and ancient precedents. That the recognised mark has been changed at different periods, and as a consequence that to a certain extent the advertisement it conveys has been less patent is, of course, put down to the "venality" of mediæval heralds (happily their backs are broad) by those who are too short-sighted to observe that the one thing an official herald moves heaven and earth to escape from is the making of a new precedent; and that, on the score of signs of illegitimacy, the official heralds, when the control of arms passed into their hands, found no established rule. So far from having been guilty of venality, as Woodward suggests, they have erred on the other side, and by having worked only on the limited number of precedents they found they have stereotyped the advertisement, and thereby made the situation more stringent than they found it.
We have it from biblical sources that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations, and this spirit has undoubtedly crept into the views of many writers, but to get into the true perspective of the matter one needs to consider the subject from the point of view of less prudish days than our own.
I have no wish to be misunderstood. In these days much heraldic reviewing of the blatant and baser sort depends not upon the value of the work performed, a point of view which is never given a thought, but entirely upon the identity of the writer whose work is under review, and is largely composed of misquotation and misrepresentation. It may perhaps be as well, therefore, to state that I am not seeking to condone illegitimacy or to combat present opinions upon the point. I merely state that our present opinions are a modern growth, and that in the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, when the fundamental principles of heraldry were in the making, it was not considered a disgrace to have an illegitimate son, nor was it considered then that to be of illegitimate birth carried the personal stigma that came later.
At any rate, the fact remains that a new mark was called into being in England about the year 1780 when in a grant to Zachary to quarter the arms of Sacheverell, from which family he was in the female line illegitimately descended, the bordure wavy was first met with as a sufficient and proper mark of illegitimacy. The curious point is that before that date in Scotland and in England the bordure wavy possessed nothing of this character, and to the present day the bordure wavy in Scotland is undoubtedly nothing more than a legitimate mark of legitimate cadency, for which mark Mr. Stodart provides a place in the scheme of differencing which he tabulated as the basis of cadency marks in Scotland (Fig. 732). Since that date the bordure wavy has
