Natural history, lore and legend : being some few examples of quaint and by-gone beliefs gathered in from divers authorities, ancient and mediaeval, of varying degrees of reliability / by F. Edward Hulme.

Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Natural history, lore and legend : being some few examples of quaint and by-gone beliefs gathered in from divers authorities, ancient and mediaeval, of varying degrees of reliability / by F. Edward Hulme. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    of this. We need only now refer to the allusive use of the charge in the arms of the ancient family of De La Mere, and to its occurrence as one of the badges adopted by the Black Prince. By his will in 1376 the Prince left to his son some hangings de worstede embroidery avec mermyns de mier. The mermaid is found, too, sometimes on paving tiles, bells, and in Gothic stone and wood-carving. It may be seen, for example, in a boss at Exeter Cathedral. In Winchester Cathedral the mermaid holds the accustomed comb, while her companion merman grasps a captured fish. In Lyons Cathedral a mermaid, or we may perhaps more justly say a mer-matron, nurses a mer-baby. A mermaid will be found carved on one of the misereres of Henry VII.'s chapel. Another may be seen at Exeter Cathedral, and a very good one again on a bench end at Sherringham church.* It is also well known as a tavern sign, and the first literary club ever founded in England, including amongst its members Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Selden and Carew, was established in 1603 at the Mermaid in Bread Street, Cheapside. Scoresby in his account of the arctic regions says that the head of the young walrus is very human in appearance ; the creature has a way too of rearing itself well out of water to gaze at ships and other objects in a way that proves very suggestive of the mermaid idea. I have myself, * See some good figures, too, in the Book of Emblems of Alciatus, 1551.