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Updated: June 8, 2025
Though repudiated and unrecognised by the strict herald, they are now generally considered to be the particular property and distinguishing ensign of certain surnames and families, and as hereditary as the quaint and fanciful charges and quarterings of coat-armour itself.
The cry of the trumpets rang out again high and shattering, as the trumpeters and heralds in rich coat-armour came next; and Anthony looked a moment, fascinated by the lions and lilies, and the brightness of the eloquent horns, before he turned his head to see the Lord Mayor himself, mounted on a great stately white horse, that needed no management, while his rider bore on a cushion the sceptre.
Ere the troops were fully on march Quentin Durward received from an unknown hand a billet which Lady Hamelin had sent to the Countess Isabelle, mentioning that her William as she called the Wild Boar had determined, for purposes of policy, in the first action to have others dressed in his coat-armour, and himself to assume the arms of Orleans, with a bar sinister.
Nay, he will not be so overcome: it is no knot of an hempton girdle that he feareth; that is no piece of harness of the armour of God, which may resist the assault in the evil day; it is but feigned gear; it must be in the heart, &c. "And be ye apparelled or clothed," saith Paul, "with the habergeon or coat-armour of justice, that is, righteousness."
The two princes, William and Geoffrey, give a mutual challenge; each gives the other notice of the garb and shield that he will wear that he may not be mistaken. The spirit of knight-errantry was coming in, and we see that William himself in his younger days was touched by it. But we see also that coat-armour was as yet unknown.
All was very fair and fine, said Master Richard, with pieces of rich stuff hanging upon the walls on this side and that beneath the windows, and, finest of all were the colours of the robes, and the steel and the gold and the white fur and the feathers, and the gilded glaives and trumpets, and coat-armour of the heralds.
Yet when they marched into the quaint old town to the blare of trumpets and the crash of the kettledrums, all the long line gaudy with the coat-armour of the Lord High Admiral beneath their flaunting banners, and the horses pricked up their ears and arched their necks and pranced along the crowded streets, Nick, stared at by all the good townsfolk, could not help feeling a thrill of pride that he was one of the great company of players, and sat up very straight and held his head up haughtily as Master Carew did, and bore himself with as lordly an air as he knew how.
And should some blue-blooded insect indignantly retort that, though his own ancestors have borne coat-armour for seventeen generations, and though he himself was brought up so utterly and aristocratically useless as to have been unable, at twenty years of age, to polish his own boots, yet he is now, mentally and physically, a man fit for anything I can only reply, in the words of Portia, that I fear me my lady his mother played false with a smith.
Indeed his raiment was goodly, for his surcoat was new, and it was of fine green cloth, and the coat-armour of Upmead was beaten on it, to wit, on a gold ground an apple-tree fruited, standing by a river-side.
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