Legitimizing bucket-shops

 
Kathy McClurg
 
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Kathy McClurg
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19 July 2012 06:13
 

Jeremy Keith Hammond;94714 wrote:

Michael, your’s is my favorite response. Thank you for getting me closer to understanding what that threshold is. Are you saying that if it wasn’t harmful - perhaps the original line of legitimate armigers has ended or abandoned the arms - that it may be forgivable?


Unless the original line can be proven to have completely died out (male and female line descendants), then you’ll never know if someone in their future doing genealogy research may use the arms in family trees, matriculate them in some way or base their family arms on them in some way…  To get such arms from a source which is questionable at best is bad practice and once you realize this is the case (or future generations do), I believe some serious thought would have to be given to abandoning them OR making some significant changes to develop essentially new arms with a nod to the "old" ones - hopefully registering or recording the change in such a way that the connection can still be made to your family’s past users of the arms.

 

However, ALL mistakes made honestly can be forgiven.  If one showed up here proudly displaying their family’s assumed arms and one of our distinguished scholars immediately said, "Those are the arms of George Washington"....  I would think this body would be more than happy to assist the armiger in making necessary adjustments to an original assumption after the person’s story were told…. but they’d (I’m guessing here) probably more or less abandon someone who refused to adjust once they knew the arms were someone else’s and refused to make a change…

 
Michael Y. Medvedev
 
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Michael Y. Medvedev
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21 July 2012 17:49
 

Jeremy Keith Hammond;94714 wrote:

Are you saying that if it wasn’t harmful - perhaps the original line of legitimate armigers has ended or abandoned the arms - that it may be forgivable?

Dear Jeremy, it all depends on the circumstances. To usurp (unwillingly) arms of a family which is extinct, or simply living somewhere else far enough, may happen to be harmless if by a lucky chance it does not affect the "victim", its identity, affairs, etc.

An intended usurpation constitutes a grave harm by itself IMHO.

Bartholus said that if a German has the same arms as an Italian, this is no problem, and, apart of the legal (jurisdictional) logic, there was a practical common sense behind it. Today "the world is lesser" and "everything is closer" but this common sense still may work - from time to time.

 
Martin Goldstraw
 
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Martin Goldstraw
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30 July 2012 15:13
 

Michael F. McCartney;94746 wrote:

"Are you saying that if it wasn’t harmful - perhaps the original line of legitimate armigers has ended or abandoned the arms - that it may be forgivable?"

I’m sure you were addressing your question to the other Michael, but FWIW, I don’t believe that the extinction (which may or may not be total extinction—maybe just a job of genealogical research) of the original family leaves their arms open for whoever else jumps on them first.  IMO thqat would be the equivalent of finding an extinct and unrelated family of the same name and "grafting" yourself onto their pedigree.  Not OK.


I entirely agree. The arms of an extinct line remain forever as a memorial to that line.

 
J. Stolarz
 
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J. Stolarz
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08 October 2012 13:37
 

Kenneth Mansfield;94580 wrote:

I reject your premise. Standards need not have anything to do with the law or governmental regulation. You do not walk into a restaurant shirtless, in short shorts and barefoot because of regulations. You do not walk into church shirtless, in short shorts and barefoot because of standards.


I agree.  Even though there isn’t governmental regulation, it doesn’t mean it’s alright for it to be a free for all.  We don’t need the government to regulate everything, especially when there’s good honest people willing to do so because they enjoy the history, hobby, and principle of something like heraldry.  When there isn’t governmental regulation, it’s up to people like us to help regulate what is, and what isn’t kosher.

 

And if they refuse to listen, we can always resort to the time and test practice of publicly shaming them by putting them in stocks wink.

 
Quent
 
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Quent
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12 April 2014 10:30
 

The Penn arms might be an example of what the OP is writing about.

The Penn arms (William Penn of Pennsylvania) are:

Argent, on a fess Sable three plates.

 

I’ve read that Admiral Sir William Penn (William Penn’s father) found these arms displayed in a confiscated manor house he had been given and simply started using them.

 

My own opinion is this is bad form.  However, after three hundred and sixty years or more I have no doubt these arms are universally recognized as the Penn arms.  The Penn family continues to this day in England.

 
Michael F. McCartney
 
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Michael F. McCartney
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14 April 2014 02:27
 

FWIW I’d always heard that the Penn arms were canting - the silver roundels being "pence" (English pennies).

 
Quent
 
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Quent
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14 April 2014 11:18
 

Internet sites based in England assert that Sir William Penn assumed the arms of the Penns of Buckinghamshire, supposedly an unrelated family.  No citations were given.  I’ve also read that the arms were on the wall of a manor house Sir William acquired.

However, I was amazed to find that there is serious hatred for the Penn family (Sir William and his eldest son, William) on the part of some English enthusiasts.  That bias certainly casts doubt on unsupported assertions.

