In an attempt to be organised the answers for last week’s quiz are below. I hope that the captions are clear to read.
2) Lion charges
3) County coats of arms – in some cases with some rather wonderful crests.
And lets not forget the journey involves one king with more than twenty illegitimate children who appears to have had a bad reaction to a dish of lampreys and the king ‘who was not a good man and had his little ways’…no prizes for knowing which two monarchs before reading on.
Robert de Clare, the fifth son of Richard of Tonbridge and Rohese Giffard, was granted the lordship of Little Dunmow by King Henry I. So far so good! He was often at court during the later years of King Henry I’s reign but died a year before the king in 1134. He was married Matilda de Senlis a daughter of the Earl of Huntingdon who granted five acres of land to the priory at Little Dunmow after her husband’s death so that they could pray for his soul. Their son Walter gave a further ten acres of land for prayers to be said for his cousin Earl Roger de Clare (2nd Earl of Hertford).
Little Dunmow was previously a Baynard honour and had been confiscated by the crown. Geoffrey Baynard inherited eight manors from his mother but he became embroiled in a plot against King Henry I in 1111 along with Robert Malet, Lord of Eye – and lost some or all of them (more research needed there). Robert de Clare benefited from Henry’s policy of elevating younger sons to increase the debt of loyalty owed to him. The gift also had the effect, according to Hollister, of binding the whole de Clare family to him (Hollister pp.339-340)
As might be expected Walter FitzRobert was married for political and financial advantage. A wedding to Maud de Lucy bought the Lordship of Diss in Norfolk under his control. She bore him a son Robert – Robert FitzWalter was one of the key figures in the Baron’s War. According to the story John, not yet king, lusted after FitzWalter’s daughter Marian but when she spurned his advances he had her poisoned with an egg – I’ve posted about her and her father before. In due course Marian who was actually married
Walter de Clare whose family links to the de Clares would be remembered in the coming generations largely through the chevrons of the FitzWalter coat of arms had the common good sense not to become enmeshed in the Anarchy between the Empress Matilda and King Stephen even though he was one of King Stephen’s stewards. The direct line of the FitzWalters died out during the fifteenth century.
Dr Paul Fox’s wonderful book on the heraldry in the Great Cloister of Canterbury Cathedral shows the FitzWalter arms in the cloister as ‘Or a fess between two chevrons gules’. He adds that the de Clares were the first family to have adopted heraldry in the British Isles (think its page 155). And a fesse is a charge – a band which runs across the middle of the shield whilst the chevrons are an inverted “v” shape for want of a better description.
Fox, Paul A., Great Cloister A Lost Canterbury Tale, (Archaeopress, 2020)
Hartley, Alfred, ‘The Priory Church of Little Dunmow’, The Essex Review: An Illustrated Quarterly Record of Everything of Permanent Interest in the County. (E. Durant and Company, 1895) pp.167-180
Hollister, Charles Warren, Henry I,  (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2001)
Having managed to completely take leave of my senses I gave Bristol Derbyshire’s axe wielding dragon crest in error yesterday – it was swiftly remedied but I decided to have a closer look at the city’s coat of arms.
Sinister – is left, dexter is right.
So starting at the bottom we have the motto: Virtue et Industria – so virtue and industry.
The lovely green clumps of grass above the motto form the compartment.
The two unicorns (or with sable manes) are supporters holding the shield, then there’s a helm, a torse which is still not a horse despite the spell check’s best efforts anchoring the mantling into place and then the crest.
In heraldic terms the crest is ‘issuant from clouds two arms embowed and interlaced in saltire proper the dexter hand holding a serpent vert and the sinister holding a pair of scales or.’ The symbolism behind the serpent is wisdom and the scales are justice – so good governance comes from wisdom and justice.
