Page:The Ancestor Number 1.djvu/89

 THE ANCESTOR 49 bends which in some coats lie beside the bend are called cotises, what remains of the tribe of illegitimate descendants credited by the handbooks to the ' ordinaries ' ? Pallets and endorses, bendlets and ribands, barrulets, closets, escarpes, and the like should be brought to the bar of modern archaeology charged with loitering in print without visible means of, or necessity for, existence. The flasques and voiders which are reckoned diminutives of the flaunch owe their origin to the practice of those armorists who, finding a second word or even a second spelling for the name of a charge, hastened to construct a new charge out of their trouvaille. Of the quarter Mr. Cussans, a typical armorist, tells us that ^ examples of this charge are very rarely to be met with.* They are rare indeed in such books as that of Mr. Cussans, but in ancient heraldry this is invariably the word for the frequently occurring charge lately called the canton^ and the word will serve us well enough for this charge, whilst the pedant's word canton for ' the diminutive of the quarter ' will be dispensed with when we consider that, as has been said before, the size of ' ordinaries ' varies freely with the nature of the composition, and the word quarter commits us to no rule for filling a fourth part of the shield's surface with the charge. The lozenge is set down for us as a diminutive of the fusil, the fusil being described as an elongated lozenge. This again being one of those rules which would cramp the artist's free- dom in drawing his charges, we may regard it with a natural suspicion. A fusil, we find, is a term for which we have no need unless it serves us as a word for those shuttle shaped divisions into which the ancient ' engrailing ' divided bends and fesses. Its cousin the rustre, being only encountered in dictionaries of heraldry, need not trouble us. A fret in its modern sense of a heraldic device formed of two bastons laced through a mascle is another ' ordinary ' to be rejected of the antiquary and the artist. The ancient figure the fret, or fretty as it was more frequently termed, formed by the interlacing of some six crossing bastons, is the sole figure of the kind discoverable before the making of the dictionaries of arms. Planche himself is entrapped by the assumption of the armorist that the modern figure followed the use of the middle ages, and blunders sadly when he lays down that Harington's fret may be the descendant of an earlier ' fretty ' coat.