Excerpt from The British Herald, or Cabinet of Armorial Bearings of the Nobility and Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, From the Earliest to the Present Time, Vol. 1: With a Complete Glossary of Heraldic Terms, To Which Is Prefixed a History of HeraldryThe primary object of the present compilation is to obviate a defect, which, in works of this description, has been the subject of long and general complaint, viz. The difficulty of obtaining precise and accurate information respecting any particular family. Individuals, it has been remarked, wishing to obtain such information, are under the necessity of consulting voluminous and expensive publications, in which, however arduous their research, they can seldom find more than obscure and inadequate descriptions, and those, in many instances, only intelligible to such as are competently versed in. The technicalities of heraldry, not to mention, that in some cases, the object of their pursuit is completely defeated.Although Edmondson's Complete Body of Heraldry, the ground-work of the present undertaking, is undoubtedly a most meritorious performance, and incomparably superior to those of his predecessors, for arms of English families, in respect of accuracy, amplitude, and particularity of detail, it is, notwithstanding, extremely defective in some very important essentials, the injudicious and perplexing intermixture of the 1's and Y's, as also the U's and V's, so frequently occurring in these letters, and the arranging of such names together as happen to be similar in sound, without a due regard to their orthographical distinctions, are sources of considerable embarrassment to the inquirer. These imperfections have been remedied in this work, by a punctilious attention to the alphabetical arrangement of its contents, not only of the names of families, but also of the counties in which they reside, so that any family can be referred to with the greatest facility and certitude.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.