The Giron Seal found at Hackington

Fig. 1.—SEAL found at Hackington, inscribed S. Pero Alhonso Giron. ( 161 ) THE GIRON" SEAL EOITND AT HACKINGTON. BY A. VAN DE PUT, DEPUTY KEEPER, LIBEAEV, VICTOEIA AND ALBEBT MUSEUM. I am indebted to Mr. Charles Cotton, O.B.E., E.E.C.P.E., of Briarfield, Canterbury, for particulars of the discovery of the seal and for photographs of it. " I t was found on Mr. Edwards's brickfield, which lies on the north side of Broadoak Road, which leads from St. Stephen's Eoad to Broadoak; about 3 or 4 feet below the surface of the field; in the Parish of Hackington." The seal is on view at the Canterbury Eoyal Museum and Free Library. v» C2 (b ffi SBTZ FIG. 2.—Seal inscribed "ALFONSO TEMEZ GIKON" (from Gudiel, 15^1). The object, which is of latten [EIG. 1], bears, on a central shield between three smaller ones, the arms: Three girons or piles conjoined issuant from the base. Between the outer and inner escutcheons, and as it were superimposed over the trilobe enclosing the [smaller shields, is a broad frame of inverted triangular shape, inscribed:— i.e. S(igillum) Pero Alhonso Giron. The insignia and inscription accord in designating as the VOI/. XXXVII. M 162 THE GIRON SEAL FOUND AT HACKINGTON. original owner of the seal, Pedro Alonso Giron, a fourteenthcentury member of the old Castilian house of Giron, a race of grandees which drew its male origin from the royal line of Leon, and more than once held the office of high chamberlain and high chancellor of Castile, ere it failed in the male line about the third quarter of the fourteenth century. The arms of gold, with three girons or piles rising from the base gules, have been figured and described in more than one heraldry book, but almost invariably, as borne by the ducal house of Osuna, with a chief per pale of Castile and Leon, and a bordure cheeky or and gules charged with five escutcheons from the arms of Portugal. In this marshalling, the Tellez-Gir6n—lords of Urena (countship, c. 1466) and of Osuna (dukedom, 1562), issue of the Gir6n heiress Teresa, daughter of Don Alonso (II.) Tellez-Gir6n by her marriage (ante 1364) with the Portuguese Martin Vazquez de Acuna, count of Valencia de Don Juan—are seen to have revived the use of the cheeky of fifteen points or and gules, which were the original arms of the old Girons of Cisneros, to the family of which latter name also they were related by blood. The known story of the Giron name and arms is as involved as it is fragmentary. It includes the assumption of the surname Giron by Eodrigo Gonzalez (flor. c. 1170), lord of Cisneros; his descendants' bearing of the coat cheeky, now more usually associated witb the great Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros, until the mid or late fourteenth century; and the adoption of the girons about the period of the decimation and disruption of the house during the civil war which convulsed Spain in the days of Pedro, el Justiciero (Peter II., the Cruel). On Pedro's murder in 1369, when his bastard brother and competitor, Enrique of TrMstainara, mounted the throne as Henry II. (1369—1379), certain of the Girons transferred their allegiance to Ferdinand I. of Portugal, who claimed the throne of Castile as a great-grandson, through a female, of the Castilian Sancho IV. Among them were two by the name of Pedro Alonso Giron. and also a Don Alonso Tellez (II.) Giron, eventually fai her of the family heiress already mentioned. 1 6 4 THE GIKON SEAL FOUND AT HACKINGTON. It is a truly remarkable stroke of fate that has unearthed in Kent a seal similar to the one [FIG. 2] of Alonso Tellez. (II.) Giron, discovered in 1571, which has figured as one of the principal armorial evidences for this important house since Geronymo Gudiel reproduced it in his Compendio de algunas historias de Espana, donde . . . se da noticia de la antiqua familia de las drones (Alcala, 1571). And if very remarkable in the circumstance of its discovery, the provenance of the Hackington seal is at least fortunate, because it places beyond doubt the worthy Spanish historian's surmise of the fate of one of the two members of the family whosename it bears. Him we will call Pedro Alonso (II.) Giron, because the other Pedro Alonso—whom the modern genealogist, Fernandez de Betheneourt,* revising Gudiel's somewhat confused and erroneous affiliation, makes uncle of the individual we here connect with the Hackington find—had been constituted by Peter the Cruel, master of the militaryreligious Order of Calatrava, which style he continued touse although never again resident in Castile, nor de facta master of the order. The seal with its legend, lacking the cross of the order and a mention of the dignity, are both against its attribution to this Pedro Alonso (I.) Girdn. PEDRO ALONSO (II.) GIRON was (according to Fernandez de Betheneourt) a younger brother of Alonso Tellez (II.)? lord of Frechoso, of the house of Gir6n, and of San Roman de la Cuba, in the province of Palencia, Old Castile. At the latter's death in 1369 he, with his relative the master of Calatrava, embraced the faction led by Ferdinand I. of Portugal as claimant to the Castilian throne. The elder brother, Alonso Tellez (II.), is also described as a fugitive to Portugal after that event and the accession, of Henry II. The ensuing war of succession ended to the advantage of Castile in the Peace of Alcoutin (1371), a stipulation of which accorded a full pardon and restoration of their estates to the Castilian partisans of the Portuguese king. This * 3?. Eernandez de Betheneourt, Historia genealogies y heraldica de la Monaryuia espa-iiola, casa real y grandes de Espana, ii., 1900, pp. 501—513; for the two Pedro Alonsos, pp. 511-12. THE GIBON SEAL FOUND AT HACKINGTON. 