Page:Sussex Archaeological Collections, volume 6.djvu/98

 follows of supposing that distant relatives, in remote counties, and even countries, holding under distinct feudal chiefs, would, in hundreds of cases, have strangely adopted the same devices; or the equal absurdity of their wholesale fabrication, by a collusion of heralds of different ages and lands. If heraldry had originated in the twelfth century, the devices selected would, reasoning à priori, have been different from what they were. Modem family heraldry is not a new and distinctive science from the ancient, but a continuation of it, and the ordinaries are not "refinements" of modern growth, but ancient independent charges; and, indeed, no charge or "difference" (excepting canting arms) was arbitrarily assumed, but adopted from the maternal or uxorial coat; because family relationship alone, and not the feudal connexion (which was a coincidence, not a cause), was the source of each new coat. Arms seem to have been always hereditary, from the earliest times, except in certain cases, and canting arms were taken by novi homines only, and necessarily, in default of paternal arms. Probably the greater part of significant ensigns were originally of this kind. The Greeks and Romans had undoubtedly family arms, which were hereditary, and probably the Welsh heraldry is partly an inheritance from the British Romans. The military standards, borne in all ages and lands, were originally personal, afterwards, in some cases, national, and modem European blazonry is, for the most part, derived from these by composition, augmentation, and variation of display, analogously, in the same unbroken though irregular continuity, as religion, laws, language, manners, and customs. Reserving the fuller development of these arguments to an independent essay, the immediate purpose of this paper will now demand our consideration.

Of the half-dozen great families who held sway in Sussex during the Anglo-Norman periods, perhaps that of Warren is on many accounts the most interesting to the members of the Society. Without entering into Watson's speculations as to the origin of this family, in his elaborate history of that house, there can be little doubt that they first adopted the well-known chequy or and azure (No. 1), which they bore, from the princely race of Vermandois, whose coat it was, on the marriage of William, second Earl of Warren, with Isabel, daughter