry in Eastcheap affords one among many examples; while its use in armory was familiar to the father of English poesy, who, describing the equipments of Sir Thopas, says,

“His sheld was all of gold so red
And therin was a bore’s hed,
A charboncle beside.”

The annexed singular bearing, ‘a cup with a boar’s head erect,’ evidently alludes to some obsolete custom or tenure.

It may be remarked here that many of the terms of heraldry, when applied to the parts and attitudes of ‘beastes of venerie and huntyng,’ are identical with the expressions used by learned chasseurs of the ‘olden tyme,’ and which are fully elucidated by Dame Julyan, Manwood, Blundeville, and other writers on woodcraft and the chase; a science, by the way, as systematic in the employment of terms as heraldry itself. This remark applies equally to the technical words in falconry used in describing falcons, hawks, &c., when they occur in armory.

When antient armorists had so far departed from the propriety of nature as to paint swans red and tigers green, it was not difficult to admit still greater monstrosities. Double-headed and double-tailed lions and eagles occur at an early date; but these are nothing when compared with the double and triple-bodied lions figured by Leigh.[99] It would be a mere waste of time to speculate upon the origin of such bearings, which owe their birth to “the rich exuberance of a Gothick fancy”—the fertile source of the chimerical figures noticed in the next chapter.

Among BIRDS, the eagle holds the highest rank. The lyon was the royal beast—this the imperial bird. He is almost uniformly exhibited in front, with expanded wings, and blazoned by the term ‘displayed.’ The falcon, hawk, moor-cock, swan, cock, owl, stork, raven, turkey, peacock, swallow, and many others of the winged nation are well known to the most careless observer of armorial ensigns. The Cornish chough, a favourite charge, is curiously described by Clarke as “a fine blue or purple black-bird, with red beak and legs,” and said to be “a noble bearing of antiquity, being accounted the king of crows!”

The pelican was believed to feed her young with her own blood, and therefore represented “vulning herself,” that is, pecking her breast for a supply of the vital fluid.[100] The wings are usually indorsed or thrown upwards; “but this,” says Berry, “is unnecessary in the blazon, as that is the only position in which the pelican is represented in coat-armour.” This may be true of modern heraldry, but antiently this bird was borne ‘close,’ that is, with the wings down. The pelicans in the arms of the family of Pelham, resident at Laughton, co. Sussex, temp. Henry IV, were represented in this manner, as appears from a shield in one of the spandrels of the western door of Laughton church, and from some painted glass in the churches of Waldron and Warbleton. In a carving of the fifteenth century, among the ruins of Robertsbridge Abbey, the pelicans have their wings slightly raised, and in the modern arms of Pelham they are indorsed, as shown below.

Fishes, as borne in arms, have recently been made the subject of an able, most interesting, and beautifully illustrated volume.[101] In my en passant survey of the ensigns of armory it will suffice to remark that the dolphin takes the same rank among heraldric fishes as the lion occupies among quadrupeds, and the eagle among birds; after him the pike, salmon, barbel, and trout hold an honourable place, and even the herring and sprat are not deemed too mean for armory. Neither have shell-fish been overlooked: the escallop in particular, from its religious associations, has always been a special favourite.

Amphibia, REPTILES, and INSECTS sometimes occur, particularly toads, serpents, adders, tortoises, scorpions, snails, grasshoppers, spiders, ants, bees, and gad-flies. It is singular that such despised and noxious creatures as the scorpion and the toad should have been adopted as marks of honour; yet such, in former times, was the taste for allusive arms that the Botreuxes, of Cornwall, relinquished a simple antient coat in favour of one containing three toads, because the word ‘botru’ in the Cornish language signified a toad!

