HERALDRY

By DERMOT MORRAH Arundel Herald Extraordinary 0 write of the connection of heraldry with the Catholic Faith and Church is to bring together elements that strictly speaking should be incompatible.
In one sense, of course. all heraldry that matters is Catholic; for the beginning of the Protestant Reformation falls about the time when the emblazoned shield ceased to be carried by armoured knights in action, and by consequence the art of which it was the centre became detached from real life and fell into a rapid decadence.
To say, with one of the armorial purists of the last generation, that "Tudor heraldry is mostly rubbish and modern heraldry beneath contempt" would be unjust to many good artists and scholars who have educed new beauty from the old forms; but the virtue of this later heraldry is a derivative and antiquarian thing, not, like the heraldry of the Catholic centuries, a practical part of the business of living.
Episcopal shields
TT must however be constantly -remembered that this living business with which heraldry has to do is the business of war; and even more, of the tournament, for it was the lists rather than the battlefield that provided the best background for the display of armory in its most fantastic splendour.
Now the medieval Church, bound by its very nature to use its influence for the discouragement of war, was particularly downright-though not very successful--in its denunciation of tournaments. Readers of Jocelyn of Brakeland will remember how the great Abbot Samson of Bury St. Edmunds kidnapped a party of young knights on their way to a tournament that he had forbidden and kept them rocked up in the Abbey until they
abandoned their project and did penance.
In its natural and proper use, therefore. Churchmen could or should-have nothing to do with heraldry. It was for the fighting laity, and for them alone.
There were exceptions, of course. Bishop Odo of Bayeux, laying about him with his mace at the Battle of Hastings. lived before the days of true heraldry; hut 300 years later his successor in the see of Durham, Thomas Hatfield, is shown on his seal charging with drawn sword at fall gallop, his helmet surmounted with that "bush of feathers" we generally associate with the Prince of Wales, and bearing on his left arm his shield of a gold chevron and three lions in an azure field.
At the end of the 14th century another muscular Christian, Henry Despenser, Bishop of Norwich, appears rather similarly arrayed, with the famous arms of his family on his shield and a formidable griffin frowning from his crest. So, apparently, he rode to the Hundred Years' War.
'Marginal shields
RUT these are comparatively -1-"late examples. In earlier times we may have to rely upon churchmen for our knowledge of
heraldry, but.they record it merely as observers on the ways of the fighting classes.
Matthew Paris, the 13th-century monk of St. Albans, had the engaging habit of ornamenting the margins of his chronicle with the shields of the men whose deeds be recordedif the bearer's death in action is mentined, his shield is shown upside down. This collection is the earliest English "roll of arms." There are
Crossword 332
Prize-winners.-First prize, one guinea : Mrs. M. Howley. Sligo; second prize, a book : Mr. H. Duffy, Canterbury. more than 100 shields; but only one of them belongs to an ecclesiasticWilliam, Bishop of Valence, who bore gules with three gold pales (vertical stripes) and on the chief. or top part of the shield. which is sable, a gold leopard as in the arms of England.
Thc Cross
CO the earliest heraldry is of lay "'invention, and its devices are laymen's devices without any religious allusion. Even the cross, when it first appears, on some of the shields in the pre-heraldic Bayeux tapestry, seems not to be a symbol, but an arrangement of metal reinforcements to the structure of the shield, not differing in kind from the horizontal test, the vertical pale, and the diagonal bend, which also followed structural lines.
Of course, once a shield with a cross had come into use, it was not long before a symbolic meaning was read into it; and this emblem became so popular, especially with knights who had been on crusade, that hundreds of variants upon it were devised, and into these also pious fancy read allegorical meanings.
The famous eight-pointed cross of the Knights Hospitallers, for instance, though probably adopted merely for its geometrical beauty, was soon interpreted as an allusion to the eight beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount.
Cross potent
OST famous of all crusading crosses was that of the Christian Kings of Jerusalem, who bore a cross potent (i.e., with Tshaped arms) in a field sprinkled with little crosses. The charges here are (according to Matthew Paris) silver on a gold ground, which violates the accepted heraldic convention that metal should not be set upon metal. But the violation is deliberate : these are "arma inquirenda" challenging the question "Why break the rule?" in order that the answer may be given that this dominion is not as other kingdoms of this world.
