stamp with his own arms all the weights of the kingdom. He is also mentioned (Madox, Hist. Exch.) as sitting with others of the king's council in the Court of Exchequer in 14{o} and 54{o} of Henry III: there was an ancient officer of that court, called a Pesour, Ponderator, or Weigher, but the family of Windesore held this office for four generations by hereditary serjeantry, during the reigns of kings John and Henry III. It would seem more probable, therefore, that these weights were stamped with his arms,[338] by the king of the Romans, in the ordinary exercise of his baronial rights, for the common use of his own officers in his widely extended domains, and especially for those of his own personal household, in order efficiently to check the entries and deliveries of the stores of food and forage necessary for the supply of his numerous retinue. The contemporary accounts of his sister, the Princess Eleanor, wife of the great Simon, earl of Leicester, in 1265 (recently published by the Roxburghe Club), show with what minute detail and accuracy such expenses in a large household were regulated, and superintended by the steward of a great personage. The steward of the king of the Romans may have been thus busily employed at Lewes in measuring out with this identical weight their scanty rations to his Cornish troops, until surprised by the hurry of the fatal battle, in which--for human bones were found with the weight near the Castle gateway--he may have continued to clutch it faithfully, even in death. Prince Richard embarked at Yarmouth in 1253, on his way to his coronation as king, at Aix-la-Chapelle, and he went to Cologne in 1267, to marry his German bride, Beatrice. On one of these occasions, when he would have been accompanied by a large suite, or on some other passage through Norfolk, which was a customary route to Germany, the two interesting weights found there may have been accidentally dropped. [Illustration] C. AND J. ADLARD, PRINTERS, BARTHOLOMEW CLOSE. FOOTNOTES: [1] Yorke's 'Union of Honour.' [2] The general ignorance of Heraldry even among the well-educated may be illustrated by the fact that not many months since the Commissioners of Assessed Taxes decided that a person who sealed his letters with a Thistle surrounded by the words '=Dinna Forget=,' was liable to the charge for armorial bearings, albeit the device contained neither shield, helmet, wreath, nor any other _necessary_ element of heraldric insignia! [3] Woodham's 'Application of Heraldry to the Illustration of various University and Collegiate Antiquities;' Nos. 4 and 5 of the publications of the Cambridge Antiq. Soc.--an interesting essay, which would be none the worse if divested of a few remarks on "church principles," "conventicles," "Cobbett," and the "Morning Chronicle,"--subjects as irrelevant as the whims of old Morgan, or any other heraldric writer of the sixteenth or seventeenth century. [4] Woodham. [5] Grimaldi. Orig. Gen. p. 82.