Page:Sussex Archaeological Collections, volume 6.djvu/107

 at the county election as freeholders of west Sussex. Edward Cobden,, Chaplain to George II, and Archdeacon of Middlesex, was of a family long seated at West Dean, and he is a collateral ancestor of Richard Cobden, Esq.,

The of Hixted and Framfield are supposed to have sprung originally from East Sussex: in the catalogue of the Battle Abbey deeds, the name occurs frequently in the fifteenth century. As they bore three boars' heads it would seem, at first sight, that their use by them arose in the same way as those we have been speaking of. But these are arms evidently of appropriation, and not of inheritance. The Stapleys of Battle and the neighbourhood were tanners, and smiths, and yeomen; and on their rise in the social scale in the sixteenth century, they assumed a coat of arms (it does not appear by any grant or exemplification from the College of Arms), which are an obvious plagiarism from the ancient family of Staplegh of Staplegh, in Cheshire, who bore 3 boars' heads, and which were intended, as indeed some pedigrees assert, to create the belief that the Sussex family was an offshoot of the Cheshire stock. But the Sussex Stapleys surrounded their boars' heads with a bordure engrailed, either as a mark of original cadency, or to cover, by an ambiguous variation, the assumption. Indeed the baronetical family of Patcham seem to have been aware of the apocryphal origin of their coat-armour, for they had a grant from the heralds of different charges altogether.

. This name was first assumed by the owners of the lordship of Goring, in the time of Henry III, (Cart. W, Suss., ii, 36.) The heiress of the elder line carried the lordship of Goring to her husband, Henry Tregoze, temp. Edward I. The arms now borne by the Goring family, a chevron between 3 annulets (9), are probably one of several similar coats, borne by different offsets, who took the names of the estates they inherited or acquired.

Sir John de, who lived in the reign of Edward III, it may reasonably be presumed, was of this family from his name and arms, the latter being argent 3 annulets sable, on a canton of the second, a mullet of the first (10). (Vide Hasted's Kent, V, 74.)

The family of Tregoze, according to the Roll of arms,