Third Series Vol. II part 2. ISSN 0010-003X No. 212 Price £12.00 Autumn 2006 THE COAT OF ARMS an heraldic journal published twice yearly by The Heraldry Society THE COAT OF ARMS The journal of the Heraldry Society Third series Volume II 2006 Part 2 Number 212 in the original series started in 1952 The Coat of Arms is published twice a year by The Heraldry Society, whose registered office is 53 High Street, Burnham, Slough SL1 7JX. The Society was registered in England in 1956 as registered charity no. 241456. Founding Editor † John Brooke-Little, C.V.O., M.A., F.H.S. Honorary Editors C. E. A. Cheesman, M.A., PH.D., Rouge Dragon Pursuivant M. P. D. O'Donoghue, M.A., Bluemantle Pursuivant Editorial Committee Adrian Ailes, B.A., F.S.A., F.H.S. Jackson W. Armstrong, B.A. Andrew Hanham, B.A., PH.D Advertizing Manager John Tunesi of Liongam FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ORDINARIES OF ARMS Part 1: Thomas Jenyns' Book and its precursors Paul A. Fox Thomas Jenyns' Book is the largest and most significant of all the medieval ordi• naries of arms, and as such warrants more attention than it has hitherto received.1 Some intriguing insights into the story of its evolution can be deduced from its struc• ture and composition. It owes its existence to a now lost ordinary from the reign of Edward III which was the very first of its kind. The contents of this roll have been preserved in three later copies, of which the earliest surviving version is Cooke's Ordinary of 644 shields.2 Cotgrave's Ordinary is essentially the same, but with the ordinary arranged in a slightly different sequence, and missing some 88 shields from Cooke's.3 Both are dwarfed in scale by the later Thomas Jenyns' Book, which adds over a thousand shields, while remaining closely related to the other two.4 In order to gain a clearer understanding of how, when and why these ordinaries were created a careful comparison was made of the three. The first and most obvious observation arising from this analysis is that Jenyns generally supplies us with a Christian name for the bearer of the arms, frequently omitted in Cooke and Cotgrave. There are 189 instances of matching arms and surname in all three ordinaries but with the Christian names supplied only in Jenyns. Many sequences of shields are strikingly similar in all three, and the only possible explanation for these findings is that they are all based on a common progenitor, with Cooke's being an early copy and not the orig• inal.5 Altogether some 565 shields in Jenyns, more than a third of its total number, are based on the lost original. Of these 225 match the Christian names in either Cooke, Cotgrave or both, and there are 67 examples of Christian name mismatches. These errors are mostly transcriptional, which is hardly surprising in a situation where none 1 The only other ordinary of comparable size, rather confusingly called William Jenyns' Ordinary, contains far fewer families, but many examples of cadency, and will be the subject of a later paper. 2 Robert Mitchell's edition, Heraldry Society of Scotland, 1982, and CEMRA pp. 58-9. 3 Nicholas Harris Nicolas, A Roll of arms compiled in the reign of Edward III (London, 1829); CEMRA p. 60. 4 There are various copies of this in existence, the earliest surviving being BL Add Ms 40851. I worked primarily from Soc Ant Ms 351, which is a remarkably faithful copy of the BL man• uscript, though two leaves have been lost and the pages are bound out of sequence. The numeration between the two differs slightly because the BL version includes some blank shields. 5 Cooke's is certainly a fourteenth century document, which led Sir Anthony Wagner, its then owner, to believe it was the original, see CEMRA p. xv. Some names found in Jenyns and Cotgrave are entirely wanting in Cooke, e.g. Jenyns no 710, although the loss may be due to wear and the fading of ink. 97 THE COAT OF ARMS of the surviving documents is the original.6 Despite the fact that the surviving text of Cotgrave is later than Cooke, the degree of concordance with Jenyns is the same for both. Nearly two thirds of the arms from the lost ordinary can be independently dated by reference to other rolls of arms, seals, and the like, with the benefit of the addi• tional Christian names supplied by Jenyns. By far the largest proportion are from the reign of Edward III, with a somewhat smaller group who were living in the reign of Edward II, and a still smaller one in the reign of Edward I. Only four of the 