_Ladies' Arms in a Lozenge_ (Vol. viii., pp. 37. 83.).--BROCTUNA has a
theory that ladies bear their arms in a lozenge, because hatchments are
of that shape; and it is probably that widows in old time "would vie
with each other in these displays of the insignia of mourning." It has,
however, escaped his memory, that maids with living fathers also use
the lozenge, and that in a man's hatchment it is the _frame_ only, and
not the shield at all, which has the lozenge shape. The man's arms in
the hatchment not being on a lozenge, it is scarcely possible his widow
could thence have adopted it. He suggests that the shape was adopted for
hatchments as being the most convenient for admitting the arms of the
sixteen ancestors.
I wish to insert a Query, as to whether the sixteen quarters _ever were_
made use of this way in English heraldry? Perhaps your readers will be
willing to allow that the lozenge is surely a fitting emblem for the
_sweeter_ sex; but is not the routine reason the true one after all? The
lozenge has a supposed resemblance to the distaff, the emblem of the
woman. We have spinster from the same idea; and, though I cannot now
turn to the passage, I am sure I have seen the Salic law described as
forbidding "the holder of the distaff to grasp the sceptre."