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ART. II.-1. The Fursuivant of Arms, or Heraldry founded
upon Facts.
By J. R. PLANCHE, Rougecroix.
Edition. London: 1859.

Second

2. Heraldry, Historical and Popular. By the Rev. CHARLES BOUTELL, M.A. Third edition, revised and enlarged. London: 1865.

3. The Herald and Genealogist. Edited by JOHN GOUGH NICHOLS, F. S. A. London: 1862-5.

4. The Law and Practice of Heraldry in Scotland. By GEORGE SETON, Advocate, M. A. Oxon, F. S. A. Scot., &c. Edinburgh: 1863.

5. Descriptive Catalogue of Impressions from Ancient Scottish Seals, Royal, Baronial, Ecclesiastical, and Municipal, embracing a Period from A. D. 1094 to the Commonwealth. Taken from original Charters and other Deeds preserved in public and private Archives. By HENRY LAING. Edinburgh: 1850.

'HAPPY,' says Jean Paul Richter, is the man who can 'trace his lineage ancestor by ancestor, and cover hoary 'time with a mantle of youth!' The love to trace the links that connect us with the past, and to make acquaintance with the names and history of those without whom we should not have been, is one of man's most natural instincts. It may be quite independent of any idea of illustrious ancestry. Benjamin Franklin had no sooner arrived in England on a weighty political mission, than he hastened to the country to ascertain every fact that he could pick up regarding the line of yeomen from whom he was sprung, and many an obscure English family history has, in our own days, been carefully studied and illustrated by its American descendants. But it is natural to expect that the desire to know something of one's progenitors will be proportionally stronger when they have been among the great and renowned of their day. Every country has had its career more or less moulded by some leading families, whose histories must be read aright in order to understand that of the nation, and whose hereditary idiosyncrasies have helped to form the national character. And while family history supplies the most valuable materials for national history, a knowledge of genealogy is absolutely necessary to understand any nation's political compli cations. Without the aid of a genealogical chart, it were vain to attempt to comprehend the wars of York and Lancaster, the claim of Edward III. to the throne of France, the tragic history

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of Lady Jane Grey, or the events which brought about the union of the Scottish with the English crown.

Closely connected with the history of nations and families is the subject of difference of social rank. The condition of society has at all times and in all countries been one of inequality. In the heroic days of Greece we have a glimpse of families or races of larger, stronger, more vigorous men ruling over the rest of the community. In ancient Rome there were two great classes, corresponding in their origin with the new settlers and the old inhabitants of the country. The broadly marked difference between the nobleman or gentleman and the rest of the community is one of the most prominent features of medieval life, and the source from which the less abrupt variations of rank in modern society have sprung. This distinction, which seems in its origin to have been in part at least one of race, was developed by feudalism, which made land its necessary support and adjunct. According to feudal ideas the whole land came to be considered the property of the sovereign, from whom it was held under the obligation of military service, with or without attendance at his court to do homage and assist in the business transacted there. The tenants-in-chief of the crown were called Barons: they dispensed justice within the limits of their barony as miniature sovereigns. Some of them might hold the office or dignity of Comes, count or earl, implying jurisdiction over an extensive province; or the still higher dignity of Dux, or duke, implying the duty of leading the armies of the country: but all were barons or tenants of the crown. Some of the more considerable barons, particularly such as enjoyed the dignity of earl or duke, had other vassals, barons of the barons, holding of them by the same military tenure by which they held of the sovereign, and bound to attend the courts of their immediate superior. By a constitution generally resembling what we have described, though varying in its detail in different parts of Europe, society was held together in feudal times. The landholder was the nobleman or gentleman: the smallest tenant of land by military service participated in all the privileges of nobility, an impassable barrier being placed between him and the common people. The right to bear a coat of arms was, like the jus imaginum of the Romans, the distinctive privilege of the nobly born. Nobiles,' says Sir Edward Coke, 'sunt qui arma gentilicia ' antecessorum suorum proferre possunt.' Or, to use the words of Sir James Lawrence, Any individual who distinguishes

Nobility of the British Gentry. By Sir James Lawrence, Knight of Malta, p. 3. 4th edition, London: 1840.

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C himself may be said to ennoble himself. A prince judging an individual worthy of notice gave him patent letters of nobility. In these letters were blazoned the arms that were to distin'guish his shield. By this shield he was to be known, or nobilis. A plebeian had no blazonry on his shield, because he was ignobilis, or unworthy of notice. . . . Hence arms are the cri'terion of nobility. Every nobleman must have a shield of arms. Whoever has a shield of arms is a nobleman. In every country of Europe, without exception, a grant of arms or letters of nobility is conferred on all the descendants.' On the Continent, as formerly in our own country,* the term noble' is still used in this sense; by later usage in England it has, on the other hand, become the common though less correct practice to restrict the word nobleman' and 'nobility' to members of the peerage, gentility in its strict sense corresponding to the nobility of Sir James Lawrence and continental countries. This difference of usage has not unfrequently been the source of a ridiculous confusion of ideas on the other side of the Channel, particularly at some of the minor German courts, where we have heard of a member of the British aristocracy, of the most ancient and distinguished lineage, in respect that he was not himself a peer, and therefore not noble' in the common English acceptation, having to give the pas to a Baron' or Herr von' who had newly received his patent of nobility along with his commission in the army. The confusion in question has in part sprung out of the greater prevalence of titles of nobility, in modern times, in most parts of the Continent, and their use in Germany, Russia, and largely also in Italy, by every member, however remote, of the family to whom they belong. A baron' in Germany is heraldically (we do not now allude to his social status) something very different from a baron in England. Baron' was, as we have already observed, originally the designation of every feudal vassal of the crown. All held by military service, but in England, as elsewhere, a limited number, called the Greater Barons, were summoned to aid the sovereign in the council as well as in the field. They became eventually the House of Lords, the lesser barons being

