Is There Something About Marys and Martlets That I Don't Know?

Our next two memorials are to two wives, both named Mary, and whose memorials display heraldry which contains martlets.*

The first is that of Lady Mary Fenwick.

Lady Mary was the daughter of Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Carlisle, and the wife of Sir John Fenwick, Baronet.

At the top of the monument, surmounted by a knight's helmet (for her husband) and an earl's coronet (for her father), we see Per fess gules and argent six martlets counterchanged, the badge of a baronet (Argent a sinister hand appaumy couped gules) (Fenwick), impaling Gules on a bend between six crosses crosslet fitchy argent an escutcheon or charged with a demi-lion rampant pierced through the mouth with an arrow within a double tressure flory counter-flory gules, on the bend a mullet for difference (Howard, Earl of Carlisle).

Flanking the marital arms of Lady Mary are two more shields.

On the left, the arms of her father, Gules on a bend between six crosses crosslet fitchy argent an escutcheon or charged with a demi-lion rampant pierced through the mouth with an arrow within a double tressure flory counter-flory gules, on the bend a mullet for difference. No crest, but the coronet of an Earl surmounts the shield.

And on the right, the arms of her husband, Per fess gules and argent six martlets counterchanged, the badge of a baronet (Argent a sinister hand appaumy couped gules). Crest: A phoenix rising from flames proper gorged of a mural crown or.

Though this next monument memorializes several deceased children of Richard Sterne, the only one remembered armorially is his daughter, Mary, who married Rev. Thomas Pulleyn.

The arms are painted on a cartouche:

Azure on a bend cotised or [Burke says "argent"] three escallops gules on a chief or three martlets sable [Pulleyn/Pullein/Pullen], impaling Or a chevron between three crosses patonce sable (Sterne).

So, as it turns out, there is nothing connecting "Mary" with "martlet", as all nine of the martlets on these two memorials belong to their husbands' coats of arms.

Still, it was an interesting juxtaposition, and I had to research it and report back to you!

* For those very few of you reading this blog who don't know what an heraldic martlet is, J.P. Brooke-Little's An Heraldic Alphabet defines it this way:

"Martlet. A very common charge which resembles a house martin but has no shanks or legs, just tufts of feathers. It may have originally been a swift, as these apparently legless birds were to be found in large numbers in the Holy Land at the time of the Crusades."

So now you know.