In deference to this unanswerable position, I find it necessary to alter entirely the classification pursued in the earlier centuries--to take Mr. Rylands' drawings seriatim, and to give for each shape the earliest and latest dates at which, in my limited researches, I have found them in use. This method of treatment eliminates from our enquiry all strictly fanciful shields which did not gain a hold on public taste, and leaves us still with a sufficiently heavy list of variations to which it is possible, from their frequent recurrence, to attach the dates.
A few leading remarks on points bearing on our subject will prove useful at this stage of our enquiry.
Before watches became common, seals were sometimes attached to the arms, like bracelets. In _Mercurius Rusticus_, No. 30 (for 19/20 July, 1660), an advertisement appears for "a gold seal, being a coat of arms, cut in a piece of gold, in the form of a lozenge, fastened to a black ribband to tye about the wrist." In the _Visitation of Essex, 1634_ [Harleian Society, p. 455], appears the following certificate:--"This coate is certiffied by Thomas Scott to bee by him seen on a seale some 40 years since, and to be the seale of armes of Thomas Moore Esq. father of the said Hunting Moore, and that Robert Scott his father did weare the same about his neck in a scarffe about xx yeares--in witnes whearof I have sett to my hand. Tho. Scott." [Robert Scott had married Anne, daughter of Richard Hunting and relict of Thomas Moore, of Orsett, co. Essex.] This seal was, of course, a ring.
Watches, which naturally suggest small attached seals, were, however, in pretty general use in Queen Elizabeth's reign. In Shakespeare's _Twelfth Night_, Malvolio says:--"I frown the while, and perchance _wind up my watch_, or play with some rich jewel." A watch was found upon Guy Fawkes, 3 James I. (1605/6), which he and Percy had bought the day before, "to try conclusions for the long and short burning of the powder."--Stow's _Chronicle_, p. 878, and introduction to Mr. Reuben Burrow's _Almanac_ for 1778.