WYRLEY, William.

£5,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington

The True Use of Armorie, Shewed by Historie, and plainly proved by example: Rare first edition of this essay on heraldry, finely bound. Wyrley, an antiquarian and officer of arms, explains the symbolism of armorial devices with illustrations. Appended to the essay are two long poems about the knights Sir John Chandos and Sir John de Gralhy.This volume is from the library of Stowe House, Buckinghamshire, which was inherited in 1834 by Richard Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Chandos. His wife, Anne Elizabeth, was the sole heir of the 3rd Duke of Chandos and a descendant of Sir John Chandos.Wyrley highlights the importance of heraldic devices as distinctive marks especially in war. He rejects the practice of dividing a shield into too many parts, and shows how the same blazon can be varied in an effective way for different members of the same family using illustrations of shields of the Basset family. William Dugdale republished part of the tract in his Ancient Usage of Bearing Arms (1682), misattributing it to Wyrley's mentor Sampson Erdeswicke.The two poems are written in the style of The Mirror for Magistrates, a Tudor-era collection that recounts the lives and tragic deaths of historical figures. Both pieces take the form of moralized complaints against Fortune, voiced by their ill-fated subjects. Sir John Chandos, in the tenth stanza of his poem, praises the authors of the Mirror and wishes to be counted among their storied figures.This w

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