298 HERALDIC SCIENCE. 



Athens, the Crocodile of Egypt, and the Dove of Assyria, but the devices 

 with which their bucklers were covered were not transmissible from father 

 to son. These figures, which the celebrated warriors of Rome represented 

 upon their arms as the insignia of their warlike achievements, were selected 

 at the bidding of fancy. We may, however, cite, as a unique instance of 

 a patrimonial emblem, the crow which was worn on the crests of their helmets 

 by the descendants of Valerius Corvinus, to whom tradition attributed a 

 singular victory achieved by the intervention of one of these birds of evil 

 omen. 



When the age of feudalism set in, it became the custom to distinguish 

 by means of various signs, bright colours being as a rule used, the military 

 shields and insignia, so as to provide rallying-points for the troops during the 

 thick of the fight. These decorative paintings, in which may be discerned 

 the germ of armorial bearings, were at first styled cognisances, or entrc-sains, 

 and they were all the more necessary as the vantailks, or eyelets, of the armet 

 (closed helmet) quite hid the face of the wearer. 



Here and there, in the chronicles of the Middle Ages, are to be found 

 traces of the cognisances, but at the epoch when they first appear in history 

 these different signs, all of a very simple kind, were not used to form the 

 special combinations which afterwards became the exclusive appanage of such 

 and such a family, and which fixed the principles of heraldic science. They 

 were, so to speak, public property, and any one who chose could appropriate 

 them. Master Jean de Garlande, who wrote in 1080 a very curious descrip- 

 tion of Paris, relates that the " dealers in bucklers, who supplied their goods 

 to all the towns of France, sold to the chevaliers shields covered with cloth, 

 leather, and pinchbeck, upon which were painted lions and fleurs-de-lis." 

 Thus, as late as the close of the eleventh century, the Kings of France had 

 no regular coat-of-arms, and the shields, embellished with lions and the fleur- 

 de-lis, belonged by right of purchase to any one who chose to buy them, upon 

 his showing that as a chevalier he had the right to use them. 



If the coat-of-arms existed as one of the attributes of nobility, it may be 

 affirmed that the practice had not any fixed and general basis. Heraldic 

 science was in its infancy, and had not even settled the way in which 

 armorial bearings were to be composed, by the use of enamels that is to say, 

 the metals and the colours and of the plush, or fur, to form the ground of 

 the shield, in such a way as not to confound them, or place one upon the 



