406 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
SOME NOTES ON THE ANCIENT HERALDRY OF 
PLYMOUTH. 
BY MR. R. N. WORTH. 
(Read at the Anniversary Meeting, May 1, 1877.) 
Prymovutn, for a town of such antiquity, has very little ancient 
heraldry to show. The achievements of arms which we may well 
imagine once adorned the mansions of the thriving burghers, who 
either came of good families or had risen in their social status to 
the once very real dignity of armiger, have almost without excep- 
tion passed away. Far more of the older heraldry of Plymouth is 
to be seen and learnt within the walls of St. Andrew Church 
than elsewhere in the town. That, however, has been exhaustively 
dealt with by Mr. J. Brooking Rowe; and I shall refer only to 
some of the fragments he has left upon secular territory. By and 
by, when complete, the armorial enrichments of our Guildhall will 
be worth a note; but I do not now intend to speak of matters so 
recent. 
The oldest armorial bearings specially associated with Plymouth 
are those of the town itself—as they were, by no means as they 
are. The present arms of Plymouth are of very modern date, 
though they do embody the more ancient ensigns. Like other 
seaports of the West—Dartmouth, Fowey, Looe, Truro, Saltash, 
among the number—when Plymouth became corporate it adopted 
a ship as its device. There is still extant an impression of a seal 
to a deed of 1368, which bears a ship on the waves, and purports 
to be the seal of the community of Sutton-upon-Plymouth. And so 
in the Visitation of 1574 we find a three-masted ship on the waves, 
the masts surmounted by fire-beacons, given as the arms of the 
town. Long before that date, however, Plymouth had set up a 
rival coat. The oldest seal now in being, disused only when the 
Municipal Reform Act came into operation, has no such device. 
I am inclined to believe that this was the seal provided when the 
town was chartered by Act of Parliament, 1439-40. It may be 
