The headline, “Incipit Liber Armorum,” gives us at once the title of the manuscript from which the text was compiled. “Heraldry Run Mad” might indeed have been an appropriate title for this, as well as all similar tractates; for the author, in his anxiety to honour the science, does not scruple to take the reader back historically not to Noah only, but to Adam, whose spade, he tells us, was the first shield in Heraldry, and who was the first to bear Coat Armour. The argument, if it may so be called, is:—All “gentilnes” comes from God; there were originally in heaven ten Orders of Angels bearing Coat Armour, but now only nine, Lucifer with “mylionys of aungelis” having fallen out of heaven into hell and other places. As a bondman might say that all men come from Adam, so might Lucifer say he and his angels came from heaven. Cain, for his wickedness, was the first churl, and all his offspring were churls also by the curse of God. Seth, on the other hand, was a gentleman by his father’s blessing; Noah, too, was a gentleman by nature, but of his three sons, “Sem, Cham, and Jafeth,” Cham, for his unfilial conduct, was made “ungentle.” The address of Noah to his three sons is curious, and is thus supplemented:— “Of the offspring of the gentleman Japhet came Abraham, Moses Aaron, and the prophets, and also the King of the right line of Mary, of whom that gentleman Jesus was born, very God and man, after his manhood King of the land of Judah and of Jews, a gentleman by his mother Mary, and Prince of Coat Armour.”