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See, for example, grant of arms, quoted in the 'Excerpta Historica,' from Henry VI. to Roger Keys, clerk, and Thomas Keys, his brother, in 1439, for certain services rendered in building Eton College, by which the King did ennoble, and make, and create ⚫ noble the said Roger and Thomas Keys and the descendants of the latter, and, in sign of such nobility,' gave them the arms there described and other distinctions to noblemen due and accus'tomed.'

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allowed to appear by representatives of their number in the House of Commons. The designation Commons' and the absence of title have often misled foreigners to suppose that the men who gained their liberties and constitution for the English people were the roturiers,' while in reality they came from the élite of the class who would be called in continental phraseology noble. The class in Germany corresponding to the peers, or higher nobility, of England were the electoral and princely houses of the empire, and such of the immediate counts and barons of the empire as had seats in the estates of the realm, and were known as the Dynastien-Adel.' The representatives of the Dynasty Barons have all in recent times been elevated to higher titles, mostly as the reward of their acquiescence in the dismemberment of the German Empire. Even the immediate counts and barons of the empire, entitled to display a square banner in the field, and possessed of a gallows with four posts, provided they had no seat in the Diet, ranked among the lower nobility of Germany, corresponding to the English gentry. Among the other classes of lower nobility are comprised the Knights of the Holy Roman Empire, whose gallows had but two posts, and whose descendants all now take the designation of baron (which in Germany has been extended beyond its original signification, instead of having been restricted as in England), as also what is popularly styled the Bullen-Adel,' or diploma nobility, that is, the titular counts and barons, who are such merely in virtue of a diploma granting them the title, either from the Emperor or a minor German potentate, and a numerous class, constituting the lowest degree of gentry, who have no distinctive title except the prefix ' von' attached to their surnames.* The superior social position of the British nobility, lesser and greater, to those of the Continent has always been sufficiently marked: a very large proportion of our eminent men in all departments, not merely generals and statesmen, but poets and authors, have been heraldically gentlemen. The nobility of France may claim a few individuals of note, but for a long time back Germany has only produced one or two men of mark who enjoyed the prerogative of birth.

A marked distinction has obtained from early times among the lower nobility of Germany, between those who do not and those who do owe any feudal service of a ministerial or non-military kind. Such service, even if due to the Emperor himself, has been considered to involve a certain amount of degradation to the individual subject to it and to all his family, incapacitating them for intermarriage with the higher nobility.

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Heraldry, the symbol or indication of nobility or gentility, grew up side by side with feudalism. The armorial shield shed a halo of poetry around the pursuits of war. The heavenly luminaries, the flowers of the field, the animals of the east and west, the emblems of holy warfare, whatever was familiar to the eye of the pilgrim or the crusader, the shells picked up on the coast of Syria, the bags or budgets' in which water was conveyed across the desert, and the symbol of the Christian faith itself, all had their reflex on the knightly escutcheon. Before long, arms constituted a thorough system for distinguishing, in the first place, family from family, and then one branch of a family from another, becoming faithful chroniclers of the history both of royal dynasties and of private families. Every change in the hereditary succession of a kingdom, every fresh accession of territory, every union of two houses by marriage, occasioned a corresponding change in the coat-of-arms; the position which each member of the house occupied in the family tree was duly indicated; and a heraldic shield became a record whose nice distinctions asserted to all who understood its language, as well as words could do, a number of material facts regarding the owner of it.

All this Heraldry was; and we may add, all this it is, for Heraldry is not to be looked on as defunct: it is a legacy from our ancestors which should be carefully preserved by us as a curious and valuable connecting link with the past. Though the helmet and shield have no longer all the significance that they had when in actual use, they still come to us with strong hereditary claims to our recognition. We still have our heralds and kings-at-arms to preserve a record of our public and private genealogies, and to preside over the assumption of armorial insignia. A coat-of-arms is still the mark of gentility or nobility. Although it be the boast of our gentry, or lesser nobility, as well as of our greater nobility, that they receive into their ranks with open arms the eminent and the meritorious, whatever their lineage, the possession of insignia gentilicia is still the legal test of gentility; and one of the duties delegated by the sovereign to the officers of arms is to assign appropriate insignia to all who have acquired a social importance that entitles them to take their place among the gentlemen of coatarmour of the country, which will become a bond of union to their family, to preserve their name and memory among their descendants.

After occupying for ages the attention of the learned, Heraldry fell into notable neglect and disrepute in the eighteenth century its study, once an essential branch of a princely

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