Page:Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, Etc., with an Appendix Containing a Rare Tract.djvu/64

 of Astbury was uncle of Sir Thomas, alias Oskatel, the father of Isabella; and it would be a strange circumstance if an uncle should have assumed a crest bearing allusion to the adoption of an illegitimate child. Supposing Sir Oskatel to have been the son of Sir Thomas, instead of Sir Thomas himself, the fact of Philip bearing the crest would be still more extraordinary. That there was an Oskel or Oskatel Lathom, who bore as his crest an eagle standing on a child, is proved by the painting formerly in the windows of Northenden Church, 1580,—viz., an eagle sinister, regardant, rising, standing on a child, swaddled, placed on a nest; inscribed, "Oskell Lathum" (Harl. MS. 2151, fol. 10). But this may have been because it was the old Lathom crest; and the eagle seems to have been from a remote period a favourite cognisance of the family. The Torbocks, the younger branch of the Lathoms, took an eagle's claw for a difference on the family shield; and the grant of Witherington by Sir Thomas Lathom, sen., reputed further of Sir Oskatel, was sealed with the Lathom arms on an eagle's breast. But a legend of the eagle and child is as old as the time of King Alfred—several centuries earlier than the time of the De Lathoms:—"One day as Alfred was hunting in a wood, he heard the cry of a little infant in a tree, and ordered his huntsmen to examine the place. They ascended the branches, and found at the top, in an eagle's nest, a beautiful child dressed in purple, with golden bracelets (the marks of nobility) on his arms. The King had him brought down and baptized and well educated. From the accident he named the foundling Nestingum. His grandson's daughter is said to have been one of the ladies for whom Edgar indulged an improper passion." If for Edgar we read Oscital, the Danish prince, this would complete