And that leaves us with the arms which were licensed in 1569. There’s a fortified harbour and a ship – which more or less sums up what Bristol was famous for at the time given the wool trade and the commerce between England and Ireland. It also traded with Iceland and with Gascony. In 1497 John Cabot set off to North America and Bristol’s port became a focus for trade with the Americas. It was one of the ports associated with the slave trade. George III signed the act banning the slave trade on 25 March 1807 but it was only in 1833 that slavery was abolished within the British Empire and even then it was a gradual process.
First of all there is no reward for spotting that I labelled the crest for Derbyshire as the crest for Bristol – I have no idea what came over me! Many apologies. Have now amended it online.
So – to the shield – the background of the shield is called the field and it is usually made of a colour (a tincture) or a metal or a design representing a fur.
Keeping things straight forward for the time being -we’ll come back to the way the shield is divided up- a charge is then added to the field. This is the shape, object, bird or animal that identifies the shield’s owner. A colour is never put on a metal!
There may be one large charge or several smaller repeated ones.
Popular charges include; crosses, stars, rings, balls, crescents and diamonds. – except of course nothing is as straight forward as that – why call a star a star when you can call it something different!
A certain well known online encyclopaedia provides a list of heraldic charges.
Lions are a popular charge!
2) Which countries do these lions belong to?
And finally can you identify these English or Welsh county coats of arms – I’ve selected ones with repeating charges. The Derbyshire coat of arms should be no problem as he represents the fact that Derbyshire was initially founded by the Danes who came on their dragon boats (presumably not all the way to land locked Derbyshire) and there’s also a nod to the county’s mining. And of course its an opportunity to spot lozenges, lions rampant and martlets. How I managed to miss the crests for Lincolnshire and Suffolk I do not know!
Last Friday I left you with a number of crests belonging to the coats of arms of various towns, cities and counties in the UK. The crest sits above the shield, the torse (not a horse as the spell check keeps trying to tell me) and the helm. How did you do? And of course, there were some notable exceptions – the owl on Leeds crest, Hereford’s white lion and Lancaster’s sailing boat to name but a few. The next instalment will follow today.
Hawise, the suo jure Countess of Aumale was married to William de Mandeville, 3rd Earl of Essex but she had something of a reputation during her life time according to Richard of Devizes as a woman ‘who is almost a man, lacking nothing virile except the virile organs.’ Despite that she was married off on Richard the Lionheart’s orders for a second time to William de Forz, her social inferior, who was one of the king’s naval commanders. The countess was not amused. She was even less amused when after de Forz’s death in 1195 she was required to take as her third husband Baldwin de Béthune who was a crusader and also Richard’s companion in captivity – he was well born but a third son. Baldwin would die in 1212 and Hawise took the opportunity of paying a fine of 5,000 marks in instalments to avoid marriage for a fourth time.
There were rumours that the countess was King John’s mistress and that her eldest son by William de Forz was in fact John’s own progeny. The rumour arose because when Hawise died the fine she owed the king was still not fully paid – a debt of 4,000 marks was carried forward to her heir- (remember a mark is 2/3’s of a pound so – £2667 in 1214 when she died and a whopping £4,000,000 or thereabouts now) but John forgave the new earl the debt, provided him with a wealthy bride of his own who he himself dowered and forgave Aumale for siding with the barons and the French – suggesting a degree of fondness with which King John did not habitually regard his aristocracy. And yes I have posted about Hawise and her son William before and she will turn up in the book on medieval royal mistresses being published by Pen and Sword in November. So why today?
Let us return to husband number three – Baldwin de Béthune – the imprisoned crusader and buddy of King Richard I. Friendship was clearly important because as a third son he would not reasonably have expected to marry someone as wealthy as Hawise who had possession of large chunks of Normandy (until John lost most of the duchy) as well as Holderness and Craven in Yorkshire. It helped that he had taken Richard’s place in prison and that he spent rather a lot of his own money paying the king’s ransom.
