Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/121

 THE ANCESTOR 8i of ennoblement, and a distinction is always drawn in them , between the principal object, which, following the French form, is usually nobilitare nohilemque facere^ and the addition of arms in signo hujus nohilitatis. Thus in 1389 the king receives John de Kyngeston, who has accepted the challenge of a French knight, en Vestat de Gentile Homme ^ and desires that he shall be known by arms, which accordingly are assigned to him. In the grant of 1439 two grants of 1445 have the same phrase, nohilitamus nobilesque facimus et creamus^ and the coats are bestowed in signum hujusmodi nohilitatis. These are grants to foreign subjects, but the wording is pre- cisely the same in the letters of nobility and arms which Henry VL, in 1448-9, granted to two Englishmen, Nicholas Cloos and Roger Keys, who seem to have acted as clerks of the works at King's College and Eton.^ In two later instru- ments by King James, made in 16 10 and 16 14, the fact that arms are not a necessary accompaniment of nobility is still more strongly pressed upon our notice, for the sentence insignia gentilitia nohili famili^e illius adjunximus is an acknowledgment by the Crown that a man may be noble and the descendant of a noble house, though his ancestors were not distinguished by coat armour. Another proof of this is the charter made by Humphrey Earl of Stafford in 1442, which speaks of the recipient as noble homme Robert W^hitgreve^^ndi declares its object by the words augmenter en honneur et noblesse. But indeed the point is one which hardly requires demonstration, for the heralds, who were never authorized by the Crown to make a gentleman, in their latest as well as in their earliest grants, assume that the applicant is a gentleman already.^ Mr. Fox Davies in his Armorial Families^ takes up the same ground as 'X,' and in order to prove that arms and gentility cannot exist except by concession from the Crown, refers the reader to a statement of Fuller, namely that ' in the reign of Henry V. (141 7) a Royal Proclamation was made that no man in future be allowed to bear Arms without authority.' I must beg leave to point out that the proclamation lays down no such rule. Even the incomplete and incorrect copy of it, ^ Herald and Genealogist, i. 135. ^ The fact that the heralds were making grants of arms in the fourteenth century seems to have escaped notice (Bysshe, Johannes de Bado Aureo, 1654, pp. 27, 44), owing to the fact that none of these grants have been preserved. It was generally thought that arms so granted were of no authority.