The HUMAN FIGURE and its parts are employed in many arms. The arms pertaining to the bishopric of Salisbury contain a representation of “our blessed Lady, with her son in her right hand and a sceptre in her left.” The arms of the see of Chichester are the most singular to be found in the whole circle of church heraldry. They are blazoned thus: ‘Azure, Prester-John hooded, sitting on a tomb-stone; in his sinister hand an open book; his dexter hand extended, with the two fore-fingers erect, all or; in his mouth a sword, fessewise, gules, hilt and pommel or, the point to the sinister.’[102] Prester or Presbyter-John, the person here represented, was a fabulous person of the middle ages, who was imagined to sway the sceptre of a powerful empire somewhere in the East, and who must have been a very long-lived personage, unless he was reproduced from time to time like the phœnix of antiquity. Many writers, during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, make mention of him. Sir John Maundevile describes his territory, which, however, he did not visit. That country, according to his statement, contained rocks of adamant,[103] which attracted all the ships that happened to come near them, until the congeries appeared like a forest, and became a kind of floating island. It also abounded in popinjays or parrots as “plentee as gees,” and precious stones large enough to make “plateres, dissches, and cuppes.” “Many other marveylles been there,” he adds, “so that it were to cumbrous and to long to putten it in scripture of bokes.” He describes the Emperor himself as “cristene,” and believing “wel in the Fadre, in the Sone, and in the Holy Gost,” yet, in some minor points, not quite sound in the faith. As to his imperial state, he possessed 72 provinces, over each of which presided a king; and he had so great an army that he could devote 330,000 men to guard his standards, which were “3 crosses of gold, fyn, grete and hye, fulle of precious stones.” It is related of Columbus that he saw on one of the islands of the West Indies, which he then apprehended to be a part of the continent of Asia, a grave and sacred personage whom he at first believed to be Prester-John. This incident serves to show that the existence of this chimerical being was credited even so lately as the close of the fifteenth century, although Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth, doubted many of the tales related of him—“de quo tanta fama solebat esse, et multa falsa dicta sunt et scripta.”[104] The best account of him is to be found in the work of Matthew Paris, the monk of St. Albans, who wrote before the year 1250. Marco Polo also mentions him in his travels.[105] Porny places him in Abyssinia under the title of Preter cham, or ‘prince of the worshippers,’ while Heckford[106] considers him a priest and one of the followers of Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople in the fifth century.

Kings and bishops occur as charges; but rarely. The heads of Moors and Saracens are more common, and belong to the category of trophies, having originated, for the most part, during the Crusades. The arms of the Welsh family of Vaughan are ‘a cheveron between three children’s heads ... enwrapped about the necks with as many snakes proper.’ “It hath beene reported,” saith old Guillim, “that some one of the ancestors of this family was borne with a snake about his necke: a matter not impossible, but yet very unprobable!” Besides heads, the armorial shield is sometimes charged with arms and legs, naked, vested, or covered with armour, hands, feet, eyes, hearts, winged and unwinged, &c. The coat of Tremaine exhibits three arms (et tres manus!) and that of the Isle of Man, three legs, as here represented. Of the former, Guillim remarks, “these armes and hands conjoyned and clenched after this manner may signify a treble offer of revenge for some notable injurie.” If we might be jocular upon so grave a subject as armory, we should consider the second coat a happy allusion to the geographical position of the island between the three kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland, as if it had run away from all three, and were kicking up its heels in derision of the whole empire![107]

The VEGETABLE KINGDOM has furnished its full quota of charges. We have whole trees, as the oak, pine, pear-tree, &c.; parts of trees, as oak-branches, and starved (i.e. dead) branches, trunks of trees, generally raguly or knobbed; leaves, as laurel, fig, elm, woodbine, nettle, and holly; fruit, as pomegranates, apples, pears, pine-apples, grapes, acorns, and nuts; flowers, as the rose, lily, columbine, gilliflower, &c.; corn, as stalks of wheat and rye, and particularly garbs (Fr. gerbes) or wheatsheaves; to which some add trefoils, quatrefoils, and cinquefoils, and the bearing familiar to all in the arms of France, and called the Fleur-de-lis.

Respecting the trefoil, there can be little doubt, as Mr. Dallaway observes, that it was borrowed from the foliated ornaments of antient coronets, which again were imitations of the natural wreath. The shamrock, which is identical with the trefoil, is the national badge of Ireland. Of the quatre and cinquefoils “almost any conjecture would be weakly supported. Amongst the very early embellishments of Gothic architecture are quatrefoils, at first inserted simply in the heads of windows, between or over the incurvated or elliptical points of the mullions, and afterwards diversified into various ramifications, which were the florid additions to that style.”[108] These terms are common to both architecture and heraldry, but from which of the two the other adopted them must remain in doubt.

The non-heraldric reader will be surprised to learn that the identity of the fleur-de-lis with the iris or ‘royal lily’ has ever been called in question; yet it has been doubted, with much reason, whether an ornamented spear-head or sceptre be not the thing intended. The Boke of S. A. informs us that the arms of the king of France were “certainli sende by an awngell from heuyn, that is to say iij flowris in maner of swerdis in a felde of asure, the wich certan armys ware geuyn to the forsayd kyng of fraunce in sygne of euerlasting trowbull, and that he and his successaries all way with bataill and swereddys (swords) shulde be punyshid!” Those who imagine the bearing to be a play upon the royal name of Loys or Louis decide in favour of the flower. Upton calls it ‘flos gladioli.’[109] Perhaps it was made a flower for the purpose of assimilating it to the English rose; certainly all our associations, historical and poetical, would tell in favour of its being such; and such it was undoubtedly understood to be in the time of Chaucer, who says of Sire Thopas,

“Upon his crest he bare a tour (tower),
And therein stiked a lily flour.”

