The arms of Sir Richard Damory

The Damory arms of Bucknell and Bletchingdon are almost always given today as barry nebuly argent and gules. Burke, Boutell and Hutchins all print it that way, and it is the form the Tudor heralds recorded. But the earliest authoritative sources say something subtly different, and the difference is worth setting down properly, because it tells us how the coat was actually borne in Sir Richard's lifetime and how the language of heraldry itself changed underneath it. ✓

The earliest record: the Parliamentary Roll, c. 1312

Both Damory brothers appear in the Parliamentary Roll of Arms (also called the Great Roll or the Bannerets' Roll), compiled about 1312 and preserved as British Library Cotton MS Caligula A. XVIII. They are entered under Berkshire, at shields 328 and 329, in the original Anglo-Norman blazon:

Sire Richard Ammori · oundee de argent e de goules
Sire Roger Ammori · meisme les armes, a une bende de sable

Two things follow at once. First, the field is blazoned oundee, that is, wavy, not nebuly. Second, Sir Richard bears the coat plain and undifferenced, as head of the house, while his younger brother Roger, the future baron and husband of Elizabeth de Clare, carries a bend as a brother's difference. The bend so often treated as part of the Damory coat began life as Roger's cadency mark. ✓

The same treatment continues into the next reign. A roll of the time of Edward III, cited in Parker's Glossary of Terms Used in Heraldry under Undy, blazons the coat as Monsire Daumary, port unde argent et gules de vi peeces: still wavy, now specified as of six pieces. ✓

How wavy became nebuly

The apparent contradiction between the medieval rolls and the later authorities is not a contradiction at all. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, blazon used unde or oundee for any waved line of partition; the systematic distinction between wavy and nebuly is a later refinement, largely settled by the Tudor period. Early painted versions of unde were often drawn with deep, bulbous, cloud-like waves, and when the Tudor heralds and the antiquaries who followed them looked at those paintings, and at the Damory coat surviving in glass and in quarterings, they read and recorded the line as nebuly. So the rolls of arms say wavy, the visitations and everything downstream of them say nebuly, and both are describing the same coat through the conventions of their own century. ~

The visitation evidence

The Damory male line was extinct by the late fourteenth century, more than a hundred and fifty years before the heralds' visitations began, so no visitation records the family in its own right. But Sir Richard is named directly in the visitation record all the same. In the Poure of Blechingdon pedigree printed with the Oxfordshire visitations (Harleian Society vol. 5, pp. 209 to 211, incorporating the fuller descent from Sir Thomas Phillipps's Topographer), Sir Walter Poure is recorded as marrying Katherine, daughter of Robert D'Amory of Blechesdon, and heir following the daughters of Richard D'Amory, her brother. That single sentence carries the Damory inheritance, and the quartering, into the Poure line. ✓

The Poure arms are entered with the Damory coat in the first quarter: Barry nebulee of six argent and sable, a bend or, labelled D'Amory, quartered with Poure and Cottesford. The identical quartering appears again at p. 175 in the Wayneman of Fringford entry, brought in through a Poure marriage. And in the church gatherings printed with the same volume, immediately following the notes on Bletchingdon church and the Poure tombs there, the heralds recorded glass bearing Barry nebulee of six argent and gules, a bend azure and plain Barry nebulee argent and gules, both labelled D'Amory: the true medieval tinctures, agreeing with the Parliamentary Roll. ✓

The tinctures of the bend, it will be noticed, wander freely across the sources: sable in the Parliamentary Roll, azure in the Bletchingdon glass, or in the Poure quartering. The wandering is itself evidence that the bend was a difference rather than a fixed element of the coat. ~

The later authorities

Burke's General Armory, Boutell and Hutchins's History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset all latterly give the coat as nebulee, following the visitation-era convention rather than the earliest record. They are not wrong; they are simply downstream. The family record should cite them as witnesses to the settled later form, with the Parliamentary Roll standing as the earliest authority for the coat as borne. ✓

The Damer descent and the Cotherington link

The coat did not end with the antiquaries. Hutchins prints, with the Damer of Came and Milton Abbey material, a pedigree carrying a line down from Sir Richard Damory (d. 1375/6) through Giles Damory of Cotherington to Joseph Damory or Damer, who married Jane St Loe in 1570, and so to the Damers of Godmanstone, Came and Milton Abbey, culminating in Joseph Damer, created Earl of Dorchester in 1792. The earldom died with his son in 1808, the name continuing through the Dawson-Damers, Earls of Portarlington. ~

The heralds' treatment of the Damer arms embodies that claimed descent. The Damer coat is recorded as Barry nebuly of six argent and gules, a bend engrailed azure: the medieval Damory coat, differenced by engrailing the bend. The Royal Commission's survey of Dorset monuments records exactly that blazon on the Damer memorials, and, tellingly, records a separate Damory coat in the county as barry wavy with a bend: the wavy and nebuly renderings of the same field standing side by side in the same armorial index. ✓

A note of caution belongs here. The link through Giles Damory of Cotherington connects a sixteenth-century Dorset family to a male line generally held extinct in the fourteenth century, and it rests on the pedigree tradition printed by Hutchins and repeated by Burke rather than on contemporary record. It is entered in this family record as a claimed descent, accepted by the heralds for the purposes of the Damer arms, and graded accordingly. ~

THE COAT, STATED PROPERLY

The earliest authoritative blazon of the Damory arms is oundee de argent e de goules: barry wavy (later regularised as barry nebuly) of six, argent and gules. Sir Richard Damory bore the coat plain and undifferenced. His brother Roger differenced it with a bend, variously rendered sable, azure and or across the sources. From the Tudor period onward the line of partition was consistently blazoned nebuly, and it is in that form that the coat descends through the Poure and Wayneman quarterings, into Burke, Boutell and Hutchins, and, differenced with a bend engrailed azure, into the Damer arms of the Earls of Dorchester.

The registered arms of Aynsley Damery carry the same field, Barry nebuly of six Argent and Gules, as a deliberate echo of the medieval coat. The echo is a matter of design and homage, recorded here on its own terms and graded separately from any question of descent.

Sources