A Complete Guide to HeraldryFox-Davies, Arthur Charles
History
A Complete Guide to Heraldry
Fox-Davies, Arthur Charles
Heraldry -- Great Britain
Two other colours will be found in nearly all text-books of English armory.
These are murrey or sanguine, and orange or tenné. The exact tint of murrey
is between gules and purpure; and tenné is an orange-tawny colour. They are
both "stains," and were perhaps invented by the old heralds for the
perpetration of their preposterous system of abatements, which will be
found set out in full in the old heraldry books, but which have yet to be
found occurring in fact. The subject of abatements is one of those pleasant
little insanities which have done so much to the detriment of heraldry.
One, and one only, can be said {73} to have had the slightest foundation in
fact; that was the entire reversal of the escutcheon in the ceremony of
degradation following upon attainder for high treason. Even this, however,
was but temporary, for a man forfeited his arms entirely by attainder. They
were torn down from his banner of knighthood; they were erased in the
records of the College of Arms; but on that one single occasion when he was
drawn upon a hurdle to the place of his execution, they are said to have
been painted reversed upon paper, which paper was fastened to his breast.
But the arms then came to an end, and his descendants possessed none at
all. They certainly had not the right to depict their shield upside down
(even if they had cared to display such a monstrosity). Unless and until
the attainder was reversed, arms (like a title) were void; and the proof of
this is to be found in the many regrants of arms made in cases where the
attainder has remained, as in the instances of the Earl of Stafford and the
ancestor of the present Lord Barnard. But that any person should have been
supposed to have been willing to make use of arms carrying an abatement is
preposterous, and no instance of such usage is known. Rather would a man
decline to bear arms at all; and that any one should have imagined the
existence of a person willing to advertise himself as a drunkard or an
adulterer, with variations in the latter case according to the personality
of his partner in guilt, is idiotic in the extreme. Consequently, as no
example of an abatement has ever been found, one might almost discard the
"stains" of murrey and tenné were it not that they were largely made use of
for the purposes of liveries, in which usage they had no such objectionable
meaning. At the present day scarlet or gules being appropriated to the
Royal Family for livery purposes, other people possessing a shield of gules
are required to make use of a different red, and though it is now termed
chocolate or claret colour by the utilitarian language of the day, it is in
reality nothing more than the old sanguine or murrey. Of orange-tawny I can
learn of but one livery at the present day. I refer to the orange-tawny
coats used by the hunt servants of Lord Fitzhardinge, and now worn by the
hunt servants of the Old Berkeley country, near London. _A propos_ of this
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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