Leigh seems to entertain no doubt of its belonging to the vegetable kingdom; for in his notice of this charge he particularly describes the flower and the root of the iris. Mr. Montagu, in his recent ‘Guide to the Study of Heraldry,’ thinks the arguments of M. de Menestrier “in favour of the iris so strong as almost to set the question at rest.”[110]

Those who advocate the spear-head view of the question, bring forward the common heraldric bearing, a leopard’s head jessant de lis, i. e. thrust through the mouth with a fleur-de-lis, which passes through the skull as represented in the above cut. “There cannot,” as Dallaway says, “be a more absurd combination than that of a leopard’s head producing a lily, while the idea that it was typical of the triumph after the chase, when the head of the animal was thrust through with a spear and so carried in procession,” seems perfectly consistent. Still the query may arise ‘how is it that the head of no other animal, the wolf or boar for instance, is found represented in a similar manner?’

The little band surrounding the pieces of which the fleur-de-lis of heraldry is composed is analogous to nothing whatever in the flower, while it does strongly resemble the forril of metal which surrounds the insertion of a spear-head into its staff or pole. After an attentive consideration of both hypotheses, I have no hesitation in affirming that the fleur-de-lis is not the lily. This is shown, not from the occurrence of lilies in their proper shape in some coats, and that of the heraldric lis in others, (for such a variation might have been accidentally made by the incorrect representations of unskilful painters,) but from the fact that both lilies and lis are found in one and the same coat—that of Eton College.[111]

The Tressure surrounding the lion in the royal arms of Scotland is blazoned ‘fleury and counter-fleury,’ that is, having fleurs-de-lis springing from it, both on the outer and inner sides. The fabulous account of the tressure is that it was given by Charlemagne to Achaius, king of Scotland in the year 792, in token of alliance and friendship. Nisbet says, “The Tressure Flowerie encompasses the Lyon of Scotland, to show that he should defend the Flower-de-lisses, and these to continue a defence to the Lion.”[112]

Now, although we must discard this early existence of the Scottish ensigns, it is by no means improbable that the addition of the tressure was made in commemoration of some alliance between the two crowns at a later date. But the defence which a bulwark of lilies could afford the king of beasts would be feeble indeed! Yet, upon the supposition that the fleur-de-lis is intended for a spear-head, such an addition would be exceedingly appropriate, as forming a kind of chevaux-de-frise[113] around the animal.

This doubtful charge may serve as a turning point between ‘things naturall’ and ‘things artificiall.’ Among the latter, crowns, sceptres, orbs, caps of maintenance, mantles of state, and such-like insignia may be first named. According to Dame Julyan Berners, crowns formed part of the arms of King Arthur—“iij dragonys and over that an other sheelde of iij crownys.” Mitres, crosiers, &c. occur principally, though not exclusively, in church heraldry. From attention in the first instance to the ‘arts liberall’ came such charges as books, pens, ink-horns, text-letters, as A’s, T’s and S’s, organ-pipes, hautboys, harps, viols, bells, &c. The ‘arts mechanicall’ furnish us with implements of agriculture, as ploughs, harrows, scythes, wheels, &c. The Catherine Wheel Dallaway takes for a cogged, or denticulated mill-wheel, with reference to some feudal tenure, but it seems rather ungallant to rob the female saint of the instrument of her passion, while St. Andrew and St. George are allowed to retain theirs in undisturbed possession. Manufactures afford the wool-comb, the spindle, the shuttle, the comb, the hemp-break, &c. Among mechanical implements are included pick-axes, mallets, hammers, plummets, squares, axes, nails, &c. Architecture furnishes towers, walls, bridges, pillars, &c. From the marine we have antient ships, boats, rudders, masts, anchors, and sails. From field-sports come bugle (that is bullock) horns, bows, arrows, pheons or fish-spears, falcons’ bells, and lures, fish-hooks, eel-spears, nets of various kinds, and bird-bolts. The bird-bolt was a small blunt arrow, with one, two, or three heads, used with the crossbow for shooting at birds. Hence the adage of ‘The fool’s Bolt is soon shot,’ applied to the hasty expression or retort of an ignorant babbler. John Heywood versifies the proverb thus:

“A foole’s bolte is soone shot, and fleeth oftymes fer;
But the foole’s bolte and the mark cum few times ner.”[114]

From sedentary games are borrowed playing-tables, dice, chess-rooks, &c.

