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 THE ANCESTOR 83 lords of manors invented arms for themselves, and gave or allowed them to the free tenants who fought under their banners. As time went on, long usage was held to confer a proprietory right ; a coat of arms became by law an estate of inheritance ; assignments or alienations of arms by subjects were acknowledged in the Chancery ; and the Court of Chivalry gave redress to those whose family bearings had been usurped by others. Yet even as late as the fifteenth century the Crown was not the sole fount of honour. Some of the greater nobles still maintained their own heralds and bestowed arms upon their feudal followers. Camden gives the text of a grant by Humphrey Earl of Stafford, dated August 13, 1442, and in the previous reign John Edom, esquire, of Hertfordshire, had an escutcheon of arms conferred upon him ' in the presence of the Earl of Pembroke,' who was probably the donor.^ Other persons, as the proclamation of 141 3 clearly shows, did not feel the need of any authority, but in accordance with the older custom ' took what arms they pleased.' Ferne, in his Blazon of Gentrie^ speaks of a calendar of one of the Inns of Court in 1422, which gave in the margin the arms of all the members. He offers this as proof of his statement that none but ' gentle- men of blood ' were then admitted ; but of course it is only another indication of what we had already reason to suspect, namely that lawyers at that period considered that every man had a legal right to devise arms for himself. Heraldic custom in other countries seems to have been very much the same as in England. It appears by the Act of 1430 that in Scotland every freeholder was expected to possess a ' sele of his armys.' ^ In the fourteenth century the free peasantry of Switzerland furnished some of the best fighting men in the world, and these little landowners, when they contracted to serve as men-at-arms in Italy or France, usually placed some armorial bearing upon their shields. In Germany the mayor of every little city such as Rothenburg, invented a coat of arms for himself, and had it painted upon the walls of the Rathhaus. In Holland, in Castile, and amongst the Basques, every one seems to have adopted arms by his own authority and at his own pleasure. French and German books upon heraldry published in the sixteenth century complain of the ^ Young's Gre^ and Hastings (i 841), p. 30. ^ (1586), 24. 3 Acts Pari Scot. ii. 19.