heraldryofyorkmi01custuoft

190 THE HERALDRY OF YORK MINSTER.
We can therefore imagine Thomas Hotham, of Scorborough, now the
head of the family, consulting with his aged uncle, the bishop, and deciding
If so, what more natural
to renounce the old coat and adopt a new one.
than that Thomas Hotham should suggest the arms of his mother, Matilda,
a daughter of Robert de Hilton, a baron of the realm temp. Edw. I.
(about
whom I shall have much to say by-and-by), who bore argent two bars azure,
and that the bishop should suggest the arms of his mother, Maud, daughter
of Robert Lord Strafford, by Alice, daughter of Thos. Corbet, of Shropshire,
who bore Or a corbeau or raven sable ? Her brother was also made a baron
by Edw. I. ;
but on the death of her nephew, John, third baron sine prole
she, and her sister Elizabeth married to Edmund de Cornwall, became coheiresses,
and thus entitled to bear the arms of Corbet, which her daughter
would inherit and impale. An illustrious coat indeed in those days, for
the device of the raven is said to have been granted to Robert Corbet,
grandfather of Alice, by Richard I., at the battle of Acre, so that it would
be specially valued by her descendants, and incorporated in any coat
which they might bear.
And thus the new, i.e. the present coat of Hotham, could be formed,
viz., the bars of Hilton becoming barry of argent and azure, and the
corbeau of Corbet being placed on a canton at the most honourable
corner of the shield the method employed when it was desired to give
significant
reference to some allied coat.
And this, I think, is confirmed by the fact that Bishop Hotham
undoubtedly bore the coat, for it was illuminated on the south wall of
the choir at Ely, and the colours rigidly adhered to by Dean Peacock
when Ely Cathedral was restored. It was considered by those at work
upon the re-illumination that the old colours were coeval with the
masonry, viz. 1336, the year of the Bishop's death. Wharton, in his
Anglia Sacra, quoting from the Continuatio Histories Eliensis, in the
Lambeth Library, by Robert Steward, the last prior and first dean of
Ely, 1522-1577,
azurae et argenteae,
says, "Arma Johannis Hothum sunt barrulae octo partium
in uno cantone aureo unus mertellus sable." And