Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/274

 214 THE ANCESTOR unsolvable puzzle, and when such a word as parmy^ used in no obscure context, is passed up as a discovered 'curiosity — worth consideration,' we begin to doubt whether he can have any French ' but of the furthest end of Norfolk,' and to glance through the book for examples of the errors which guesswork will produce. These are not far to seek. * Foilles de gletuers ' should be ' foilles de gletners ' = burdock leaves, and the entry puzzles Mr. Foster under both of the surnames into which he splits the same family of Lisle. But a deeper pitfall has been stumbled into in dealing with the ' cheyne ' or oak tree which is the punning coat of the well known house of Cheyndutt or Chenduyt. Two pictured versions are given of this shield. In the one the links of a stout chain hang from top to bottom of the shield. In the other something more medieval is attempted, and we have in place of the chain a narrow pale marked out with a pattern which suggests an ancient conven- tion for a chain where it does not suggest a cribbage board. Another version of this unfortunate word turns up to worry Mr. Foster under the heading Okstede or Oakstead, a name which should have afforded a clue. Mr. Foster's own view of blazon and his slight acquaintance with its earlier practice produce something short of chaos. His belief that ' fret ' and ' fretty ' indicated two separate chargings even in the middle ages makes him detect continual discre- pancies between the pictured coats and the blazoned coats. For Robert Dene's slanting quarter, or quarter embelify he invents a cumbrous blazon of per bend sinister enhanced ! Checkered chiefs which are pictured with two rows only of checkers he calls counter-compony and essays to distinguish them from checkered chiefs. It troubles him to find that bends engrailed are found in pictures to be what he feels bound to call bends fusilly or lozenges in bend. Burele in the old French becomes the curious French-English burulee^ and in such burele coats the author counts what he styles the barrulets with his pencil point and announces the result of his sum as though the number possessed some armorial significance. The fact that the family of Wodeburgh alone offers a differ- ing total for each example found of their shield conveys no lesson to Mr. Foster. In the presence of an odd-looking charge even handbook heraldry sometimes fails him, and finding a blunt looking pile in a certain coat of a Kentish man he is driven to find words for it as ' a chief pily.* The /