Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and the Gardens of Adonis

In the architectural description in the Victoria County History of the superstructure over the tomb of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (d. 1447), in St. Albans Abbey, there is a drawing by our late Fellow, the Rev. E. E. Dorling, of a frequently repeated ornamental detail that is called ‘a device of daisies in a standing cup’, and there rightly said to be one of the duke's badges, for it was observed that it was used not only in conspicuous decorative bands, but also as the cresting of the coronets over the duke's arms (pls. xiv and xv). In 1796 our famous Director, Richard Gough, also noted and figured this badge, which he described as ‘wheat-ears in vases on pedestals’, and he suggested that it was the device of Abbot John Whethamstede who, he thought, had built the tomb. Chauncey (1700) and the later historians of Hertfordshire made no reference it it; Weever (1631) did not notice it, nor did Sandford (1677), whose beautiful, but in this respect inaccurate, illustration of the canopy shows the device as an angel's head with wings.