165 became inoperative, owing to the less favourable terms which the latter had to accept (1373) after a further outbreak of hostilities. These terms enacted the expulsion from Portuguese territory within thirty days of twenty-eight Castilian nobles to be designated by the King of Castile, among these principal knights being Don Pedro Alonso (II.) Giron. Gudiel goes on to say that King Ferdinand gave the Castilians ships in which to make their escape. They got from Lisbon to Gibraltar, then in the hands of "el Africano" (i.e., the Sultan of Morocco); Gibraltar was being besieged by the Moorish King of Granada, whom they assisted for fifteen days, as he had been an ally of Peter the Cruel. Thence they went to Valencia, the majority betaking themselves ultimately to England, where they died; among them was probably Don Pedro Alonso Giron.* The elder brother, Alonso Tellez (II.), unlike the two Pedro Alonsos, returned to his country under Henry PL's son and successor John I. His seal came to light, as has been said, in 1571, in the demolition of an old wall at the Premonstratensian abbey of Our Lady of Retuerta, between Penafiel and Valladolid. The arms it displays are considered by Cotarelo, a writer who has dealt specially with the origin of the Giron coat, to have been probably new arms,f in con- * Compendio (op. cit.), f. 74 verso ; see also ff. 70 verso—72 for the other Gir6ns more especially in question here. I am indebted to Mr. B. P. Bedford for the copy of the outline of the seal preserved in Gudiel's cut (FIG. 2). It is .described as of latten (azofar), and peculiar iu its size and make. f Emilio Cotarelo, Las armas de los G-ir6nes, estudio de antiqua heraldica espanola, in the Bevista de Arohivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 3a epoca, ix., 13, Madrid, 1903. This paper gives the legend of the Giron arms according to Lopez de Ayala, the chronicler of Peter the Cruel—a strip of cloth (giron) cut from the surcoat of Alonso VI., who reconquered Toledo (1085), and dyed in paynim blood by the monarch's rescuer, a certain Count Bodrigo, who himself remains a prisoner with the Moors. The rescue is claimed as his work by one of the monarch's courtiers, but the subsequent liberation of the count enables him .to appear before the king with the strip, and to claim as his only reward for the deed the graat of a giron for arms. Instead, three girom, a fief and vassals, are given to him, and his descendants assume the name of Gir6n. Cotarelo also snakes (p. 18) an important correction to a statement by Fernandez de Betheneourt [op. cit., p. 509) as to the arms borne by Bodrigo Gonzalez V. Giron, whioh were without the bordure of Cisneros, but leaves the all-important question of the date of the assumption of the girons in the plaoe of the cheeky praotically unanswered. Nor does the nature of the Cisneros relationship transpire from either authority. 166 THE GIBON SEAL FOUND AT HACKINGTON. tradistinction to the old cheeky, henceforward, assumably, abandoned to the kinsmen of the name of Cisneros. The Hackington seal, of course, proves nothing except the common ownership of the charges by a younger brother in the same generation. The great-grandfather, Eodrigo Gonzalez Giron (late thirteenth century), bore cheeky or and gules, and thetwo intermediate generations are armorially a blank. It would appear at least premature, therefore, to endorse this theory of the change of arms having been effected in this generation; to attribute it to the intermediate link which definitely discontinued the style, Lord of Cisneros, i.e., apparently the grandson of the aforementioned Eodrigo Gonzalez,, Juan Alonso Giron, who is not so described by Fernandez de Betheneourt, would be more in keeping with the probable facts of the ease. The place this authority assigns in the family to both Pedro Alonso Girons is indicated by the accompanying genealogical table. Whilst the number of impressions from Spanish sealsthat have been published is not inconsiderable, there exists, to the writer's knowledge, no study of the evolution of the Spanish seal-shape. Conjecture can but base itself meanwhile upon the examples already described and illustrated, in comparison with which the seal of Don Pedro Alonso> Giron is certainly of a rare type in the seals of fourteenthcentury Spain. That of Don Alonso Tellez Giron is less difficult to match. Cotarelo cites a seal of Don Pedro Manrique (1367), of which an impression is shown in Salazar y Castro's Historia genealogica de la casa de Lara (1694—97). This is of practically identical contour. I find nothing of either type as yet in my friend Don Francisco de Sagarra's Corpus of Catalan seals, but an anonymous, perhaps French, impression, of less pronounced but similar shape to the sealsillustraied by Gudiel and Salazar y Castro, has been recently published in the Catalogue of the Senium berger and Blanchet Collections (No. 89).