War has naturally supplied heraldry with a numerous list of charges, as banners, spears, beacons, drums, trumpets, cannons, or chamber-pieces, ‘murthering chain-shot,’ burning matches (of rope), portcullises, battering-rams, crossbows, swords, sabres, lances, battle-axes, and scaling-ladders; also shields, generally borne in threes, helmets, morions, gauntlets, greaves (leg armour), horse-trappings, bridles, saddles, spurs, horse-shoes, shackles, cum multis aliis. Many of these, though disused in modern warfare, will require no explanation, but a few others whose use is less obvious may be added, as swepes, caltraps, and water-bowgets.

The swepe, sometimes called a mangonel, and as such borne in the canting arms of Magnall, was a war-engine, used for the purpose of hurling stones into a besieged town or fortress; a species of balista.

In the celebrated lampoon upon Richard, king of the Romans, who was obliged, at the battle of Lewes, to take refuge in a windmill, the following lines occur:

“The Kynge of Alemaigne wende to do full wel,
He saisede the mulne for a castel;
With hare sharpe swerdes he ground the stel,
He wende that the sayles were mangonel!”[115]

The caltrap was a cruel contrivance for galling the feet of horses. It was made of iron, and so constructed that, however it might fall, one of its four sharp points should be erect. Numbers of them strewed in the enemy’s path served to retard the advance of cavalry, and a retreat was sometimes secured by dropping them in the flight, and thus cutting off the pursuit. Its etymology is uncertain, cheval-trap and gall-trap have been suggested with nearly equal claims to probability.

Water-bowgets, or budgets, date from the Crusades, when water had often to be conveyed across the sandy deserts from a great distance. They are represented in various grotesque forms as—

so that it is a matter of curiosity to know in what manner they were carried. Leigh and others call them gorges; but the charge properly known by that name is a whirlpool, as borne in the armes parlantes of the family of Gorges.

The mullet, a star-like figure, has been taken to represent the rowel of a spur; but a doubt of this derivation of the charge may be suggested, as the spur of the middle ages had no rowel, but consisted of one sharp spike. Some of the old heralds considered mullets as representations of falling stars—“exhalations inflamed in the aire and stricken back with a cloud”—which, according to Guillim, are sometimes found on the earth like a certain jelly, and assuming the form of the charge. The substance alluded to bears the name of star-jelly. In the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1797, are several communications on this subject, in which there is a great contrariety of opinion, some of the writers contending that it is an animal substance, while others consider it a vegetable. As it is usually found in boggy grounds, Dr. Darwin deemed it a mucilage voided by herons after they have eaten frogs, and Pennant attributed it to gulls. The antient alchemists called it the flower of heaven, and imagined that from it they could procure the universal menstruum; but all their researches ended in discovering that by distillation it yielded some phlegm, volatile salt, and empyreumatic oil.[116]

Personal costume, although mixed up with the very earliest of heraldric devices, furnishes scarcely any regular charges. Excepting shoes, caps, and body-armour, the maunch is almost the only one derived from this source. This charge, a familiar example of which occurs in the arms of the noble family of Hastings, represents an antient fashion of sleeve worn soon after the Conquest, but of such an extravagant form that Leigh blazons it a maunch-maltalé, a badly-cut sleeve; and certainly the example given by him fully justifies the use of that epithet. The taste for a long pendulous addition to the cuff of the sleeve forms one of the most curious features of the female costume of the twelfth century. According to Brydson, the maunch was a distinguished “favour” bestowed on some knights, being part of the dress of the lady or princess who presented it.

The woodcut (no inappropriate tail-piece for the present chapter) delineates several antient forms of this article. Well may Master Leigh remark, “Of thinges of antiquitee growen out of fashion this is one.”

No. 1, Leigh; 3, 4, from Planché’s Hist. Brit. Cost.; 2, Arms of Hastings, from the tomb of W. de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, Westminster Abbey.

CHAPTER IV.