Later on, the silver and gold were reversed and the small crosses reduced to four; and we may note that the English Bishopric of Lichfield adopts an almost identical shield, though in red and silver "countercharged per pale" (which Means silver on red in the right-hand half of the shield and red on silver in the left). Why the resemblance? The probable reason is that the old word "lich" meant a dead body (we still have lych gates to shelter the coffin at a funeral); Lichfield therefore suggests a burial ground, and justifies the Bishop in imitating the arms of the King who rules over the Holy Sepulchre.
Episcopal seals
THIS Lichfield device first I appears during the Wars of the Roses, by which time nearly all ecclesiastics of rank were bearing arms. What had brought them into the heraldic world was the use of seals for the authentication of all legal documents.
The usual form_of an episcopal seal was a vesica, formed by the intersection of two circular arcs, having on the obverse a portrait of the Bishop enthroned. Below his feet there would be a blank space, exactly the shape of a knight's shield; and it was a natural step to ornament the seal by inserting in this space the arms of the family to which the Bishop belonged.
After that it was inevitable that both the higher clergy and the religious houses should proceed from personal to official arias; and then combine the two, so that a shield would be divided like that of a husband and wife per pale. having the arms of the see or abbey on the dexter or husband's side, and the personal arms of the Bishop or abbot on the sinister.
These official arms scarcely became general before the end of the 13th century, but when they did they brought a new influx of religious symbolism into heraldry,
The pallimn
THIS symbolism sometimes related only to the dignity of the bearer. For instance all four of the metropolitan sees of England and Ireland adopted substantially the same device (though York subsequently changed it) with the archiepiscopal pallium in an azure field and the archiepiscopal cross showiug be When modem times Cardinal Vaughan matriculated arms for the see of Westminster he too chose this design, but changed the azure field of Canterbury to 4ulcs.
Mitres and croziers are of course common; Norwich, for instance, by taking three gold mitres in an azure field. alludes both to the dignity of the Bishop and to the dedication of the cathedral to the Holy Trinity.
Arms based on dedication are more interesting. At Bury St. Edmund's, for instance, where the abbey housed the relics of St. Edmund, the martyr-king of East Anglia, who was captured and made a target by the bowmen of the heathen Danes, Abbot Samson's successor, Richard de PIsle, adopted the device of a crown transfixed by art arrow.
Westminster Abbey, dedicated to St. Peter, used in the middle ages the sign of the keys; it was not till later that it adopted the legendary arms, a cross between five martlets, of its founder, St. Edward the Confessor. (Martlets, by the way, are always shown without feet, because they have been on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and have walked all the way; but whether Shakespeare's templehaunting martlets came from Solomon's Temple I do not know.)
Crossed keys
THE crossed keys (keys in salt ire in the language of blazon) appear as one would expect wherever cathedrals or monastic houses are dedicated to St. Peter. Gloucester Cathedral has them; and Henry VIII's see of Peterborough carried them on from the dissolved monastery with part of whose property it was endowed.
Often the keys (as at Winchester and Exeter) were crossed by the sword of St. Paul, whether or not he was included in the dedication, because of the indissoluble association of the two Apostles But St. Paul's Cathedral in London bears two swords in saltire, and the sword appears again, with the cross of St. George (patron of several gilds) in the arms of the City.
St. Alban's Abbey, dedicated to St. Andrew, bore his saltire, the diagonal cross on which, according to tradition, he was martyred. The same emblem (gales on silver instead of gold on azure) was used by the ancient priory of Rochester; but the scallop used by the Anglican Bishop seems to have been added later and to allude to the neighbouring oysterfisheries rather than to the cockleshell of St. James, the patron of pilgrims.
The griffin
SAINTS of lesser fame may be "found leaving their emblems on the shields of ancient religious foundations up and down the land; but there is no space to enumerate them here.
This essay may end with a hare allusion to some heraldic representations of mysteries and augustitudes lying beyond the saints.
The "pelican in her piety." which is borne by both the Corpus Christi Colleges, at Oxford and Cambridge, is a parable of the Blessed Sacrament, because it was believed that this bird wounded her own breast to nourish her young.
The most common heraldic. "monster," the griffin, half eagle and half lion. is as readers of the Fhlrgatorio know a symbol of the Incarnation and the dual Nature, the highest of the birds of heaven united with the highest of the beasts of the earth.
It is even possible that the lion alone (which appears in the earliest known example of true heraldry, the shield of Geoffrey of Anjou, father of Henry II) may sometimes hint at supernatural things. We read in the medieval bestiaries that lion cubs are born dead and comwto life only on the third day, when their father breathes on them. For some knights at any rate in the chivalric ages the lion on their shields may have stood (as it did for the bestiarists) for the power of God the Father, manifested in the resurrection of His Son.