565 were sourced from rolls of arms prior to Edward I. This demonstrates that the lost origi• nal ordinary was very much a working document of the reign of Edward III, with some knights surviving from the previous two reigns. Wagner's date of c. 1340 for Cooke and Cotgrave is probably about right, and places the lost original at the high point of chivalry in the English court, in the period leading up to the foundation of the Order of the Garter.7 The compiler of Jenyns was working in the reign of Richard II, the evidence for which will be cited below, but he makes almost no attempt to update the names of the bearers of arms to his own time, some fifty years later. Some families had the name of their paterfamilias updated to later in the reign of Edward III, for example Nicholas Cantilupe in Cooke who died in 1355, becomes his heir William in Jenyns.8 Such a change may well have been an accidental consequence of the use of multiple sources, because Jenyns sometimes also moves backwards in time from the lost ordi• nary, for instance William de Valoignes died in 1288, whilst Cotgrave supplies Warren or Waris de Valoignes his son who was living in 1326.9 6 There are three cases where each of the ordinaries supplies a different forename: Jenyns no 679 is called Robert in Cooke and the contemporary Ashmole roll, Roger in Jenyns and John in Cotgrave; Jenyns no 685 is Adam in Jenyns, Amias in Cotgrave and Anketyn in Cooke, Boroughbridge and Ashmole; at Jenyns no 1228 the surname is spelt Hertford, in Cooke it is Retford, in Cotgrave Tetford, and in Ashmole Bedford. 7 It must certainly be after 1337 when William Montagu (no 628) was created Earl of Salisbury, but the terminus post quem is more difficult to establish. Unfortunately some of the knights and peers included were already dead by 1337, e.g. Richard Lord Grey of Codnor (no 570; d. 1335), Robert Constable of Holderness (no 575; d. 1336), and Fulk Fitzwarin (no 957; d. 1336). Their inclusion signifies that the copyist was working from contemporary rolls of arms, and that the deaths even of peers cannot be relied upon as dating material. There is also Thomas Lord Poynings (no 574; d. 1339); William Lord Fitzwilliam (no 1032; dead by 1342 and succeeded by his brother John); Henry Lord Ferrers (no 1026; d. 1343, succeeded by his son William); William Lord Greystoke (no 581, the Christian name here supplied from Cooke as it is wanting in the other two; d. 1359 leaving a son and heir Ralph); Ralph Lord Neville of Raby (no 340; d. 1367, succeeded by his son John). The further we move away from 1337 the less likely it becomes that such transitions would have been overlooked, which makes 1340 a reasonable guess. The date must surely be before the Garter was instituted as the founder knights are sparsely represented. 8 No 1185: Nicholas Cantilupe's heirs were his grandsons William and Nicholas, who both died without issue by 1375. 9 No 1064. See G. J. Brault, The Rolls of Arms of Edward 1 (Aspilogia 3: London 1997), vol. 2 pp. 432-3, s.v. Warresius (d.s.p.m.). 98 THOMAS JENYNS' ORDINARY The method by which the original ordinary was augmented to form Jenyns was much as one might expect in that sections matching those from Cooke and Cotgrave were copied and corresponding heraldic charges were then added, before moving on to the next theme. The sequence of charges differs between Cooke, Cotgrave and Jenyns, but the internal structure within each section is retained. In some sections new shields are inserted more randomly into the original material, but for the most part in Jenyns it is possible to follow long runs of shields from the precursor ordinary interspersed with runs of additional material. While Cooke and Cotgrave begin with crosses, Jenyns begins with lions, and moves the crosses to the middle of the ordinary. A new section of 22 shields of lions belonging to kings and great men of yore was placed at the head of the book and before the section of lions from the lost ordinary. It has been possible to date 40% of the 1,034 additional shields, and once again the great bulk of them are from the reigns of the three Edwards, with the largest group being datable to Edward III.10 Most of the undatable shields are totally unique to Jenyns, but it is reasonable to sup• pose that they derive from lost rolls of arms from the same period. The first 1,211 shields of Jenyns maintain the structure of an ordinary, whilst at first sight the remaining 388 shields were seemingly added at random.