The days of the Crusaders were the days of romance. “From climes so fertile in monsters as those through which these adventurers passed,” observes Dallaway, “we cannot wonder that any fiction was readily received by superstitious admirers, whose credulity nothing could exhaust.” The narrations of those warriors who had the good fortune to revisit their native lands were eagerly seized upon by that new class of literary aspirants, the Romance writers, by means of whose wonder-exciting productions, giants, griffins, dragons, and monsters of every name, became familiarized to all. For ages the existence of these products of a “gothick fancy” was never called in question. The early travellers, such as Marco Polo and our own renowned Sir John Maundevile, pandered to the popular taste, and what those chroniclers of ‘grete merveyles’ reported in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was religiously believed in the sixteenth, and hardly questioned even in the seventeenth. In the early part of this period, indeed, it can scarcely be expected that the multitude at least should have been disabused of the delusion, when the existence of witchcraft was considered an essential part of the common creed,—when a learned herald, like Guillim, could write a tirade against “divellish witches that doe worke the destruction of silly infants, and also of cattel,”—and when the supreme magistrate of these realms could instigate the burning of deformed old women, and write treatises upon “Dæmonology,” which, among other matters, taught his loyal and undoubting subjects that these maleficæ were wont to perform their infernal pranks by means of circles, some of which were square, and others triangular! It was reserved for the advancing light of the eighteenth century to break the spell, and scatter these monsters to the winds. This, however, was not to be done at once; for our grandfathers, and even our fathers, gathered their knowledge of popular natural history from a book which contained minute descriptions of the dragon, ‘adorned with cuts’ of that remarkable hexapede, for the edification of its admiring readers!

Under the category of Heraldric Monsters the following deserve especial notice:—

The allerion is a fabulous bird without either beak or legs, described by some writers as very small, like a martlet, while others give him the size of an eagle. The name is derived from the circumstance of his being destitute of all his extremities except the wings (ailles). Three such birds, according to the chroniclers of the middle ages, were shot with an arrow from a tower, by Godfrey of Boulogne, duke of Lorraine, at the siege of Jerusalem, during the first crusade; and three allerions upon a bend, in honour of that event, are borne as the arms of the duchy of Lorraine to this day.[118]

The chimera is, to use the words of Bossewell, “a beaste or monstre hauing thre heades, one like a Lyon, an other like a Goate, the third like a Dragon.”[119]

The cockatrice[120] is a cock, with the wings and tail of a dragon. The best account of him is given by Leigh: “Thys though he be but at ye most a foote of length yet is he kyng of all serpentes[121] of whome they are most afrayde and flee from. For with his breath and sight he sleath all thynges that comme within a speare’s length of him. He infecteth the water that he commeth neare. His enemy is the wesell, who when he goeth to fight with y^e cockatrice eateth the herbe commonlye called Rewe, and so in fight byting him he dyeth and the wesell therewith dyeth also. And though the cockatrice be veneme withoute remedye whilest he liueth, yet when he is dead and burnt to ashes, he loseth all his malice, and the ashes of him are good for alkumistes, and namely, in turnyng and chaungeyng of mettall.” To this latter remark he adds, “I have not seene the proofe thereof, and yet I have been one of Jeber’s cokes.”

The dragon is usually depicted with a serpentine body, sharp ears, a barbed tongue and tail, strong leathern wings armed with sharp points, and four eagles’ feet, strongly webbed; but there are many modifications of this form. “Of fancy monsters, the winged, scaly, fiery dragon is by far the most poetical fabrication of antiquity. To no word, perhaps, are attached ideas more extraordinary, and of greater antiquity, than to that of dragon. We find it consecrated by the religion of the earliest people, and become the object of their mythology. It got mixed up with fable, and poetry, and history, till it was universally believed, and was to be found everywhere but in nature.[122] In our days nothing of the kind is to be seen, excepting a harmless animal hunting its insects. The light of these days has driven the fiery dragon to take refuge among nations not yet visited by the light of civilization. The draco volans is a small lizard, and the only reptile possessing the capacity of flight. For this purpose it is provided on each side with a membrane between the feet, which unfolds like a fan at the will of the animal, enabling it to spring from one tree to another while pursuing its food. It is a provision similar to that of the flying squirrel, enabling it to take a longer leap.”[123] The annexed cut represents a dragon volant, as borne in the arms of Raynon of Kent, and the draco volans of the zoologists. A fossil flying lizard has been found in the lias of Dorsetshire, which, to employ the words of Professor Buckland, is “a monster resembling nothing that has ever been seen or heard of upon earth, excepting the dragons of romance and heraldry.”

