CHAPTER XIV.

CADENCY, OR DIFFERENCING.

(J. W.; AND G. B.)

BEFORE armorial bearings had been for a century in general use it was found necessary to distinguish by their variations, not only different families but different members, or branches of the same family. It came to be understood that the head of the house could alone

use the pure unaltered coat. Even the heir apparent, or heir presumptive, had no right to use the ancestral coat without some variation; in common with the other cadets he had to bear it with a difference, or brisure. This was early an unwritten but generally accepted law. The obligation of cadet lines to difference their arms. was recognised over nearly the whole of civilised Europe in the fourteenth century; and when, later, the obligation seemed in danger of being forgotten it was made the subject of direct legislation.

In the treatise of ZYPCEUS, de Notitia juris Belgici, lib. xii, quoted also in MENÊTRIER, Recherches du Blazon, p. 218, we find the following:

"Ut secundo et ulterius geniti, quin imo primogeniti vivo patre, integra insignia non gerant, sed aliqua nota distincta, ut perpetuo lineæ dignosci possint, et ex quâ quique descendant, donec anteriores defecerint. Exceptis Luxemburgis et Gueldris, quibus non sunt i mores. (The exception is curious. I have printed the Regulations in force in Portugal in the Appendix to this book.)

The choice of these brisures was, however, left to the persons concerned; and there is, consequently, a great

variety of these ancient modes of difference which it is the object of this chapter to set forth in detail.

In England, where great stringency of regulation has prevailed with regard to some armorial matters of smallimportance, it has (as is often the case) been accompanied with extreme laxity as regards other, and more important, ones.

The old system of differencing was practically abandoned in the sixteenth century, and was replaced by the present unsatisfactory "Marks of Cadency," consisting of minute charges intended to denote the order of birth of a series of brothers, and themselves to be charged in a second generation by a still minuter series. Even to this limited extent the system has been found unworkable, and beyond a second generation there is not even the semblance of provision for indicating cadency.

In the remarks on DIFFERENCES printed in the Appendix to LOWER'S Curiosities of Heraldry from an essay by Sir EDWARD DERING, circa 1630, occur the following just remarks:

"These minute differences, as they were antiently dangerous and insufficient, so in manner as they are now used they were then unknown; neither is there art enough by any of our heralds' rules, though much refined of late, to guide one so as to know which of the crescent-bearers was the uncle, or which the nephew, and for crescent upon crescent, mullet upon mullet, etc., in a pedigree of no great largeness, perspective glasses and spectacles cannot help you; but you must have Lyncean eyes, or his that could write Homer's Iliads, and fold them into a nutshell."

As in England so on the Continent generally brisures have gone greatly into disuse. It is in Scotland alone. that the old system of differencing has never ceased to be in viridi observantia. In fact the most striking

peculiarity of Scottish Heraldry is the importance which it has always attached to distinguishing the arms of the cadets of a family from those which pertain to its chief. It must, however, be confessed that circumstances, presently to be referred to, have made this an easier matter than it has been elsewhere.

Anyone who has given attention to the different economic conditions of England and Scotland will have little difficulty in apprehending the reasons which have made differencing at once easier and more important in North Britain than in the southern kingdom. These are the permanency of the old families; and the closeness of the family and feudal tie. At an early period the leading families of England began to wane, not merely out of power but out of existence. Great baronial houses continually ended in heiresses and co-heiresses who often divided estates, and carried them to meaner men. The great struggle between the Houses of York and Lancaster known as the Wars of the Roses, swept whole families of both the greater and lesser nobility off the face of the earth. Of the twentyfive barons appointed to enforce the observance of Magna Charta, who must have been chief among the magnates of England, there is not a male descendant surviving in its present peerage. It is not intended to imply that the present nobility of the British Empire is inferior in point of ancient lineage, or in any other respect, to the existing noblesse of any other European country. The foreigner, who looks simply to the date of the Peerage dignity of one of our nobles, is very liable to form an entirely false idea with regard to this matter. He does not know, probably he has no means of knowing, that a person called to the House of Lords, Imperante Victoria, may be the head, or still more probably the cadet, of a family of untitled gentlemen who can trace their descent in the male line, if they care