FROM
the day ‘quhan Alysander our king wes dede' down to the day when the
Chancellor Lord of Seafield laid down his pen and exclaimed, ‘And
there’s an end o’ an auld sang,’ the varied thread of Scottish story is
mainly the history of a nobility which blended or opposed its ambitions
in an endless succession of intrigues and feuds of which even the open
wars of the country with the ‘auld enemy,* England, were too often but
the opportunity or the result. No country, it has been said, stands so
little indebted to its nobles as does Scotland. The saying may be false
or true according as we determine wherein lies Scotland's main
achievement. I
think it false. The pride of Scottish history does not He in the patient
upbuilding of a great democracy or the solution of constitutional
problems, but rather in the exploits of its heroes in War; and its
achievement has been the making of a people rather than a nation. While
it is true that the Scottish magnates never united to extort a Magna
Charta from the Crown, it is on the other hand also true that Scotland
never saw its nobles combined to oppress its commons, nor its commons
arrayed in form of war against its nobles. In all the blood-welding of
this northern people a Wat Tyler or Jack Cade, a peasant war or a
Jacquerie was unknown and impossible. And if there is anything in
national sentiment, the deeds of Bruce and Randolph at Bannockburn, and
the devotion of the eleven earls who died round their king at Flodden—in
brief the valiant part played by her nobles in all her wars, is a
service they performed to their country for all time.
The
Comyns, Baliols, Bruces, Stuarts, the Black Douglases and the Red, the
Grahams and pervading Setons, the Homes and the Gordons, the Boyds and
the Hamiltons; Athol, Buchan and Crawford, Glencairn and Cassillis, Mar
and Ruthven; the names of Angus, Arran, Huntly, Morton, Moray, Bothwell,
Leslie, Lauderdale, Montrose, Argyle, and Claverhouse—these and the like
are the tides of the chapters, sections, and subsections of the major
part of Scottish history. The most of the beloved and the execrated of
our romance as well as our history belong to these names.
Whether the part they played was good or bad; whether tradition has
dealt well with them or ill, belongs to the domain of public history,
but their positions and circumstances, their family traditions, their
territorial holdings, their alliances of blood and marriage, their very
personal characteristics of mind and body, are of interest not only to
their lineal descendants and the student of heredity, but, like the
personal peculiarities of kings, are part of the solution of the
problems of the general history of their country also.
The
most ancient, best authenticated, and in several respects most
remarkable family history in Scotland is naturally that of its royal
house. Its lineal descent and succession from the ancient Celtic
dynasty—independent kings as far back as we can trace them, its
successive infusions in early times of the best Saxon and Norman blood,
its romantic and tragic fortunes, and its survival to the present day,
render it unique among the royal lines of Europe. The new
Scots Peerage
in process of being issued does well to devote its opening pages to the
line of the Scottish kings.
The
Scottish peerage shares in much of the antiquity of the Crown. There
seems to be a great probability that some of the most ancient of our
northern earldoms derive from the even more ancient Maormars by descent
rather than by conquest. Evidence of the original character of these
Celtic officers of the time of Malcolm Canmore or earlier is, no doubt,
hard now to find. But it is known that they ruled over the ancient
districts of Ross, Moray, Buchan, Mar, Mearns and Angus, and that some
of them were latterly denominated earls, or were, in Malcolm’s time,
succeeded by earls of the same territories.
How
far these first earls acknowledged themselves to hold their titles of
land from the king of Scotland or any king is another question and as
difficult. There are several references in the chronicles of the times
before Bruce to ‘ seven earls.' As in the Holy Roman Empire there were
Seven Electors Palatine who chose the Emperors, so, probably, the
monkish chroniclers in Scotland thought that there should be, or must
have been, a college of Seven Earls who elected the king. The absence of
any allusion to such a body or system of election, on the death of
Alexander III., or of the Maid of Norway, is against their existence.
The claim of the Earl of Fife to enthrone the king on the Stone of
Destiny, or, in the case of Robert I., to place the crown on the king's
head indicates, however, that some consent of that earl at least was
requisite to confer the kingly authority, and the style he assumed, at
least occasionally, in his early charters— ‘By the grace of God, Earl of
Fife*—indicates that he did not acknowledge that he held his earldom
from the king merely. The Seven Earls mentioned in 1296 are the Earls of
Buchan, Monteith, Strathern, Lennox, Ross, Athol, and Mar.1
The Earl of Fife and the Earl of Sutherland are not among the number.