Considering the hideous form and character of the dragon, it is somewhat surprising to find him pourtrayed upon the banner and the shield as an honourable distinction; unless he was employed by way of trophy of a victory gained over some enemy, who might be symbolically represented in this manner. The dragon often occurring at the feet of antient monumental effigies is understood to typify sin, over which the deceased has now triumphed; and the celebrated monster of this tribe slain by our patron saint, St. George, was doubtless a figurative allusion to a certain pestilent heresy which he vehemently resisted and rooted out. Favine, on the Order of Hungary, remarks that the French historians speak of Philip Augustus ‘conquering the dragon’ when he overcame Otho IV, who bore a dragon as the standard of his empire.[124] It has been suggested that the design of commanders in depicting monsters and wild beasts upon their standards was to inspire the enemy with terror.[125]

The dragon forms a part of the fictitious arms of King Arthur; and another early British king bore the surname of Pen-Dragon, or the ‘dragon’s head.’ The standard of the West Saxon monarchs was a golden dragon in a red banner. In the Bayeux tapestry a dragon on a pole repeatedly occurs near the person of King Harold; and in the instance which is copied in the margin, the words ‘Hic Harold’ are placed over it.[126] It was an early badge of the Princes of Wales, and was also assumed at various periods by our English monarchs. Henry III used it at the battle of Lewes in 1264.

“Symoun com to the feld,
And put up his banere;
The Kyng schewed forth his scheld,
His Dragon fulle austere.
The Kyng said ‘On hie,
Symon jeo vous defie!’”
Robert Brunne.

“The order for the creation of this ‘austere’ beast,” says Mr. Blaauw, “is still extant. Edward Fitz-Odo, the king’s goldsmith, was commanded, in 1244, to make it ‘in the manner of a standard or ensign, of red samit,’ to be embroidered with gold, and his tongue to appear as though continually moving, and his eyes of sapphire, or other stones agreeable to him.”[127]

“Then was ther a Dragon grete and grimme,
Full of fyre and also venymme,
With a wide throte and tuskes grete.”[128]

The dragon-standard must have been in high favour with commanders, for in the same war we find it unfurled in the opposite cause by the leader of the baronial party:

“When Sir Simoun wist the dome ageyn them gone,
His felonie forth thrist, somned his men ilkon,
Displaied his banere, lift up his Dragoun!”
Robt. Brunne.

“When Sir Simon knew the judgment given against them, his wickedness burst forth, he gathered all his men, displayed his banner, and lifted up his Dragon.”[129] The expression ‘his dragon’ must not be understood to imply any peculiar right to the device, for the arms of De Montfort were widely different, viz. ‘Gules, a lion rampant, double queué, argent.’ From the indiscriminate use of the monster by different, and even by contending parties, I should consider him merely as the emblem of defiance. The Dragon must not be confounded with the usual pennon, or standard of an army, as it was employed in addition to it. Matthew of Westminster, speaking of the early battles of this country, says, “The king’s place was between the Dragon and the standard.”[130] Among the ensigns borne at Cressy was a burning dragon, to show that the French were to receive little mercy.[131] This dragon was of red silk, adorned and beaten with very broad and fair lilies of gold, and bordered about with gold and vermilion. The French frequently carried a red pennon, embroidered with a dragon of gold. Our Henry VI caused a particular coin to be struck, the reverse of which exhibited a banner charged with a demi-dragon, and a black dragon was one of the badges of Edward IV. A red dragon was one of the supporters of Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth, whence the title, Rouge-dragon, of one of the existing pursuivants in the College of Arms.

The griffin, or griphon, scarcely less famous than the dragon, was a compound animal, having the head, wings, and feet of an eagle, with the hinder part of a lion. He is thus described by Sir John Maundevile in the 26th chapter of his ‘ryght merveylous’ Travels:

“In that contree [Bacharie] ben many Griffounes, more plentee than in ony other contree. Sum men seyn that thei han the body upward as an egle, and benethe as a lyoun; and treuly thei seyn sothe that thei ben of that schapp. But 0 Griffoun hathe the body more gret and more strong thane 8 lyouns, of such lyouns as ben o’ this half (hemisphere); and more gret and strongere than an 100 egles, suche as we han amonges us. For 0 Griffoun there wil bere fleynge to his nest a gret hors, or 2 oxen yoked to gidere as thei gon at the plowghe. For he hathe his talouns so longe and so large and grete upon his feet, as thowghe thei weren hornes of grete oxen, or of bugles or of kygn, so that men maken cuppes of hem to drynke of, and of hire ribbes and of the pennes of hire wenges men maken bowes fulle stronge to schote with arwes, and quarell.”

