Page:A record of European armour and arms through seven centuries (Volume 2).djvu/203

 and coat and trapper took the new tints of armoury the crest came back to a helm, the round or flat top of which was ready to receive it.

Richard Cœur-de-Lion, the first of our kings to bear on his red shield the three golden leopards, is seen on his last seal wearing a crested helm (see vol. i, Fig. 145, a, b). It is an antiquity among crests, this of King Richard. The helm, as it would seem, has a ridged comb rounded to a half-circle, the edge set off with pen-feathers, the side bossed or painted with one of the leopards of the king's arms. Yet the new fashion came slowly into England, and XIIIth century seals and pictures have few crests to show us. The knight is not yet sure that the crest is a part of his armorial devices, to be inherited with his shield. The armourer will make a winged wyvern to sit on the helm of the Earl of Winchester; but he will make another of the same brood for another earl. Of all those great lords who seal in 1301 the English magnates' letter to the Pope, only five give us examples of crested helms, and two of these are the Earl of Lancaster and Henry his brother, each with the wyvern. But John St. John of Halnaker put a leopard on his helm between two palm branches; Ralph of Monthermer is crested with the eagle of his arms, a like crest nodding between his horse's ears. These are true crests for the heralds' books, which can take no account of those fan or scallop-shell crests which might be made by the dozen before a tournament.

King Edward III's costly play of Round Tables and knightly feasts soon gave a crest to the helm of every spendthrift knight who had the fancy of the time for splendid toys. With cord or boiled leather, or moulded and varnished parchment, with paint and gold leaf, the maker of crests set about fashioning any strange device that might be to the taste of the warrior and the jouster. The seal-engraver, then come to the height of his beautiful art, took kindly to the new crests. He set the crest upon the great helm, below which hung the shield of arms, flanked by the grotesque reptiles and the like, which soon became counted, as supporters, a part of that armoury which enriched all things from the lord's gate-tower to his bed and his thumb-ring. To this day there are ancient English houses which have no tradition of their use of any crest; even as, in the XVth century, there were men who, though gentlemen born of free blood, had no care to take any device for a shield. Yet crests were in plenty. Archbishops and bishops are seen sealing with seals that have crested helms, the crests of which sometimes lift themselves from the cleft of the mitre. A priest might not wear a helm. Nor might a woman. There are mediaeval seals with helm and crest for woman and for priest. But we may count this bad heraldry. At the end of