I am here upon very vague ground, and I know it. But I think that ground, though vague, has limits inferior and superior. The custom of adorning the shield with distinctive marks which might be recognised in battle, is of course as old as the world—or at least as old as the profession of arms. But something ritual and regular attaching to this habit, something which made it part of society and a wheel within the machinery almost of law and certainly of social habit, is the creation of the Crusades. A modern parallel will make my point clear. A cheque is something belonging to the nineteenth century, especially the latter part of the nineteenth century. Orders for payments signed in various ways are very much older. But a cheque is a cheque. It is something crystallised and developed in what is now a fixed and a final form. So with armorial bearings. Bring me some new document which shows that Charlemagne himself had the sun or the moon painted upon his shield, and I shall not be surprised; but I do know that the _regular_ portraiture of such and such emblems to represent such and such people, and the _common_ habit among great families of always having such, is posterior to and not prior to the Crusading march: it was indeed, in the main, a product of the Crusading march. Now, the Bayeux Tapestry, though it shows us most of the shields without such signs (for most of them were the shields of common knights), yet shows the shields of leaders regularly adorned with distinctive bearings; note, for instance, the four lords who come from Guy of Ponthieu to take Harold prisoner. Each of these shields carries an armorial bearing. The two heralds or messengers, men presumably of position, who ride to tell William the overlord that Guy has captured Harold, are similarly distinguished. Those in the immediate suite of the sovereigns or quasi-sovereigns show the mark, as when Harold is interviewed by William. One principal shield is hung upon the first two ships of those which sail for England for the Conquest, and each has armorial bearings. Nor need the reader be surprised at the number of shields which have none, if he will consider how large a proportion are seen in reverse—that is, from the inside—the side where the shield was held by the arm, the side which was turned towards the body. For where the artist describing a fight shows us the right arm with its weapon, and therefore the left arm holding the shield from within, he cannot let us know whether the shield was ornamented or no. But turn to the scenes where the fight is upon the defensive, as, for instance, that showing Harold’s resistance to the Norman charge, there you at once get the leaders with their pictured shields marking the distinction of rank; or again, where the Norman charge in the next panel is shown getting home into the Saxon axes—there you have two shields out of five distinctively ornamented. In the episode of the death of the brothers of Harold, all