Casley says that in the Cottonian Library there was a cup of the description just referred to, four feet in length, and inscribed—

“Griphi unguis divo Cuthberto Dunelmensi sacer,”

a dedication which, I must confess, puzzles me sorely. A griffin’s claw and the ‘saint-bishop’ of Durham seem as absurd a combination of ideas as that presented in the old proverbial phrase of ‘Great A and a Bull’s Foot,’ or by the tavern sign of ‘The Goat and Compasses.’ If wisdom, according to classical authority, lies in a well, so does the wit of this association. Another griffin’s claw, curiously mounted on an eagle’s leg of silver, which came at the Revolution from the Treasury at St. Denis, is preserved in the cabinet of antiquities in the King’s Library at Paris. Three such talons were formerly kept at Bayeux, and were fastened on high days to the altar as precious relics! A ‘corne de griffoun’ is mentioned in the Kalend. of Excheq. iii, 176. Another, about an ell in length, is mentioned by Dr. Grew in his ‘History of the Rarities of the Royal Society,’ p. 26. The Doctor thinks it the horn of a roebuck, or of the Ibex mas. Leigh says that griffyns “are of a great hugenes, for I have a clawe of one of their pawes, which should show them to be as bygge as two lyons.” The egg was likewise preserved as a valuable curiosity, and used as a goblet. “Item, j œf de griffon, garnis d’argent, od pie et covercle.” The griffin was assumed by the family of Le Dispenser, and the upper part appears as the crest on the helm of Hugh le Dispenser, who was buried at Tewkesbury in 1349. Another strikingly designed representation of this curious animal is seen at Warwick, at the feet of Richard Beauchamp, who died in 1439.[132]

The harpy, unusual in English armory, has the head and breasts of a woman, with the body, legs, and wings of a vulture. This was a classical monster. Guillim, imitating Virgil,[133] says:

“Of monsters all, most monstrous this; no greater wrath
God sends ’mongst men; it comes from depths of pitchy hell;
And virgin’s face, but wombe like gulfe insatiate hath;
Her hands are griping clawes, her colour pale and fell.”

The coat ‘Azure, a harpy or,’ was ‘in Huntingdon church’ in Guillim’s time.

The lyon-dragon and the lyon-poisson are compound monsters; the former of a lion and a dragon, and the latter of a lion and a fish. These are of very rare occurrence, as is also the monk-fish, or Sea Friar, which Randle Holme tells us ‘is a fish in form of a frier.’ ‘Such a monstrous and wonderful fish,’ he adds, ‘was taken in Norway.’

The identity of the popular idea of the mermaid with the classical notion of the syren is shown in the following passage from Shakspeare:

“Thou rememberest
Since once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a Mermaid on a dolphin’s back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song.”

And Brown, in his ‘Vulgar Errours,’ observes, “few eyes have escaped [that] the picture of a Mermaid, with woman’s head above, and fishy extremity below, answers the shape of the antient syrens that attempted upon Ulysses.” The heraldric mermaid usually holds a mirror in her right hand and a comb in her left. The existence of mermaids was religiously believed not many ages since, and many accounts of their being captured on the English coast occur in the writings of our old chroniclers, and other retailers of marvels. The specimens exhibited of late years have been pronounced ingenious combinations of the upper half of the ape with the tail of a fish.

The montegre, manticora, or man-tyger, had the body of a lion (q. tiger?), the head of an old man, and the horns of an ox. Some heralds, by way of finish, give him dragon’s feet.

Butler’s well-known line,

“The herald’s martlet hath no legs,”

has rendered most readers aware of the singular defect of this otherwise beautiful charge. Heraldric authors differ as to the identity of this bird. Its being called in Latin blazon ‘merula,’ and in French ‘merlotte,’ the diminutive of ‘merle,’ has induced some to consider it a blackbird; while others, with greater plausibility, decide in favour of the common house martin, the legs of which are so short and the wings so long that when it alights upon the ground it cannot rise without great difficulty. Hence originated the mistake of pourtraying it without legs, “and for this cause,” sagely observes Guillim, “it is also given for a difference of younger brethren to put them in minde to trust to their wings of vertue and merit to raise themselves, and not to their legges, having but little land to put their foot on.”

