to be still so considered, or whether under English armorial law it must now be merely ranked as a charge in an ordinary coat of arms, in general practice it is accepted as the latter; but it nevertheless remains a point of very considerable interest (which has not yet been elucidated) why the pallium should have been discarded for York, and another coat of arms substituted.
The various coats used by the archbishops of England and Ireland are as follows:—
Canterbury.—Azure, an episcopal staff in pale or, and ensigned with a cross patée argent surmounted of a pall of the last, charged with four crosses formée fitchée sable, edged and fringed or.
York.—Gules, two keys in saltire argent, in chief a Royal crown or.
Armagh.—Azure, an episcopal staff argent, ensigned with a cross patée or, surmounted by a pallium of the second, edged and fringed or, charged with four crosses formée fitchée sable.
Dublin.—The arms of this archbishopric are the same as those of Armagh, only with five crosses charged on the pallium instead of four.
The arms of the episcopal sees have no attribute at all similar to the charge of the pallium in the coat of an archbishop, and are merely so many different coats of arms. The shield of every bishop and archbishop is surmounted by his mitre, and it is now customary to admit the use of the mitre by all persons holding the title of bishop who are recognised as bishops by the English law.
This, of course, includes Colonial and Suffragan bishops, retired bishops, and bishops of the Episcopal Churches in Scotland and in Ireland. It is a moot point whether the bishops of the Episcopal Churches in Ireland and in Scotland are entitled to make use of the official arms formerly assigned to their sees at a period when those Churches were State-established; but, looking at the matter from a strictly official point of view, it would not appear that they are any longer entitled to make use of them.
The mitres of an archbishop and of a bishop—in spite of many statements to the contrary—are exactly identical, and the mistaken idea which has of late years (the practice is really quite a modern one) encircled the rim of an archbishop's mitre with the circlet of a coronet is absolutely incorrect.
There are several forms of mitre which, when looked upon as an ecclesiastical ornament, can be said to exist; but from the heraldic point of view only one mitre is recognised, and that is of gold, the labels being of the same colour. The jewelled variety is incorrect in armorial representations, though the science of armory does not appear to have enforced any particular shape of mitre.
The "several forms" of the mitre—to which allusion has just been
