Armorial bearings seem to have taken their rise in this kingdom in the reign of king Richard the first, and by little and little to have become hereditary; it was accounted most honourable to carry those arms which the bearers had displayed in the Holy Land, against the professed enemies of Christianity, but they were not fully established until the latter end of the reign of king Henry the third. King Richard the first after his return from his captivity in Austria, had a new great seal made, on which seal he first bore three lions passant guardant for his arms, which from this time became the hereditary arms of the kings of England. The arms assigned or attributed to the kings of the Norman dynasty, namely _gules_, two lions passant guardant, _or_, Mr. Sandford, in his Genealogical History of England, says he could not find had ever been used by those Princes, either on monuments, coins, or seals, but that historians had assigned or fixed them upon the Norman line to distinguish it from that of their successors the Plantagenets, who bore _gules_, three lions passant guardant, _or_.[67] According to the opinion of modern genealogists, king Henry the second, who bore two lions for his arms, in the manner before mentioned, added, on his marriage with Eleanor of Aquitaine, the arms of that dutchy, namely _gules_, a lion, _or_, to his own, and so was the first king of England who bore three lions; but for this there is no better proof than for those assigned to the Norman dynasty, for the arms of king Henry the second upon his monument at Fontevraud in Normandy, are on a shield of a modern form, and on the same monument are escutcheons with both impalements and quarterings which were not used till a hundred years after his death. King Edward the first was the first son of a king of England that differenced his arms with a file, and the first king of England that bore his arms on the caparisons of his horse. Margaret of France, second wife of king Edward the first, was the first queen of England that bore her arms _dimidiated_ with her husband’s in one escutcheon, that is, both escutcheons being parted by a perpendicular line, or _per pale_, the dexter side of the husband’s shield, is joined to the sinister side of the wife’s, which kind of bearing is more ancient than the impaling of the entire coats of arms. King Edward the third, in the year 1339, having taken upon him the title of king of France, was the first of our kings who quartered arms, bearing those of France and England, quarterly, and so careful were the kings, his successors, in marshalling the arms of both kingdoms in the same shield, that when Charles the sixth, king of France, changed the semée of fleurs de lys into three, our king Henry the fifth did the like,[68] and so it continued till the union of Great Britain with Ireland in 1801, when the arms of France were relinquished.