heraldryofyorkmi01custuoft

348 THE HERALDRY OF YORK MINSTER.
ancient heroes derived their names, of which Hengist and Horsa, those
traditional if not historical leaders of the first Saxon invaders, furnish
examples, those names being nearly synonymous.*
And it seems equally certain that if this was the standard of the
nation generally, each individual king, when the land became divided
into several kingdoms, had his own special device. At the battle of
Assandun, where Eadmund Ironsides was defeated by Cnut, "the King
"took the post," Freeman tells us,f "which immemorial usage fixed for
"a royal general, between the two ensigns which were displayed over
" an English army, the golden dragon, the national ensign of Wessex,
" and the standard, seemingly the personal device of the "
King and
;
that the Danes had also their national standard is evident from the same
passage, which relates how Cnut had no mind to attack, and most likely
wished to avoid a battle altogether ; but the raven fluttered her wings,
and Thurkill, overjoyed at the happy omen, called for immediate action.
For the Danish raven, according to the story, opened its mouth and
fluttered its
wings before a victory, but held its wings down before a
defeat.
Edward the Confessor is
accredited with an actual coat-of-arms, viz.,
a cross between five martlets, to which I have already referred, page 29.
The Bayeux tapestry J certainly gives indications that Harold, his successor,
bore a distinctly heraldic device, for the shields of the soldiers are represented
as bearing a dragon, probably the dragon of Wessex, of which he
was the earl in succession to his father, Godwin. Freeman, in his History
of the Norman Conquest, vol. iv., p. 61, says that "William sent to Pope
"Alexander the fallen gonfanon of Harold, on which the skill of English
"hands had so vainly wrought the golden form of the fighting man;" and
that afterwards, when the abbey was to be founded on the very site
of the
battle, "the King bade that his church should be built on no spot but
" where he had won his crowning victory .... the high altar of the
"abbey of St. Martin should stand nowhere but on the spot where the
" standard of the fighting man had been pitched on the "
day of Calixtus
(vol. iv., p. 401).
The shields of the soldiers of William also have indications of
definite devices upon them ; and William himself is represented bearing a
gonfanon, on the head of which there is a distinct cross, which the writer
of the paper in the Archaologta, xviii., 360, on the tapestry, calls the
"Norman cross," and adds that "the colours thereof are argent, cross or,
" border azure." These facts, if they do not give any definite information
as to the heraldic devices of the Saxon kings, seem to me to suggest a
*
Arc/iteofagia, vol. xxxi., p. 290. t Norm.m Conquest, vol. i., p. 390.
J See illustration.