From the original bill for fitting out one of the ships in which Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, during the reign of Henry VI., went over to France, where he had been appointed to a high command, we gather hints which throw light upon this as well as several matters belonging to this Introduction. Among other items for the above-named equipage are these:--“Four hundred pencils (long narrow strips, may be of silk, used as flags), beat with the Raggedstaff in silver; the other pavys (one of two shields, likely of wood, and fastened outside the ship at its bows), painted with black, and a Raggedstaff beat with silver occupying all the field; one coat (perhaps of silk, but no doubt blazoned with the Beauchamp’s arms,) for my Lord’s body, beat with fine gold; two coats (like the foregoing) for heralds, beat with demi gold; a great streamer for a ship of forty yeards in length and eight yeards in breadth, with a great Bear and Griffin holding a Raggedstaff poudred full of Raggedstaffs; three penons (small flags) of satten; sixteen standards of worsted entailed with the Bear and a chain.”[346] The quatrefoils on the robe of our First Edward, the silver lions on the Glastonbury cope, the beasts and birds on the lady’s gown, the Bear, and Griffin, and Raggedstaff belonging to the Beauchamp’s blazoning, and all such like enrichments--mostly heraldic--put upon silken stuffs, were cut out of very thin plates of gold or silver, so as to hang upon them lightly, and were hammered up to show in low relief the fashion of the flower and the lineaments of the beast or bird meant to be represented. In fact, such a style of ornamentation done in gold or silver, stitched on silken stuffs made up into liturgical garments, knights’ coats of arms, ladies’ dresses, heralds’ tabards, or flags and penoncels, was far more common once than is now thought. It had struck out for itself a technical expression. In speaking of it men would either write or say, “silk beaten with gold or silver,” as the case might be--a meaning, by the way, for the word “beat,” quite overlooked by our lexicographers; yet, making her will as late as the year 1538, Barbara Mason bequeathed to a church “a vestment of grene sylke betyn with goold.”[347] [343] Ancient English Metrical Romances, t. iii. pp. 8, 9. [344] Close Rolls, ed. D. Hardy, p. 193. [345] Dugdale, p. 318. [346] Dugdale’s Baronage of England, i. 246. [347] Bury Wills, p. 134. The badge on the arm of the livery coat once commonly worn, and yet rowed for by the Thames watermen, as well as the armorials figured, before and behind, upon the fine old picturesque frocks of our buffetiers--the yeomen of the Royal guard, called in London “beefeaters,”--help to keep up the tradition of such a style of ornament in dress.