CHAPTER III

THE ARMS OF THE SEE

A CHAPTER largely occupied with the personality of Godfrey Giffard calls for some reference to the arms of the see of Worcester. Impaled with the arms of individual bishops, they are of frequent occurrence in the castle which Giffard helped to build, especially in the stained glass that sometimes adorns and sometimes disgraces the windows of chapel and gallery and hall. The best is in the top lights of the windows on each side of the chapel, which give the coats of:

LATIMER. Gules, a cross patonce or surmounted of a bend azure powdered de lys or.

WHITGIFT.-Argent, on a cross patonce sable four bezants. LLOYD.-Argent, a chevron between three crows sable, each holding an ermine tail in its beak.

SANDYS.-Argent, a fesse dancette between three croslets fitchy gules, a crescent for difference.

STILLINGFLEET.-Argent, on a fesse sable between three fleurs de lys gules three leopard's heads of the field. HOUGH.-Argent, a bend sable.

The last is a delicate compliment on the part of Bishop Maddox to his immediate predecessor. For it was Maddox who gave its present appearance to the inside of the chapel, and it was Hough who made the terrace and the moat-garden from which the exterior of the chapel can best be seen. Maddox is believed to have consulted Dr. John Wall, the Worcester physician, famous for his part in the porcelain works, and to have entrusted the preparation of the windows to William Price, son of Joshua Price, of Oxford, who died in 1765, and whose work can be seen at Westminster Abbey and at Winchester

and New Colleges. The armorial glass in the gallery is of a later and less happy date. The south window near the bottom of the main staircase has in its middle top light the painted coat of Bishop Hurd (argent, on a chief or a raven sable), which may date from his own time; the three in the row beneath it are by another and an infinitely worse hand; they represent Cornewall, Carr, and Pepys, and were probably executed in the time of the last-named, for they appear to be one piece of work.

In the hall there is a modern hatchment of Bishop Prideaux in stained glass-sometimes criticised as defective because the episcopal torteaux are graduated in size instead of being uniform, though there is no lack of mediaeval precedent for such treatment.

In all these cases, then, we are faced with the impaled arms of the see and with the question of their origin. This question was recently suggested to me by a holiday experience of my friend, Canon Blake, rector of Worcester St. Helen. In the cathedral of St. Pol-deLéon in Brittany he was photographing an episcopal tomb, which had attracted his attention because the recumbent bishop was thrusting his staff down a dragon's throat, and he then discovered that the arms on the face of the tomb appeared to be identical with those of our bishopric. The bishop of Léon in question was Réné de Rieux-Soudiac, who died in 1613. Was he, Canon Blake naturally asked, any connexion of Godfrey Giffard, who had inherited the blood and arms of de Cormeilles ?

Mr. Willis Bund with his usual courage tackled the problem in his edition of Giffard's Register,1 and though he left it unsolved, he found some of the factors in the most probable solution, notably the arms of Alexander Giffard. Having no skill in heraldry, I was fortunate to secure the very expert assistance of the Rev. E. E. Dorling, F.S.A., and the following statement represents the information which he placed at my disposal.

We may start with Sir Hugh Giffard, of Boyton, co. Wilts, in the time of Henry III, descending from Walter Giffard of the same place, who was alive in A.D. 1177, 1 (Worc. Hist. Soc.), App. III, clxxxvi-cxc.

and was the son of Elias Giffard of Brimsfield.
Sir Hugh
married Sibil de Craucumbe, daughter of Godfrey de
Craucumbe, co-heir of the barony of Walter de Cormeilles.
This Hugh Giffard was entitled to bear the arms of the
Giffards of Brimsfield, from whom he descended. It is
a family which figures frequently in Bishop Godfrey
Giffard's register, where many documents referring to
his personal affairs are studiously entered. There we
read much about the then head of the family. John
Giffard, lord of Brimsfield, as we have seen, took a
prominent part in the great contests of his time, first
against and later for the Crown; in the register we see
another side of him. He receives from Giles de Berkeleye
of Cubberley a legacy of swans, peacocks, and a ship.1
Bishop Giffard writes to the Pope Honorius IV, petition-
ing that John Giffard may have a dispensation to marry
Margaret Neville, to whom he is of kin within the third
or fourth degree. The bishop sent off a well-known
proctor, Adam de Fileby, archdeacon of Salop, to prose-
cute the affair at Rome, and John Giffard gave a bond to
cover the costs. The business went slowly. At the end
of the year the bishop was writing to his proctor to make
all speed and the proctor was replying to explain the
delays. The bull arrived from Sancta Sabina at Rome
in the spring of 1286, and though it was addressed to the
Bishop of Hereford and was duly entered in his register,
it was equally entered in that of our bishop 5; for it
concerned one who had been the chief of the house of
Giffard since 1248.6 Both John Giffard and Godfrey
were entitled to wear as their coat gules, three lions passant
argent, which is the coat assigned 7 to his brother Walter,

3

1 "Targia"; Register, f. 384.

