How are family Crests and coat
of arms are passed down through the generations? By the custom of the middle ages the "whole coat,"
belonged to one man only and was inherited
whole only by his heirs. Younger branches differed in many ways,
following no rule. In modern armory the label is reckoned a difference
proper only to an eldest son. But in older times, although the label was
very commonly used by the son and heir apparent, he often chose another
distinction during his father’s lifetime, while the label is sometimes
found upon the shields of younger sons. Changing the colors or varying
the number of charges, drawing a bend over the shield or
adding a border are common differences of cadet lines. Beauchamp, earl
of Warwick, bore “Gules with a fesse and six crosslets gold.” His
cousins are seen changing the crosslets for billets. 
Although no general register of arms was’ maintained it is remarkable
that there was little conflict between persons who had chanced to
assume, the same arms. The famous suit in which Scrope, Grosvenor and
Carhinow all claimed the blue shield with the golden bend is well
known, and there are a few cases in the 14th century of like disputes.
which were never carried to the courts. But the men of the middle ages
would seem to have had marvelous memories for blazonry; and we know
that rolls of arms for reference, some of them the records of
tournaments, existed in great numbers. A few examples of these remain.
to us, with painted shields or descriptions in French blazon, some of
them containing many hundreds of names and arms.
To women were assigned, as a rule, the
arms of their
fathers. In the early days of armory married women, well-born spinsters
of full age were all but unknown outside the walls of religious houses, have seals on which
appear the shield of the husband or the father or both shields side by
side. But we have some instances of the shield in which two coats of
arms are parted or, to use the modern phrase, “impaled.”
The arms of Pinkeny being an indented fesse, we
may see in this shield the parted arms of husband and wife, the latter
being probably a Basset. In many of the earliest examples, as in this,
the dexter half of the husband’s shield was united with the sinister
half of that of the wife, both coats being, as modern antiquaries have
it, dimidiated. This “dimidiation,” however, had its inconvenience. With
some coats it was impossible. lithe wife bore arms with a quarter for
the only charge, her half of the shield would be blank. Therefore the practice was early abandoned by, the majority of bearers of parted
shields although there is a survival of it in the fact that borders and tressures continue to be “dimidiated “ in order that the charges within them shall not be
cramped.
The practice of marshalling arms by quartering spread in England by
reason of the example given by Eleanor, wife of Edward I., who displayed
the castle of Castile quartered with the lion of Leon. Isabel of France,
wife of Edward II., seals with a shield in whose four quarters are the
arms of England, France, Navarre and Champagne. Early in the ,4th
century Simon de Montague, an ancestor of the earls of Salisbury,
quartered with his own arms a coat of azure with a golden griffon. In
1340 we have Laurence Hastings, earl of Pembroke, quartering with the
Hastings arms the arms of Valence, as heir of his great-uncle Aymer,
earl of Pembroke. In the preceding year the king had already asserted
his claim to another kingdom by quartering France with England, and
after this quartered shields became common in the great houses whose
sons were carefully matched with heirs female. When the wife was an heir
the husband would quarter her arms with his own, displaying, as a rule, the more important coat in the first quarter. Marshalling becomes more elaborate with shields
showing both quarterings and partings, as in the seal (1368) of Sibil
Arundel, where Arundel (Fitzalan) is quartered with the arms of
Montague.
The last detail to be noted in medieval marshalling is the
introduction into the shield of another surmounting shield called by old
armorists the innerscocheon and by modern blazoners the inescutcheon.
John the Fearless, count of Flanders, marshalled his
arms in 1409 as a quartered shield of the new and old coats of Burgundy.
Above these coats a little scocheon, borne over the crossing of the
quartering lines, had the black lion of Flanders, the arms of his
mother. Richard Beauchamp, the adventurous earl of Warwick, who had seen
most European courts during his wanderings, may have had this shield in
mind when, over his arms of Beauchamp quartering Newburgh, he set a
scocheon of Clare quartering Despenser, the arms of his wife Isabel
Despenser, co-heir of the earls of Gloucester. The seal of his
son-in-law, the King-Maker, shows four quarters: Beauchamp quartering
Clare, Montague quartering Monthermer, Nevill alone, and Newburgh
quartering Despenser.
Family Crests Home