But it must be remembered that the earliest holder of the earldom of
Sutherland known to these same records is not a Celtic earl. The
enhancement of the royal power and the subordination of the Celtic earls
were gradual; and during the process—and aiding it perhaps—there
appeared in Scotland the beginnings of a nobility of an essentially
different system—the Norman system of feus, charters, and subordination.
Scotland suffered no Norman conquest, but it shared in a Saxon, Danish,
and Norman invasion. Immigrant houses were planted on the waste places
left by the wars of Malcolm; and the immigrants, or many of them, seem
to have become magnates immediately in the land of their adoption,
whatever their condition was before. The invasion was only partial,
however, and the existing population was neither extirpated nor
enthralled. Scotland was only in process of becoming a kingdom; and it
was thus that there arose with a composite people a nobility of divers
origins. Scot or Piet, Briton or Galwegian, Saxon, Dane, Norman or
Fleming, when he accepted a charter of his lands, the king's vassal was
for the future undistinguishable in respect of his origin, so far as the
law was concerned. It was thus also that the kingdom was gradually
formed in the framework of a Norman society. The king's councillors in
time of peace and his captains in war were—saving so far as they were
churchmen, and these were, after all, scarcely an exception— the great
territorial lords, his tenants in chief. In the great feudal system of
reciprocal service and protection of which a king was scarcely more than
the first officer, the members of each rank were peers among themselves,
and were the men of their immediate overlord, bound to follow him with
their strength in the field in war and to attend his court—be it manor
court or baron court—in time of peace; and the scale ascended till at
its head came the king’s men—the barons1—par
excellence, peers of the realm. Nothing save
succession to the throne itself could enhance that quality or position
of a peer of the realm, though within their order, the possession of the
great offices of peace and war came in later times to regulate their
relative rank or precedency. These offices were the general offices of
High Steward, Great Constable, Marshal, etc., the several offices of
Earls of particular portions of the country. Afterwards were added to
these the—with us only titular—offices of Duke, a leader of the army;
Marquis, a defender of the marches; and Viscount, the king’s officer in
charge of a sheriffdom. The baron was himself in a manner-an officer.
His barony in one aspect was his fee and reward for his. services.
Failure in performing his feudal duty in peace or war did not entail
questions of assessment of damages, but made him liable to forfeiture.
And he could no more sell his barony without his overlord’s leave than a
sentry may put a substitute into his post without the leave of his
superior officer. But with the king’s leave the tenant in chief might
sell his barony and his earldom too; and the purchaser become baron or
earl in his stead, did homage for his fief, and received the oaths of
his vassals, took his place in the court and council, and his stand in
the battle.
The
feudal system furnished thus a territorial peerage. There stands in its
stead to-day a peerage of blood descent whose honours descend
jure sanguinis,
vest without ceremony in the rightful heir whether he wills it or not,
or knows it or not, and are inalienable and indefeasable save by
forfeiture or Act
THE ROYAL ARMS OF SCOTLAND
of
Parliament. Yet the process by which the present theory of peerage came
in place of the former, down at least to the date of the Union, was
gradual and apparently unbroken. Though personal dignities were known in
Scotland in the fifteenth century, strong traces of the ancient
territorial theory remained till time of the union with England, as the
practice of resignations and re-grants of honours at that date evinces.
As
early as the year 1427 James I. made an act for the release of the
smaller barons from personal attendance in parliament, and to provide
for their representation instead, but the act was from various causes a
dead letter. Kings and parliaments moved several times at intervals with
the same object, but it was not till the passing of the Act 1587, c.
120, that the object was achieved. The effect of the Act from our
present point of view was that it separated the smaller barons from the
greater. When the smaller barons came to be represented, instead of
sitting in person, they ceased to be of the same class as the Lords of
Parliament, who sat personally. And the barons who remained Lords of
Parliament came to be held to be alone the nobles and the peers of the
realm. The year 1587 therefore has been considered to be the date at
which honours became, in the eye of the law, personal. Patents of
peerage, scarcely if at all known before, began to be granted as the
rule immediately afterwards.
The
Parliamentary proceedings for the ranking of the peers according to the
antiquity of their honours naturally followed, and though conducted at a
time when information and accuracy is not to be looked for, occasioned
our earliest general enquiry into the peers’ genealogies.
