CHAPTER XXXVIII
ECCLESIASTICAL HERALDRY
ECCLESIASTICAL heraldry has nothing like the importance in British armory that it possesses elsewhere. It may be said to consist in this country exclusively of the official arms assigned to and recorded for the archiepiscopal and episcopal sees, and the mitres and crosiers which are added to the shields, and a certain number of ecclesiastical symbols which occur as charges. In Pre-Reformation days there were, of course, the many religious houses which used armorial emblems, but with the suppression of the monasteries these vanished. The cardinal's hat was recognised in former days, and would still be officially certified in England as admittedly correctly displayed above the arms of a Roman cardinal. But the curious and intricate development of other varieties of the ecclesiastical hat which will be found in use in all other European countries is not known to British armory. Nor has the English College of Arms recognised the impersonal arms of the Catholic communities. Those arms, with and without the ecclesiastical hats, play a conspicuous part in Continental heraldry.
It is difficult to assign a proper value or a definite status to the arms of the abbeys and other religious houses in this country in Pre-Reformation times. The principal, in fact the only important sources of information concerning them are the impressions of seals which have come down to us. Many of these seals show the effigies of saints or patrons, some show the impersonal arms of the religious order to whose rule the community conformed, some the personal arms of the official of the moment, others the personal arms of the founder. In other cases arms presumably those of the particular foundation or community occur, but in such cases the variations in design are so marked, and so often we find that two, three, or more devices are used indifferently and indiscriminately, that one is forced to arrive at the conclusion that a large proportion of the devices in use, though armorial in character, had no greater status than a temporary existence as seal designs. They distinctly lack the unchanging continuity one associates with armorial bearings. But whatever their status may