During the 1170s Baldwin served in the household of Henry II’s eldest son Henry The Young King. He made a lifelong friendship with another younger son struggling to make his own way in the world – William Marshal. Like Marshal as well as serving the Young King and Henry II, Baldwin offered loyal service to the Lionheart and King John – in 1200 he was one of the guarantor’s of peace between John and King Philip of France. He can be found signing royal grants in 1201 but, again, like William Marshal he found himself in less favour with the passage of time and withdrew to his wife’s lands. Unlike Marshal no one wrote a biography of his life soon after this death so he is less well known today than his old friend.
Baldwin and Hawise had a daughter named Alice and in 1203 Baldwin and Marshal arranged that their children should marry. William Marshal the Younger who was probably fostered by Marshal’s lifelong friend would marry Alice when she came of age and the two families would be tied by blood. Alice was not her mother’s heiress but she would inherit lands, including Wantage in Berkshire (currently Oxfordshire) which King Henry II and King Richard gave to her father. Unfortunately Alice died young and in 1224 William Marshal the Younger married King Henry III’s sister Eleanor who was born in 1215. Eleanor was nine at the time of the marriage and Marshal was thirty-four. He died in 1231 when Eleanor was nineteen but there were no children from the union. Soon afterwards Eleanor took a vow of chastity which meant that her brother wouldn’t be able to find another husband for her – unfortunately she fell in love several years later and the vow made things somewhat difficult for the couple.
Want to do calculations to update costs? Try the Bank of England’s inflation calculator.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator
When William Marshal wrote his will in 1219 he had nothing to leave his beloved youngest son, Ansel or Anselm, who was about eight-years-old at the time. The earl envisaged that the boy, named after one of Marshal’s brothers, would have to carve a career for himself as he had done. He thought that the boy would work his way up to becoming a household knight and perhaps make a good marriage – he was a Marshal after all, even if not a wealthy one. In the end John d’Earley who I have posted about before protested that the earl was offering his son a bad deal. The earl left his son £140 p.a. in rents from lands in Leinster.
The boy was looked after by his elder brothers – he turns up signing charters for his second eldest brother Gilbert Marshal and then for his brother Walter. They provided him with lands so that he could marry Matilda de Bohun, the daughter of the Earl of Hereford. The de Bohun family and William Marshal II had close ties. Matilda’s age at marriage is unknown but it is almost certain that she was still a child.
All four of his brothers became Earl of Pembroke in their turn. On 27 November 1245 Walter, the brother closest to him in age died and the earldom was delivered to Ansel. But although Henry III recognised Ansel’s rights it was necessary for him to appear before the king so that he could pay the necessary homage and to pay the fines associated with license to enter his estates. Unfortunately it seems that Ansel, who was at Chepstow, was too ill to do that because he never went to court and died on 23 December 1245, just eleven days after his brother, the last of William Marshal’s sons. He was buried at Tintern Abbey.
Ansel’s failure to fulfil his feudal obligations meant that he was technically not the earl so his widow Matilda was not permitted the dower rights of a countess instead she received £60 p.a. from Ansel’s Leinster estates. Maud remarried – given her age and who she was it was almost inevitable another husband would be found for her but she continued to be known as Maud Marshal for the rest of her life which was a short one. She died in 1252 at Groby leaving her husband Roger de Quincy 2nd Earl of Winchester to marry Helen, the daughter of William Ferrers, 5th Earl of Derby soon afterwards.
And for those of you who like a mystery – were William Marshal’s sons murdered? https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/blog/the-marshal-curse-were-the-children-of-william-marshal-murdered/
Acts and Letters of the Marshal Family 1156-1248: Earls of Pembroke and Marshals of England, ed. David Crouch, Camden Society 5th series, 47 (Cambridge: CUP, 2015) p.36
The team at Pen and Sword are all lovely. At the moment I’m in the capable hands of Lucy May who is working on marketing The Son that Elizabeth I Never Had. On Wednesday I’m going to Radio Derby to talk about the book.
Listen here https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_radio_derby
to me doing Lunch With Ian Skye on BBC Radio Derby on Wednesday 17th August 12-1.