Since that date the student of history and of charters has had much to
say, both in books and before courts and committees, about these
genealogies; and few collections of pedigrees can be more varied in
their contents than the collection of the pedigrees of the peers of
Scotland.
The
Celtic earldom of Mar, says Riddell, is not merely now the oldest
Scottish earldom by descent, but perhaps in many respects the most
remarkable in the empire’; for while other lineages may be as long, if
traced through unennobled ancestors, the Earls of Mar were earls
ab initio,
and never known under any other character.’ The origin of the earldom,
says Lord Hailes, ‘is lost in its antiquity.' It is dated by some as
before 1014 and an Earl of Mar appears certainly contemporary with some
of the Maormars in the reign of Malcolm Canmore. To this most ancient
class belonged the Celtic earls of Angus, Athol, Fife, and the Lords of
the Isles. But of all of them none save Mar, and perhaps Carrick, which
earldom is held by the King by inheritance through the Bruce, survive in
the blood of the earls of the name to-day.
The
earldom next in the antiquity of its descent to its present holder is
the earldom of Sutherland, which dates from
a.d.
1228 or earlier. The heraldry of the earls—three
mullets or stars—plays a part in pointing to their descent from a common
ancestry with the Douglases and the Morays. The question as regards the
descent of the last two was agitated on heraldic grounds as early as the
fifteenth century. Wyntoun says:
*Of
Murrawe and the Douglas How that thare begynnyng was Syn syndry men
spekis syndiyly, I can put that in na story. Bot in thare armeys bath
thai bere The sternys1 set in lyk manere Til money men it is
yhet sene Apperand lyk that thai had bene Of kyn be descens lyneale Or
be branchys collaterale.'
The
exigencies of the rhyme may have seemed to warrant Wyntoun in saying
that the sternys were *set in lyk manere ’ in the shields of Moray and
Douglas. But he can scarcely have been ignorant that while the stars of
Moray, like those of Sutherland, were set
two and one
on the field of their scutcheon, those of Douglas were set as a chief.
Nevertheless it seems true of the houses of Moray and Sutherland, and
probably of Douglas too, that they are descended from one Freskin of
Strabrok, a Fleming who flourished in Scodand in the time of David I.,
and died before the year 1171. The premier earldom of Mar was unjustly
resumed by King James II., granted to strangers, and only restored in
the time of Queen Mary. Wood therefore is right, in so far that he
pronounces Sutherland to be ‘the most ancient subsisting title in
Britain which has continued without alteration in the lineal course of
succession for nearly*—we may now say
over—‘six
centuries.’
To
the same class in origin as Sutherland belong not only the great houses
of Douglas and Moray, but those of the Baliols, Bruces, Comyns,
Stewarts, and others, whose ancestries, whether Flemish, Saxon, or
Norman, can be traced back to their introduction into Scotland. The
Norman Conquest of England sent many Saxons and others into Scotland.
Gospatrick, Earl of Northumberland (progenitor of the Earls of March and
Dunbar), arriving at the court of Canmore with his comrade Maerleswegen,
and bringing Margaret and Edgar Atheling, was an instance of this. There
was a great inclination among the earlier genealogists to make every
great family spring into position with an incident as romantic. But the
Saxon and Norman knights who arrived in these days in more or less
Celtic Scotland did not necessarily all arrive as adventurers or
refugees. Malcolm Canmore held twelve manors in England under the
Conqueror; and at a later date David, afterwards King David I., became
Earl of Huntingdon (1136) and of Northumberland (1139), all in right of
his wife Matilda, heiress of Waltheof. Malcolm the Maiden succeeded to
the first of these earldoms (1157), and William the lion to the second
(1152). Afterwards their brother David was Earl of Huntingdon and
Cambridge. He was elected leader of the revolted English nobles (1174);
but in spite of his turbulent career, his son John the Scot succeeded
him in both earldoms. Through his mother, Maud, John inherited the
earldom of Chester also. When, in 1237, he died childless, the
representation of his father, Earl David, and ultimately that of the
Royal House of Scotland, fell among his three sisters—(1) Margaret,
grandmother of John Baliol the competitor and of Alianora, wire of the
Black Comyn, Lord of Tynedale and Badenoch; (2) Isabella, mother of
Robert the Bruce, the competitor; (3) Ada, grandmother of John, Earl of
Hastings, the competitor. The lists of witnesses of King David’s
charters are themselves evidences of the results of the Scottish
possession of these southern earldoms: the surnames, Graham, Lindsay,
Ramsay, for instance, which appear in them point to an important
contingent in the King’s retinue from the earldom of Huntingdon.
