FrazeEr—On Brass Matrix of an Ancient Seal, &c. 469 
be supposed to have certain special relations with the Empire of the 
Sultan. The victorious Turks, when they seized possession of Con- 
stantinople, merely took over the sacred type from the Greeks, and, 
beyond having appropriated it by right of conquest, I do not believe a 
star and crescent moon can be considered to represent any fact or circum- 
stance relating to Turkish history of the slightest interest or signifi- 
cance. The question assumes a different aspect altogether when we 
are concerned in investigating early religious symbolic history of 
the eleventh and twelfth centuries: at that time the crescent, with 
included star, was regarded as an important and distinctive sacred 
emblem. Thus to quote a brief extract from a Close Roll of the 35th 
year of Henry III., published by Mr. Thomas Duffus Hardy :— 
‘Edward of Westminster is commanded to order a banner to be 
made of white silk, and in the centre of the banner there is to be a 
representation of the Crucifixion, with the effigies of the Blessed Mary 
and Saint John, embroidered in orfraies, and on the top a star, and a 
new moon crescent, and the said banner to be ready by Easter.” 
An obyious deduction appears to suggest itself: accepted by 
the Greeks, and appearing impressed on their coins, as indicative of 
devotion to Venus Aphrodite (a worship believed to have been trans- 
mitted through Phoenician and Cyprian sources from Assyrian shrines) 
somehow, in later ages, the venerated symbol of crescent moon and 
star was revived, adopted for a distinctive Christian emblem, and ap- 
propriated to denote the Virgin and John the Baptist. At what exact 
time, or under what circumstances, the practice originated, it is need- 
less to inquire ; it is found to prevail, without distinction, alike in the 
Churches of the East and West. We have to deal with it as adopted by 
Augustinian hermits who, as I have stated, formed their early settle- 
ment near the city of Dublin, by King John, when he visited this 
country and struck silver coin for Irish circulation, and further, as a 
favourite decorative ornament, painted on the walls of our Cathedral of 
St. Patrick. I restrict myself to these examples of its adoption ; for it 
would be found, if we inquired respecting other Irish localities (prin- 
eipally I believe where Templar knights and Augustinian hermits had 
their settlements) similar symbols would be discovered, and the most 
probable common bond of connexion which appears traceable in such 
cases is a close relationship with that powerful and unfortunate asso- 
ciation, the Knights of the Temple, whose history is associated with the 
origin and erection of almost all the great ecclesiastical establishments 
which were built consequent on the Norman Conquest of Ireland. 
They founded their grand Priory at Kilmainham in the year 1174, and 
it is their lands which now form our Phenix Park. Its principal 
founder was Richard Strongbow, Earl of Pembroke; this same earl 
was one of the chief benefactors for augmenting and re-edifying Christ 
Church Cathedral, with which his name appears inseparably associated, 
so that popular tradition appropriates a monument to his memory 
which, by no possibility, could ever have belonged to him, but com- 
memorates a totally different individual, who lived much later than 
3 B2 
