238 THE ANCESTOR The real Godric, we may add, from whom the family descends was living about a century after the Norman Conquest.
- * *
One of the objects which l^he Ancestor will keep specially in view will be the raising of the standard of genealogical and heraldic criticism. It is at present a rare exception for books dealing with family history or with armorial subjects to be discussed by reviewers who possess any real knowledge of these matters. As a natural consequence of this, worthless or misleading books receive at times laudatory notices, while others of real value are dismissed with slight notice. Nor is even ignorance alone to blame. The ' little knowledge * of the proverb is here specially dangerous. For instance, in some critical observations on 'The St, George's Kalendar^ the ^een complained of its editor's ignorance of the fact that the earldom of Arundel passed 'from the FitzAlans to the Howards by the same Margaret Mowbray who is only credited with being co-heir of Mowbray, Segrave and Brotherton.' Unhappily for the writer, the earldom passed from the FitzAlans to the Howards neither in the way nor at the time that he imagines. It descended to Philip Howard at a much later period (1580) as the maternal grandson of the last FitzAlan earl. One of the illustrated papers previously referred to con- tained a portrait of Captain Swiney, who ' claims,' it explained,
- to act as Lord Great Chamberlain.' The public were in-
formed that ' Captain Swiney's claim goes back further than the eighteenth Earl of Oxford, for he is said to be descended from Robert de Vere, who went to Ireland and whose estates are now owned by the Duke of Abercorn ; " Verres " is the Latin for " boar pig." ' Robert de Vere, Marquis of Dublin and Duke of Ireland, is a well known character in English history, but he is also well known to have died without issue. A boar (verres) was no doubt the ' canting ' (or punning) device of his house, but has nothing, we need scarcely say, to do with Captain Swiney's name, which is of Celtic derivation. The name of Vere is responsible not only for the ' claim ' of this alleged descendant, but for a curious ancestor as well. For Leland's pedigree derived them through Miles de Vere, Duke of Angers and Metz, in 778, descended, in common with the Emperor Marcus Antonius Verus, from Verus (so named from his true dealing), who was baptized by Marcellus