The opinicus differs slightly from the griffin, having four lion’s legs instead of two, and the tail is short like that of a camel. It is used as the crest of the Barber-Chirurgeons Company. The pegasus or winged-horse ranks among the chimerical figures of heraldry borrowed from classical fable, and is more frequently employed as a crest or supporter than as a charge. The sphinx occurs very rarely. The satyr or satyral exhibits a human face attached to the body of a lion, and has the horns and tail of an antelope.

The sagittary is the centaur of antiquity—half man, half horse, and is said to have been assumed as the arms of king Stephen on account of the great assistance he had received from the archers, and also because he had entered the kingdom while the sun was in the sign Sagittarius. Sir John Maundevile tells us that in Bacharie “ben many Ipotaynes, that dwellen somtyme in the watre and somtyme on the lond; and thei ben half man and half hors: and thei eten men when they may take hem”—an excellent gloss upon Mrs. Glass, ‘First catch your hare,’ &c.[134]

The unicorn is the most elegant of all these fanciful figures, and is too well known as the sinister supporter of the royal arms to need any description. Mr. Dallaway derives the heraldric unicorn from the spike antiently fixed to the headpiece of a war-horse, and resembling a horn; but as this does not account for the cloven hoofs and slender, tufted tail, I should reverse the inference, and derive that appendage from the popular notion of the unicorn.

The unicorn of antiquity was regarded as the emblem of strength; and as the dragon was the guardian of wealth, so was the unicorn of chastity. His horn was a test of poison, and in virtue of this peculiarity the other beasts of the forest invested him with the office of water-‘conner,’ never daring to taste the contents of any pool or fountain until the unicorn had stirred the waters with his horn to ascertain if any wily serpent or dragon had deposited his venom therein. Upton and Leigh detail the ‘wonderful art’ by which the unicorn is captured. “A mayde is set where he haunteth, and she openeth her lappe, to whome the Vnicorne, as seeking rescue from the force of the hunter, yeldeth his head and leaueth all his fierceness, and resting himself vnder her protection, sleapeth vntyll he is taken and slayne!”

The Hebrew reem being rendered in our version of the Bible unicorn, has confirmed the vulgar notion that the animal intended was the cloven-hoofed and single-horned figure of heraldry; but there is nothing in the word sanctioning the idea that the animal was single-horned; and on referring to the passages in which the term is introduced, the only one which is quite distinct on this point seems clearly to intimate that the animal had two horns. That passage is Deut. xxxiii, 17. ‘His horns are like the horns of the reem;’ the word here is singular, not plural, and should have been ‘unicorn,’ not ‘unicorns,’ in our version.[135] It has lately been attempted to prove that the reem of Scripture was the animal now known as the nhyl-gau.[136] Reem is translated in the Septuagint by ‘μονοκερως,’ which is exactly equivalent to our unicorn. If a one-horned animal be contended for, the rhinoceros is the only one now known that is entitled to the attribute of unicornity. Leigh declares the unicorn of our science to be a mortal foe to elephants, and such, according to zoologists, is the character of the rhinoceros. These two are, however, the only points of resemblance; for while the unicorn of heraldry is of light and elegant symmetry, the rhinoceros of the African deserts is an animal so clumsy and ponderous that it has been known to require eight men to lift the head of one into a cart.[137]

The wyvern is one of the most usual of this description of charges. It is represented as a kind of flying serpent, the upper part resembling a dragon with two fore legs, and the lower part a snake or adder. The name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon ‘wivere,’ a serpent.

The bull and the lion with the wings of an eagle occasionally occur in continental armory, but I do not recollect an instance of either in English heraldry. The winged lion is the achievement of the city of Venice.

The foregoing enumeration of heraldric monsters includes all that are generally borne, and even some that scarcely ever occur; but Randle Holme, in his ‘Academy of Armory,’ figures and describes a multitude of others, some of which I strongly suspect to have been the offspring of his own prolific fancy. The triple-headed Cerberus was borne, this writer tells us, by the name of Goaler, while another family bore ‘the scarlet beast of the bottomless pit:’ ensigns of honour, truly!

What shall we say of

The Nependis, or ape-hog, half ape, half swine;
The Minocane, or Homocane, half child, half spaniel dog;
The Lamya, a compound of a woman, a dragon, a lyon, a goat, a dog, and a horse;
The Dragon-tyger, and Dragon-wolf;
The Lyon-wyvern;
The Winged Satyr-fish;
The Cat-fish and Devil-fish;
The Ass-bittern (the arms of Mr. Asbitter!)
The Ram-eagle;
The Falcon-fish with a hound’s ear;
and
The ‘Wonderfull Pig of the Ocean?’
From Holme’s Academy of Armory.