The
wars of Wallace and Bruce arrested this peaceful inflow, and forced the
incomers for the first time to choose their nationality. According to
theory, the feudal lord who held fiefs in England and also in Scotland
was bound, when the kings of these countries were at war with each
other, to bring into the field the power of each fief, for the support
of its own overlord, and to fight in person for the overlord to whom he
had given his first oath of fealty. But Edward I., pretending to be
overlord of both countries, passed forfeitures on all such feudal
tenants who did not support his arms in person as well as in force; and
Robert the Bruce meted the same measure to the lords of Scottish fiefs
who fought for Edward. Many were the forfeitures on each side, not a few
noble names disappeared then from Scottish history, and the conduct of a
number of the barons, if we neglect the circumstances of the time, seems
smirched with the unknightly stains of vacillation and tergiversation ;
it is certainly not defensible, if indeed comprehensible, if we merely
talk of a patriotism which they did not feel and do not advert to their
territorial stake in both countries, as well as to their well-nigh
incompatible oaths.
The
unfriendly relations which subsisted thereafter, almost continuously,
between England and Scodand for so many generations isolated the
Scottish nobles to a. great extent, not only from their equals in
England, but also from those of other more distant countries, for in the
constant state of war and intrigue which formed so much of Scottish
history he who would keep his lands was better to garrison them himself.
From time to time, however, exceptions to this state of isolation
appear, now and then a crusader, here and there bands of noble knights
at a foreign tournament, and some great name on the roll of the French
armies which fought France and Scotland’s common foe. In 1424,
Archibald, fourth Earl of Douglas, became Duke of Touraine in France. In
1549 the Regent Arran was created Duke of Chatelherault in France; also
Alexander, Earl of Buchan, was Constable of France in the beginning of
the fifteenth century. At a later day, James, Duke of Lennox in
Scotland, who died in 1655, was a Grandee of Spain, and so on. . The
armies of northern Europe, and the Archer Guard of the French kings
contained not a few younger sons of Scottish nobles.
At
the Union of the Crowns a new spectacle appeared; a number of Scottish
peers were made peers of England. Ludovick, who had succeeded as Duke of
Lennox in 1583, was made Duke of Richmond in England in 1603. During his
life his brother and successor, Esme, Lord d’Aubigny in France, was made
Earl of March in England (1620). James, second
THE ARMS OF THE MARQUIS OF ANGUS
Marquis of Hamilton, was made Earl of Cambridge in 1619; John Ramsay,
Viscount Haddington, was made Earl of Holder-ness in 1620. Thomas, third
Lord Bruce of Kinlos, first Earl of Elgin in 1633, became Lord Bruce of
Whorlton in 1642, and his son, after his succession to the earldom of
Elgin in 1663, was made Earl of Ailesbury in 1665. Other cases might be
cited, such as those of the Earl of Forth, made Earl of Brentford in
1644, the Duke of Lauderdale, created Earl of Guildford in 1674, the
second Duke of Argyle, created Earl of Greenwich, etc., as late as 1705.
There were cases also in which an English peer was created a Scots peer.
The Duke of Monmouth was created Duke of Buccleuch; George, Lord Home of
Berwick, was made Earl of Dunbar in 1604.
