A Fifteenth-Century Description of the Brass of Sir Hugh Hastings at Elsing, Norfolk

Extract

It has been often stated that the early records of the Court of Chivalry or Court of the Constable and Marshal are lost, and this is in the main true. More, however, by accident than care, as it seems, full records of proceedings in three great medieval ‘Pleas of Arms’ tried in the Court have been preserved. Those of two of the three, namely, Scrope versus Grosvenor, 1385–90, and Lovell versus Morley, 1386–95, are among the Chancery Miscellanea in the Public Record Office and are contemporary if not official records. For the third case, Grey versus Hastings, 1407–17, we have to rely on two relatively modern transcripts of an ancient register of which the present whereabouts, if indeed it still exists, is not now known. Both these two transcripts are at the College of Arms. The older, made in 1582 and 1583 by Robert Glover, Somerset Herald, from the original then in the hands of Henry, earl of Kent, the heir of Lord Grey of Ruthin, plaintiff in the suit, is contained in a volume labelled ‘Philpot, P.e. No. 1’. This was printed privately in 1841, at the expense of Lord Hastings, by Charles George Young, York Herald (afterwards Garter) with some illustrative matter as ‘An account of the controversy between Reginald Lord Grey of Ruthyn and Sir Edward Hastings, in the Court of Chivalry, in the reign of King Henry IIII’. This transcript, however, on its own showing (cf. p. 29 of Young's edition) omits many of the depositions, while upon comparison with the other it proves to contain only quite a small proportion of the whole contents of the original.