Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/84

 44 THE ANCESTOR their philosophy as a crack-brained pedantry, what remains of their authority as it comes down to us filtered through the handbooks of heraldry ? When we find them, and them alone, responsible for the whole ragbag of jargonings which, as Sir Peter le Neve said in his wrath, cumber the memory without adding to the understanding, we shall surely hasten to reject the laws and rules with which they stuffed the little science of blazonry until it swelled into a sort of mad Euclid. Then it will be that the medieval blazonry, unmuddied by those middens of paper and ink, will assert its reasonable claims to the attention of antiquaries. First of these claims is its sim- plicity — in the space of an hour or two any man with his wits about him can learn all that he needs of it. It sets the great period of heraldry before us as our standard, and the heraldry that showed itself in the jousting yard and the fields of France is gloriously different from the heraldry of the study. Above all things, it enables us to deal in reasonable fashion with the monuments, the seals, the carvings and the illumi- nations which we are at last beginning to study as something more to us than a peepshow for Dryasdust. Examples of the need for a wider knowledge of old heraldry are not far to seek. It is not long since the Dean of York put forth a great sumptuous book on the important subject of the heraldry of York Minster, illustrated with the most beautiful pictures we have yet seen of ancient armorial glass. But being ignorant of our old English heraldry with a curiously compre- hensive ignorance, the Dean, handbook to aid, not only essays the description of the medieval arms in glass and stone which so enrich the minster, but, heartened by his success, pads his folio with an ample treatise on armory, of which it may be said that Sir John Ferne or Sylvanus Morgan might have fathered it pridefuUy. In another field, and that a far more important one, I cannot but cite the six heavy volumes which the British Museum has issued as a catalogue of the seals deposited there. These laboriously wrought books, which must represent years of work, are a sad monument of the unwisdom of putting old wine into new bottles and attempting to decipher the seals of the men of the middle ages by the light of the farthing candles of the 'handbooks of heraldry.' At the outset of our study of medieval armory we meet a difficulty in the fact that our earliest examples of blazonry are written as a rule in the French speech, which was so long in