The shield is only part of a coat of arms – often the shield is at the bottom of a ‘stack’ – there may be a helm above the shield followed by a crest and a motto. The coil or wreath between the helm and the crest even has its own name – a torse – not a horse as the spell check insists that I actually mean. Fabric draped from the torse down around the helm is called mantling – mantling can be subdued or full on drapery with twiddly bits – see left.
Just to confuse matters the motto, placed on a scroll, can either go at the top of the coat of arms or at the bottom beneath the shield. The latter tends to occur if the arms is being held by two supporters – one on either side of the arms as in the lion and unicorn supporting the royal arms. The other thing that might appear beneath the shield is a ribbon or collar from which decorations may be hung – no not Christmas decorations! – medals and suchlike.
The images on the shield are called charges- I will be coming back to them.
Crests can sometimes appear on the torse above the shield without the helm just to help identify the owner. Crests often appear on retinue badges or in Scotland on clan badges. So how did that all come about? In the medieval period, the thirteenth century, it was acceptable to wear an actual crest made from a light wood or even boiled leather on top of the helmet usually for tournaments and jousts rather than real warfare – not sure how long that phase lasted as it sounds fairly silly to me – but that’s just me opinion. The mantle had a more practical use – it helped keep the sun off the back of the armour and was kept in place by the torse – so at least the knight wouldn’t fry.
This week’s quiz is to identify the crests belonging to towns, cities or counties – one or two have cropped the edges just to make it that little bit more tricky but it wasn’t a deliberate act on my part! The Telegraph had a competition to guess the coats of arms of 25 cities quite recently – I’m not a subscriber so that was as far as I got. Instead here are 12 crests for you to identify – some will be easier than others. Answers next week.
Richard of Tonbridge’s grandson Richard was the eldest son of Gilbert FitzRichard who was given the Lordship of Ceredigion by King Henry I provided he could take and hold it. After his father’s death Richard inherited assorted lands in England and Wales including the Lordships of Clare and Ceredigion. Richard paid a relief of £43 6s and 8d to enter Ceredigion(1) which interesting as it recognised the king’s authority to make the grant, which later marcher lords refuted, but whilst the records are very specific about the finances they are a little on the murky side as to whether Richard was the first Earl of Hertford or not but it’s generally accepted than neither King Henry or King Stephen elevated the baron to an earldom. Like his younger brother Gilbert, Richard was loyal to King Stephen and he benefited from that loyalty but not to the extent that Stephen was prepared to extend his land holdings in Wales – which was in ferment.
In 1136 Richard travelled through the borders in the direction of Ceredigion and was ambushed and killed . His body was transported back to Kent and buried in Tonbridge Priory which was his foundation. In between times Richard’s widow, the sister of Earl Ranulf of Chester, was forced to take shelter in Cardigan Castle before being rescued and returned to England.
Richard’s son Gilbert became the 1st Earl of Hertford whilst his younger brother Roger succeeded as the second earl. A daughter married into the Percy family. William Percy’s mother was a member of a Welsh royal family so the union had less to do with securing alliances in Yorkshire than establishing networks of kinship on the marches and in Wales. Other daughters married the earls of Lincoln and Devon reflecting the loyalties of the Anarchy between King Stephen and Empress Matilda. As the former was loyal to Stephen whilst the latter was created Earl of Devon by the Empress Matilda and turned pirate in the Isle of Wight on the empress’s behalf. Lucy de Clare was his second wife.
Richard’s descendants held the earldoms of Hertford and Gloucester until 1314 when Gilbert de Clare the 8th earl of Gloucester and 7th earl of Hertford was killed at Bannockburn. His widow, Maud de Burgh, protested pregnancy for the next three years until King Edward II called time on the possibility of there being a male de Clare heir to inherit the title.
(1) ed. White et al, p.255
White, Eryn Want, Jenkins, Geraint H., Suggest, Richard (eds.), Cardiganshire County History Volume 2: Medieval and Early Modern Cardiganshire. (Cardiff:University of Wales Press, 2019)