* F. 226; London, May 15, 1285. Bishop Swinfield of Hereford wrote to the Pope to the same effect from London on May 9th; so they doubtless talked it over (Register, f. 25b).

4 F. 34.

5 F.255.

3 Ff. 243, 244". John Giffard was thrice married: firstly, and somewhat forcibly, to Maud, daughter of Walter de Clifford, widow of William Longespée III, grandson of William, earl of Salisbury (son of Henry II by Fair Rosamund), by whom he had three daughters; secondly, to Alicia Matravers, who left no seed; thirdly, to this Margaret Neville, by whom he had one son, John. 7 Harleian MSS. 1357 and 6100.

archbishop of York, and which equally belonged of right to Hugh Giffard, with whom we began.

But Hugh's marriage with Sibil de Craucumbe brought in other territory and another coat of arms. She was lady of Weston-under-Edge, or Weston-subEdge, to which we have seen our bishop paying frequent attentions. .She bore to her husband at least four sons. The eldest, Sir Alexander (so called after her brother, Alexander de Craucumbe, whom she succeeded), was a crusader, one of two hundred knights who went in the train of William de Longespée, son of the third earl of Salisbury, on his second venture to the Holy Land in 1247. Alexander met his death on the crusade in 1249, and his effigy in Boyton church has a shield showing the three passant lions of the Giffards of Brimsfield. The second son, Walter, was consecrated in Paris on January 4, 1265, to the bishopric of Bath and Wells by Peter de Aquablanca, the absentee bishop of Hereford, who might remember that John Giffard of Brimsfield was one of those who seized his corpulent person in 1263. Walter, as we have seen, was made archbishop of York in 1266. He was lord of Weston-sub-Edge and heir of his mother. We begin to get in touch with the arms of the see when we find1 that (in addition to the Brimsfield coat) he bore as his arms argent, ten roundels gules (= torteaux) with the difference of a label azure; which implies that the writer of the British Museum manuscript considered that Sir Hugh, his father, also bore the shield with the red roundels, and which is not inconsistent with the fact, already noticed, that the archbishop is also credited with the three silver lions passant of Brimsfield. The third son was our bishop, and when Archbishop Walter died in 1279 and the usual inquests were held into his estate, and how it was to pass, he was seen to have held lands in the county of Southampton (Itchel and Cove) of the Bishop of Winchester,2 and Boyton in Wilts, Alkerton. in Oxfordshire, and Weston-sub-Edge and Norton in Gloucestershire, of the king in chief; and it was found 1 British Museum, Add. MS. 12443. 2 See above, p. 23..

that his brother Godfrey, our bishop, was heir to these properties. Their mother Sibil died about 1290, and thereupon Godfrey paid fifty marks for one-third of the Cormeilles fief, being his share of the property which came to him on her death. The fourth son, William, who died before Godfrey Giffard's death in 1302,1 was the only one who had issue, and through him there was a fairly regular succession of one Sir John Giffard, lord of Weston-sub-Edge, to another, till in the days of Elizabeth Sir George Giffard alienated most of the property and left no seed.

From all this we come to the following heraldic situation. The Brimsfield Giffards displayed their gules, three lions passant argent; the Weston-sub-Edge Giffards were entitled to the same; but, being through Sibil de Craucumbe, the mother of that line, co-heirs of the barony of Cormeilles, they were also entitled to the arms argent, ten torteaux, which are generally believed to be the arms appertaining to that barony. It was certainly those arms, now and for centuries past the arms of the see, that they bore (instead of the Brimsfield coat) from the days of Edward II until the extinction of the Westonsub-Edge line in the sixteenth century. The difficulty arises when we seek to know what was the de Cormeilles coat. Mr. Dorling knows of no ancient armorial roll which mentions a de Cormeilles as having roundels except the so-called Parliamentary Roll (temp. Edw. II), which assigns to Sir John " Cormayle" argent, on a fesse sable three bezants. In fact, there seems to be nothing but tradition to connect these arms with the family of de Cormeilles.

The matter may thus be summed up in Mr. Dorling's

own words :

It is all very vague and unsatisfying; but in the absence of any substantial evidence we are driven to accept the old tradition to which Wrottesley 3 refers, and for my own part I think we may accept it.

1 Gen. the Hon. Geo. Wrottesley, The Giffards, 70.

2 Wrottesley (op. cit.), p. 59.

3 Ibid. 202.