We
may note, in passing, a class of creations by which the epoch between
1603 and 1707 is marked—creations of Scots peer9 out of English knights
and others who had no territorial connection with Scotland—Sir Henry
Cary was created Lord Falkland in 1620; Sir Thomas Fairfax, created Lord
Fairfax of Cameron in 1627; Sir Thomas Osborne, afterwards (1694) Duke
of Leeds, created Viscount Dunblain in 1673; Sir Richard Graham of Esk
created Viscount Prestoun in 1681; and John Churchill, afterwards Duke
of Marlborough, became a peer as Lord Churchill of Aymouth in 1682. The
supposed design of these creations is said to have been detected in some
additions to the Irish peerage made since the year 1800, namely, to give
the grantee a ‘handle to his name'—and as little more as possible. One
instance of a Scottish commoner who received English honours shortly
after the Union of the Crowns may be mentioned on account of the
reported peculiarities in the patent. It is the case of ‘ Mr. James
Hay'. The King [James VI. and I.] no sooner came to London,’ writes Sir
Anthony Weldon, ‘but notice was taken of a rising favourite, the first
meteor of that nature appearing in our climate; as the king cast his eye
upon him for affection so did all the courtiers to adore him; his name
was Mr. James Hay.’ Sir Anthony’s description of him begins thus
ungraciously, but concludes in eulogy. Still it remains that Hay’s first
step in the peerage was the name and title of Lord Hay without a seat in
Parliament and with a precedency only after English barons. His next
step was his elevation to the full dignity of a baron of parliament with
the title of Baron Hay or Sauley in 1615, but with the unprecedented
omission of a solemn investiture— perhaps because he was a peer already.
He was subsequently erected Viscount Doncaster and Earl of Carlisle.
At
the Union of 1707 the scene was changed again; the Scottish peer
received treatment which was without either principle or prevision. In
the eye of the general law he was declared to be a peer of the realm; at
Court he was made to rank below all English peers of his degree, and
within the House of Lords he was given only a right of representation,
while all English peers were given seats in their own right.
At
the date of the Union, as we have seen, several Scots peers already held
English dignities. Shortly after it—in 1708— the Duke of Queensberry was
created Duke of Dover, and took his seat in the House of Lords. In 1709
the House of Lords resolved that no Scots peer who, since the Union,
should have received a British peerage, should vote at elections of
Scots Representative Peers. In 1711, when the Duke of Hamilton was
created Duke of Brandon, the House of Lords resolved to take the patent
into consideration before the Duke took his seat. It called in the
English Judges, and heard the Duke by counsel. It then decided not to
ask the opinion of the Judges; and resolved off-hand that ‘no patent of
honour granted to any peer of Great Britain who was a peer of Scotland
at the time of the Union can entitle such peer to sit and vote in
Parliament, or to sit upon the trial of peers.' By these resolutions,
added to the Treaty of Union, the Dukes of Hamilton and Queensberry were
debarred from sitting in their own right, and also from all right of
representation in either the Lords or Commons. The perfectly incompetent
resolution of 1711 remained on the books of the House till 1782, when it
was declared illegal by the unanimous voice of the Judges. It is said to
have been invented by the political necessities of the ministry of the
day, but it could never have lasted 70 years if it had not had the
acquiescence of England behind it. While the resolution remained it was
acted on so far as to refuse the second Duke of Queensberry a writ of
summons as Duke of Dover, though his father had been admitted and had
sat in two parliaments in respect of that title. But the House did not
attempt to carry out its principles so far as to unseat a British peer
because he inherited a Scots dignity. So the resolution was capable of
being evaded at the cost of waiting a generation. The evasion was
effected by creating the Scots peer’s son and heir a British peer in his
father’s lifetime. On the death of the father the young British peer was
in the position of inheriting a Scots peerage and no forfeiture ensued.
To this position of the law or practice at the time is due a number of
British titles held by Scottish peers. The ink was scarcely dry on the
resolution of 1711 before the evasion of it was introduced; Viscount
Dupplin, son and heir of the Earl of Kinnoull, was made Baron Hay of
Pedwardine in the peerage of Great Britain. In 1719 he succeeded to his
father’s earldom. In 1722 the son and heir of the Duke of Roxburgh was
created Earl Kerr, and the son and heir of the Duke of Montrose was made
Earl of Graham. In 1766 the Marquis of Lome, son and heir of the Duke of
Argyle, was made Baron Sundridge. Under the law of 1711 the Earl of
Bute, though capable of being* as he was, Prime Minister, was incapable
of being made a member of the House in his own right! But his son, Lord
Mount Stuart, not subject to the disability, was, in 1776, created Baron
Cardiff of Cardiff.2 Since the
removal of the offending resolution a number of other peers of Scotland
have received peerages of Great Britain and or the United Kingdom,
sometimes merely to give the grantee a hereditary seat in the
legislature, and sometimes for the purpose of conferring on him a higher
degree of peerage.
