While our noble countryman boasted of an offspring from this fabled swan, so did the greatest houses abroad. In private hands in England is a precious ivory casket wrought on its five panels, before us in photography, with this history of the swan. Helyas’s shield and flag are ensigned with St. George’s cross; the armour tells of England and its military appliances, about the end of the fourteenth century; and the whole seems the work of English hands. At the great exhibition of loans in this museum, A.D. 1862, one of the many fine textiles then shown was a fine but cut-down chasuble of blue Sicilian silk, upon which was, curiously enough for what we have said about the birds before which the “Vow” was made, figured, amid other fowls the pheasant. The handsome orphreys upon this vestment were wrought in this country, and good specimens they are of English needlework during the fourteenth century. These orphreys, before and behind, are embroidered on a bright red silk ground, with golden flower and leaf-bearing branches, so trailed as, in their twinings, to form Stafford knots in places, and to embower shields of arms each supported by gold swans all once ducally gorged. From these and other bearings on it, this chasuble would seem to have been worked for the Staffords, Dukes of Buckingham. At Corby Castle there is an altar frontal of crimson velvet made for and figured with the great Buckingham and his Duchess both on their knees at the foot of a crucifix. Amid a sprinkling of the Stafford knot, for the Duke (Henry VIII. beheaded him) was Earl of Stafford, the swan is shown, and the Lord Stafford of Cossey, in whose veins the blood of the old Buckingham still runs, gives a silver swan as one of his armorial supporters. At Lincoln cathedral there were:--A cope of red cloth of gold with swans of gold;[422] and a cope of purple velvet having a good orphrey set with swans.[423] In mediæval symbolism, as read by Englishmen, the swan was deemed not only a royal bird, but, more than that, one of the tokens of royal prowess. Hence we may easily understand why our great warrior king, Edward I., as he sat feasting in Westminster Hall, amid all the chivalry, old and young of the kingdom, on such a memorable day, should have had brought before him the two swans in their golden cages:--“tunc allati sunt in pompatica gloria duo cygni vel olores, ante regem, phalerati retibus aureis, vel fistulis deauratis, desiderabile spectaculum, intuentibus. Quibus visis, rex votum vovit Deo cœli et cygnis, se proficisci in Scotiam,” &c.[424] And then solemnly made the “Vow of the Swan,” as we described, p. 287 of the Catalogue. [422] Mon. Anglic. t. viii. p. 1282. [423] Ibid. [424] Flores Historiarum, per Matt. Westmonast. Collectæ, p. 454.