Canterbury Arms
IN the last decade of the fourteenth century, rebuilding of the nave of Canterbury Cathedral led to reconstruction of the cloister, which adjoins it to the north. This was roofed with an elaborate ribbed vault of thirty-six bays, in each of which the intersections of the ribs at upwards of thirty points were marked by bosses, of which the greatest number take the form of shields of arms carved in relief. These, numbering over eight hundred, form easily the largest display of carved heraldry of its date in the British Isles. There is reason to think that the arms shown are, in the main, those of Kentish and other benefactors of Henry IV's reign who contributed to the cost of the work. It can hardly be doubted that the shields were all at first coloured and gilded in their proper tinctures. The Reverend Thomas Streatfield was indeed confident that they had been plain and that the traces of colour remaining in his own day (1836) were the work of a seventeenth-century herald painter. But Streatfield's generation had not yet understood how gaudy--even garish—the Middle Ages were.
Manuscript notes, made in the times of Elizabeth and James I, show that even then the colours of some eighty shields only of the eight hundred could be distinguished, and since very often one shield of arms can be told from another only by its colour, this means that the identification of many of these shields must be a matter of difficulty and uncertainty. In view of their importance, great efforts have been made to repair this defect. Thomas Willement, a father of the Gothic and heraldic revival, in his scholarly Heraldic Notices of Canterbury Cathedral, printed in 1827, conjectured colours and identifications for the majority. The late Ralph Griffin, in a paper printed in Archaologia in 1915, went over the same ground in fuller detail and with greater care, arriving at certain or reason- ably probable identifications of the greater number of the shields. It was with the help of advice from Griffin that some ten years ago the shields were recoloured under the direction of Dr. E. W. Tristram.
The present volume comprises photographs of the shields as now repainted, together with blazons and identifications of the arms, brief notes on their supposed owners, an index by names, an ordinary or index by designs and a glossary of terms by the editor, Commander Messenger. For the notes and identifications the editor acknow-
ledges his debt to Griffin, from whom most of them are taken— and on whose authority they rest—for neither Griffin nor the present editor gives evidence for them. It is unfortunate that Commander Messenger has distinguished its " conjectural" those identifications (printed in italics) which he has added to Griffin's, for many of Griffin's are conjectural also, though no doubt in a lesser degree. It should also be made clearer than it is that, wherever the identifica- tions are doubtful, so also, usually, is the torrectness of the colours in which the shields have been repainted. The Friends of Canter- bury Cathedral are, however, to be congratulated on their enter- prise in first procuring the cleaning and repainting of the cloister heraldry and now in publishing this useful and attractive record
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