Nearly two centuries have elapsed since the Roll of the Scottish peerage
was closed. Time may thin its ranks, but no king since the Union has
been advised that he may make good the blanks by new creations, or may
even give a Scottish peer a higher degree on the Roll. Of the 164 titles
on the Union Roll 62 are now held to be extinct or dormant. The
remaining titles are in the hands of 88 peers, 51 of whom hold other
peerages of Great Britain, or the United Kingdom. Whatever the Scottish
peerage may have thought of its treatment at the Union, and of some of
its early experiences at the hands of British Party Ministers and House
of Lords, it cannot complain that its glory is departed. Whether in the
recent rolls of the king’s ministries at home, of governors-general of
India and the Colonies, or of officers in the Field Forces in the Soudan
or South Africa, the Scots Peers and their sons have earned distinction
for their order and their country. The student of institutions and
national and racial tendencies will find questions, if he will, to
answer in this latest chapter of the Scottish peerage— how much or how
little in blood, education, interests or affection the old order is
still Scottish. But in any case the present is not precisely the proper
moment to catalogue and sum up the Scottish peerage as it has stood in
history and stands to-day. For the accepted authorities,—the works of
Crawford, Douglas and Wood, Fraser and the other writers of general and
special genealogies of the peers, also the contents of the public
records, and of private charter chests, in a fulness hitherto
unknown,—are in the act of being thrown into the melting pot, and as yet
only a sample as it were of the new minting has come out of the
workmen’s hands. The works of the earlier peerage writers have, all of
them, their special values. Each has at least added the facts of his own
time. For this as well as for some earlier details, too full to be
reproduced in any more modern work, these Peerages are of permanent
value, and will never be entirely displaced from among the folios of the
student of Scots family history. The patience and learning of their
authors will for ever remain admirable. Since their day, however, the
materials for such histories as they strove to write have by slow but
steady process been extracted from the recesses of Record and Register
Houses, Libraries, and Charter boxes; and the possibility of telling the
full and true story of many a mystery of the past is before us.
When
we turn from the perusal of these—to this generation new—materials to
the pages of any of our general peerage histories we find that there is
much to add, much to subtract, and much sometimes to correct. Crawford
published his work in 1716, Douglas in 1764, and Wood, his editor and
continuator, in 1813. After a period of more than ninety years a new
Peerage is needed if, for no purpose but to record what has taken place
in so long an interval. But the new
Peerage
aims, as it was bound to aim, at telling each story from the beginning;
and at taking place as the standard history of the whole subject. It is
impossible to prolong this present article for the purpose of reviewing
the contents of the volume of the
Peerage
which has been already issued, but from the great amount of new
materials
THE ARMS OF THE DUKE OF ATHOLL
at
its disposal, the modern methods of its compilation, the names of its
editor and his staff, and of the specialists who contribute its several
articles, the volume is worthy of the most respectful and particular
attention.
One
of the features of the work which first attracts notice is the
exemplifications of the armorial bearings of the houses which have held
the titles of nobility in question. They are by the pencil of the
official Herald-Painter of the Lyon Office. By the kind permission of
the Publisher, several of the plates, contained in the first volume of
the Peerage,
illustrate this article. Their art and the extreme boldness of their
execution are much more pleasantly and perfectly appreciated by a brief
examination of the plates themselves than by much letterpress. The
heraldry of the peers has given rise to some discussions and will to
more; but one of the results of our fuller acquaintance with written
records is the revival of respect for the facts of early heraldry. There
are the garbs
of Buchan, derived apparently from the same source as those of Chester.
There are the
lions of Bruce and FitzAlan, abandoned in
Scotland for the territorialised
chief and saltire
of Annan, and the official
chequers
of the Steward. There are the
three bars wavy
of Drummond, said by some to represent the three rivers of the Drummond
country, but thought in another quarter to have come perhaps from abroad
with the legend of the Drummonds* foreign origin. If the Campbells are
Normans, are their well-known arms—gyronny
of eight—anything other than the four limbs
and four spaces of a cross, such as a Norman might have drawn? Does the
sable chief
in the coat of the Grahams allude to the earthen wall which the mythical
first Graham surmounted? Can we found any argument concerning the
derivation of a stock from its bearing on its shield a
lion rampant?
Can we group the families which carry
boar, bear,
or wolf heads?
These are not propounded here as merely heraldic problems; none of these
are idle to the genealogist. Heraldry and genealogy are indispensable to
each other; and now and in the future they will be found once more
walking together hand in hand.
J. H. Stevenson. |