Coat of Arms of the Symonds Family

The coat of arms of the Symonds family of Ashcombe, Wiltshire, is a heraldic achievement traditionally dated to the ennoblement of Ormund Symonds, 1st Baron of Ashcombe, in the aftermath of the Battle of Agincourt (1415), and formally re-confirmed during the heraldic visitation of 1621. It remains, according to family tradition, the arms borne by the descendants of the Symonds line, including those said to have later settled in South America.

Blazon

Quarterly sable and argent, three cinquefoils slipped counterchanged; on a helm affronty, mantled vert doubled argent, a wreath argent and vert, a ferret courant proper on a roundel sable; motto below on a scroll, "ET·AT·S·A·1621."

In plain terms: a shield divided into four quarters of black and white in checkerboard fashion, bearing three white or black four-petaled flowers (cinquefoils), surmounted by a steel tournament helm draped in green-and-white cloth (mantling) and green-and-gold acanthus scrollwork, crested with a running ferret or weasel set against a black disc, above a scrolled motto banner.

Origins: the 1415 grant

According to family tradition, the arms were first granted to Ormund Symonds by the College of Heralds shortly after his elevation to the barony of Ashcombe, in recognition of his role in proposing the stake defense that helped break the French cavalry charge at Agincourt. Heraldic custom of the period held that a newly ennobled man was entitled to arms that in some way alluded to the manner of his rise, and later family chroniclers have long pointed to the shield's design as an intentional echo of that origin.

The checkered black-and-white field has traditionally been read within the family as a reference to the stakes themselves: rows of dark, sharpened wood set alternately against pale, cleared ground, the pattern by which the English line held against the charge. Heraldic historians outside the family have generally treated this interpretation with caution, noting that checkered (chequy or quarterly) fields were already common in English arms of the period and need not encode a specific battlefield memory — but the story has persisted in Symonds family retellings regardless.

The three cinquefoils are more conventionally explained: in English heraldry, the cinquefoil was frequently granted to men who had risen through personal service rather than inherited right, and was popularly associated with loyalty, faith, and the five wounds of a soldier's devotion — a fitting charge, family tradition holds, for a man-at-arms raised to the peerage by service on the field rather than by birth.

The crest: the running ferret

The crest — a white ferret or weasel, shown running rather than at rest, set upon a black roundel above the helm — is the most debated element of the achievement. Nineteenth-century antiquarian accounts of Wiltshire gentry families offer two competing explanations, both preserved without resolution in later family retellings:

The forester's beast. The more prosaic account holds that the ferret alludes to Ormund's earlier life as a franklin with rights of warren on his land before his ennoblement — ferrets being working animals used at the time to drive rabbits from their burrows — and that the charge was retained after his elevation as a deliberate reminder of the family's modest origins, rather than an attempt to disguise them.

The Warden's emblem. A later, more romantic tradition — arising after the lifetime of Ormund's son, Gregory Symonds, and his renown as the "Warden of the Wood" — holds that the running ferret was reinterpreted by later generations as an emblem of Gregory himself: a small, quick creature that moves unseen through the undergrowth before striking, much as Gregory and his two archers were said to move through the forests of Ashcombe in pursuit of bandits. Under this reading, the ferret's black background represents the shadowed woods, and its running posture the act of the hunt itself.

The family has never formally settled between the two accounts, and later generations appear to have been content to let the ambiguity stand, treating the crest as honoring both the founder and his son at once.

The 1621 confirmation

The motto scroll bears the inscription "ET·AT·S·A·1621", generally expanded by family tradition as Etatis Suae Anno 1621 — "in the year of his age, 1621" — a common convention in period portraiture and heraldic memorials used to record the date at which an achievement of arms was formally sat for, confirmed, or re-recorded, rather than the date of the original grant.

This detail corresponds to a broader and well-documented practice of the early Stuart period: the heraldic visitations conducted by the College of Arms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which royal heralds toured the English counties to review, confirm, correct, or in some cases revoke arms claimed by gentry families, in order to suppress the unauthorized use of heraldic devices that had become widespread over the preceding century.

Family tradition holds that a descendant of the Ashcombe line presented the original 1415 grant to the visiting heralds during the Wiltshire visitation of the early 1620s, and had the arms formally re-confirmed and re-recorded — with the 1621 date subsequently added to later painted or carved reproductions of the achievement, such as the wooden armorial plaque still kept by the family, to distinguish the confirmed record from the original medieval grant. No independent record of this specific visitation entry has been identified, and the 1621 date is preserved solely through the family's own material culture rather than through surviving College of Arms registers.

Later use

The arms are said to have remained in continuous, if increasingly informal, use among descendants of the Symonds line after the loss of the Ashcombe title itself to a collateral branch following Gregory Symonds's death. Family tradition holds that reproductions of the achievement — carved, painted, or cast — were carried by later generations as a portable record of lineage even after the connection to any specific English estate had lapsed, including, according to family accounts, by the branch believed to have emigrated to South America in later centuries.

As with much of the Symonds family narrative, the coat of arms survives today chiefly as an object of household memory rather than of independently verified heraldic record — a shield whose quarters, charges, and crest have each, over some six centuries of retelling, come to carry as much story as blazon.

Note: This article is a narrative/fictional elaboration built around the fictional Symonds family history, set within the real historical conventions of English heraldry and the College of Arms visitations of the early 17th century.