Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/125

 THE ANCESTOR 85 them and exhibit them upon his belongings.^ This author was the most celebrated Jurist of his time, and gives references to the various statutes and leading cases upon which his opinion is based. Arms, he informs us, were invented, like surnames, for the purpose of distinguishing one individual from another, and as a man may take upon himself a surname, so also he may take arms at his pleasure. See /. ad cognoscen- dum C, de ingenuis manumissis. By use such arms become the bearer's property, and another may not adopt them if the first be injured thereby. In illustration of this point he tells an interesting story, which it will be better to give in his own words. ' For example, a certain German in time of indulgence (no doubt the jubilee year, 1300) went to Rome, where he found some Italian bearing the arms and ensigns of his ancestors, and he wishes to make plaint of this. Truly, he was not able, for such is the distance between either place or domicile, that for this reason the first could not suffer hurt.' Priority of use, according to our author, furnished the only good tide to a coat of arms, but in case of dispute, if this could not be clearly demonstrated by either party, he who could show a grant from the prince of the country was to be preferred. Bartholus had himself received a grant from the Emperor Charles IV., to whom he was a councillor, and the view he expresses must have been that held at the Imperial Court, as well as in Italy, where he was born. The earliest English writer upon these subjects, John of Guildford, whose little book was commenced before 1394 at the instance of Anne, the queen of Richard II., limits the power of assump- tion in the same way, asserting that no one can take the arms of another person resident within the same kingdom.^ His master in the art of heraldry, Francis de Foveis, or Foea, in a Another Englishman, Nicholas Upton, who issued his De Militari Officio before 1446, deals more carefully with the 'oft mooted question ' whether arms given by princes are * of greater or less dignity than arms assumed on a man's own authority.' His remarks like those of Bartholus and John of ^ Quilibet potest sibi assumere arma, et insignia ilia portare, et in rebus suis impingere. Bysshe, Notes on Upton (1654), PP- 4> Later commenta- tors considered this statement to be too wide, and that villeins or rustics should have been excluded from it. ^ Bysshe, Johannes de Bado Aureo (1654), P* 44-
 * Treatise concerning Arms ' had expressed the same opinion.