Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/78

 38 THE ANCESTOR This, in a word, is what has happened. Heraldry, which was feeling its way stiffly and uncertainly when Matthew Paris first made a pictured list of English arms, came towards the end of the thirteenth century into the hands of the artists who brought it at once into line with the graceful decoration of the day. The work of this school develops, as the years pass, to the vigorously drawn shields of the time of the Edwardian wars in France, which time saw the increase of the custom of quartering arms. But heraldry was child of the whole blood of the middle ages, and with the middle ages the art crumbles away. Some flamboyant pieces of the fifteenth century take the eye, but the end is at hand, and here the monstrous regiment of the books written round about heraldry begins to assert itself. Master Mumblazon has nibbed his quill, and so have John of Guildford, Nicholas Upton and Dame Julian Barnes of St. Albans. The Wars of the Roses were making tatters of the old coats, a new gentry was arising, and the heralds were up and at work. Richard III. made a corporation of these heralds, and it is but fair to say that certain of its earlier members strove hard to set up again a fallen art, so that a certain re- naissance of heraldry may be observed under the seventh and eighth Henries. But the arms granted by the heralds were overloaded with charges, and cumbered especially by the fancy for capping already crowded fields with a crowded chief. Decoration lost its balanced ease and became lumpish and stodgy. The books about heraldry and the growing mass of official precedent were too much for the art, and the little science became dropsical with words. The ancient words were mistaken and misplaced and hustled by hundreds of newly minted absurdities. The end may be said to have come when the Elizabethan heralds and their followers, for the magnifying of an office already somewhat blown upon, set themselves de- liberately to change the customs of blazonry for a code with a thousand laws, a species of augurs' slang whose key and con- trol should rest with them, although country squires might reverently spell out some of its mysteries from the big bibles of the faith. From that time an antiquary's interest in heraldry may well cease, and we need not follow it as it went at a hand gallop to the point at which, to use our grandfathers' elegantly turned and perfectly truthful phrase, it was ' abandoned to the coach- painter and the undertaker.'