 

If Sir William did appropriate the arms, it would be the classic ‘I have the same name so these are my arms’ scenario.

 
Quent
 
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Quent
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14 April 2014 13:03
 

Not to beat this topic into the ground, but I found that the great Sir Francis Drake also used arms that did not belong to him, namely:

Argent a wyvern Gules.

 

He used the arms of Sir Bernard Drake (from an unrelated Drake family).  Sir Bernard must have called Sir Francis on it, because Sir Francis was issued

new arms:

 

Sable, a fess wavy between two estoiles Argent.

 

The blazon of Sir Francis’ crest is:

 

Upon the terrestrial globe a ship under sail drawn round the same with golden hawsers by a hand appearing from clouds Proper, on the mainmast a star Argent, and in the ship a wyvern Gules, its wings spread, looking towards the hand, motto: Auxilio Divino.

 

The charming story is that " [T]heQueen originally instructed that the wyvern should be hanging by its heels from the rigging of the ship in the crest - a dig at Sir Bernard Drake, whose arms (above) Sir Francis had been assuming."

 

Sir Francis refused to give up the battle and quartered BOTH varieties of Drake arms.

 

http://www.internationalheraldry.com/famous.htm

 

When I was a boy (circa 1963) I actually wrote to the College of Arms asking about a RAKE coat of arms that I’d seen in an armorial in the library. (Ermine, three bars sable).  I was brokenhearted when I received a nice postcard from Lancaster Herald with the bad news that there were no Rakestraw arms on file with the College, and, in addition, he could find no arms with that blazon.  Meanwhile my Mom, bless her heart, had embroidered those arms for me and framed them as a Christmas present.  Also she decided to substitute red bars for black because she thought they looked better.  Turns out those are the arms of an ancient noble family from Brittany.  Worse and worse!

 

She went off like a bomb when I told her they weren’t right and we couldn’t put them up.  I still have that embroidery hanging over my desk and I have specifically mentioned it in my will as a dearly loved family heirloom.

 

Therefore I have a certain sympathy for people with coat-of-arms shop arms.  Those outfits normally list the ‘Rakestraw’ arms as ‘Azure, three garbs Or.’  Pretty ritzy, and I guess a couple of old English and Scottish noble families thought so as well!

 
Kenneth Mansfield
 
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Kenneth Mansfield
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14 April 2014 13:24
 

Wow. There’s a lot of artwork on that page taken from this site with no attribution for source or artist (Joe McMillan).

 
 
Michael F. McCartney
 
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Michael F. McCartney
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18 April 2014 11:47
 

If they’ve appropriated Joe’s artwork, there’s a little thing called copyright - it’s not just a lack of attribution, it’s a lack of permission by the copyright owner.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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18 April 2014 12:38
 

Kenneth Mansfield;101855 wrote:

Wow. There’s a lot of artwork on that page taken from this site with no attribution for source or artist (Joe McMillan).


Kenneth:  I’ve just sent a note demanding the images be deleted from their site.  Don’t hold your breath.

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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18 April 2014 12:44
 

Quent;101854 wrote:

Not to beat this topic into the ground, but I found that the great Sir Francis Drake also used arms that did not belong to him, namely:

Argent a wyvern Gules.

 

He used the arms of Sir Bernard Drake (from an unrelated Drake family). Sir Bernard must have called Sir Francis on it, because Sir Francis was issued

new arms:

 

Sable, a fess wavy between two estoiles Argent.

 


The admiral believed himself entitled to the wyvern arms by inheritance, whether he was not, and after being granted the new arms quartered the old and new together.  There is some evidence that he may have secured official sanction for this, but it is far from conclusive.  See our colleague Charles Drake’s essay on this subject at http://www.wyverngules.com/Documents/ArmsofSFD/arms_of_sir_francis_drake.htm

 
Joseph McMillan
 
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Joseph McMillan
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18 April 2014 12:56
 

On the Penns:  whether he was right or not, William Penn (founder of Pennsylvania) believed his father the admiral to have been a descendant of the Penns of Penns-Lodge, Wilts, and of Penn, Bucks.

As I recall, the arms were confirmed to at least the latter at one of the visitations, but they are first recorded in a roll dating to 1308-1314.  Since English arms descend to all the sons alike, there could well have been scores of men by the mid-17th century with a perfectly good claim to them by right of descent from the original bearer.  This could well have included the admiral.

 
liongam
 
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liongam
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19 April 2014 05:54
 

Joe is right the arms of the Penns, ‘Argent on a fess sable three plates’ are of ancient usage and certainly they were recorded in the Visitation of the County of Salop (Shropshire) 1564-1620 [Penn, of Shropshire] and the Visitation of the County of Buckinghamshire 1575-1634 [Penn, of Penn, Co. Bucks].  The Penns were said to be of ultimately of ancient Welsh origin.

John