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tewkesbury tiles: medieval heraldic dingbats

One of the hidden treasures that has rewarded my browsing in The Ancestor (of which I recently bought a set of all twelve volumes in their original publisher’s bindings), is a handsome set of cuts made after fourteenth-century encaustic floor tiles from Tewkesbury Abbey. See Hal Hall, “Notes on the Tiles at Tewkesbury Abbey,” The Ancestor 9 (1904), 46-64. The digital copy of the journal (linked here) contains fine scans of these, of which the following sample set of eight (there are several others) are reduced in size and flattened nearly to black-and-white. The captions here are as given in the article. Excellent source of dingbats for a heraldry blog!


Arms of Somerville of Gloucestershire



Beauchamp of Holt and an uncertain shield


Arms attributed to Robert Fitz Hamon, impaled with the Cross of the Abbey


Newburgh and Despenser


Arms of Newburgh Earls of Warwick, with the Badge of the Chained Bear


Tiles made up of fragments of the arms of Despenser and Beauchamp, with others


Beauchamp of Holt and Beauchamp of Powyck


Arms of Cobham or Peyvre

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