With the accession of the Tudors armory began a
rapid decadence. Heraldry ceased to play its part in military affairs,
the badges and banners under which the medieval noble’s retinue came
into the field were banished, and even the tournament in its later days
became a renascence pageant which did not need the painted shield and
armorial trappers. Treatises on armory had been rare in the days before
the printing press, but even so early a writer as Nicholas Upton
had shown himself as it were unconcerned with the heraldry that any
than might see in the camp and the street. From the Book of St Albans
onward the treatises on armory are informed with a pedantry which
touches the point of crazy mysticism in such volumes as that of
Sylvanus Morgan. Thus came into the books those long lists of
diminutions of ordinaries, the closets and escarpes, the endorses and
ribands, the many scores of strange crosses and such wild fancies as the
rule, based on an early German pedantry, that the tinctures in peers
shields should be ‘given the names of precious stones and those in the
shields of sovereigns the names of planets, Blazon became encumbered with
that vocabulary whose French of Stratford atte Bowe has driven serious
students from a business which, to use a phrase as true as it is
hackneyed, was at last "abandoned to the coach painter and the
undertaker."
With the false genealogy came in the assumption or assigning of
shields to which the new bearers had often no better claim than lay in a
surname resembling that of the original owner. The ancient system of
differencing arms disappeared. Now and again we see a second son obeying
the book rules and putting a crescent in his shield or a third son
displaying a molet, but long before our own times the practice was
disregarded, and the most remote kinsman of a gentle house displayed the
“whole coat “ of the head of his family.
The art of armory had no better fate. An absurd rule current for some
three hundred years has ordered that the helms of princes and knights
should be painted full-faced and those of peers and gentlemen sidelong.
Obeying this, the herald painters have displayed the crests of knights
and princes as sideways upon a full-faced helm; the wreath,
instead of being twisted about the brow of the helm, has become a
sausage-shaped bar see-sawing above the helm; and upon this will be
balanced a crest which might puzzle the ancient craftsman to mould in
his leather or parchment. A ship on a lee-shore with a thunderstorm
lowering above its masts may stand as an example of such devices.
As with the
crest, so with the shield. It became crowded with ill-balanced figures
devised by those who despised and ignored the ancient examples whose
painters had followed instinctively a simple and pleasant convention.
Landscapes and seascapes, musical lines, military medals and corrugated
boiler-flues have all made their appearance in the shield. Even as on
the signs of public houses, written words have taken the place of
figures, and the often-cited arms exemplified to the first Earl Nelson
marked, it may be hoped, the high watermark of these distressing
modernisms. Of late years, indeed, official armory in England has shown
a disposition to follow the lessons of the archaeologist, although the
recovery of medieval use has not yet been as successful as in Germany,
where for a long generation a school of vigorous armorial art has
flourished.
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