HERALDIAN. NORTH (LILLE) BELGIUM (TOURNAI) Armorial... Lot 9

[HERALDIAN]. [NORTH (LILLE)] [BELGIUM (TOURNAI)] Armorial of the family Le Boucq de Carnin Belgium (Tournai), ca. 1580-1600 With 122 shields or heraldic compositions with painted crests (ink, watercolor and tempera) and two drawings (ink and watercolor) Small folio, 63 ff, some missing or deleted leaves, on paper with two distinct watermarks, cursive writing in ink, numerous contemporary corrections and erasures and some additions by a modern hand (ff. 42-43; ff. 54-55), genealogical and heraldic trees (ff. 27v, 32v-33; ff. 54-55), some of them truncated (for example fol. 56v), two cut-out shields (f. 42 and f. 42v), essays or models of strap-work initials at the end of the manuscript (ff. 57-60) with a varied bestiary, characters, anthropomorphic hybrids, some enhanced with red gouache, pen essays on the verso of the last leaf (see Provenance below), some fancy drawings in the margins (squash or gherkin (fol. 9); two fruits and a pigeon (fol. 27)), a drawing of a peacock (fol. 33), a watercolored pen drawing of a Christ on the cross (fol.1), a large ink drawing heightened with watercolor and gouache depicting a procession of arquebusier and cavalry animals (ff. 55v-56). Bound in soft vellum with flap, smooth spine, stains on the boards and missing parchment in places, old inscription partially erased on the upper board and the name "Le Boucq de Carnin" in more recent ink. Some shields left blank or unfinished. Two leaves (f. 28 and f. 32) detached from the seam. Dimensions of the leaves: 200 x 303 mm; dimensions of the binding: 215 x 305 mm. This manuscript was made for the lineage represented by the marriage of Antoine Le Boucq de Carnin, lord of Lassus (archer of Charles V, died in Tournai in 1562) and Marie de Farvacques. They had four children including Jacques Le Boucq de Carnin; Antoine Le Boucq de Carnin; Arnould Le Boucq de Carnin and Barbe Le Boucq de Carnin. The seigneury of Lassus was located in Blandain near Tournai: the castle has now disappeared. The arms of the Le Boucq family were : Gules with a golden saltire charged with an escutcheon of Gules with a silver lion. According to Chastel de la Howarderie, the original name of this family was that of Le Bodcq and, according to tradition, it was of English origin. M. du Chastel traces its lineage to Bouchard de Bourke, esquire, whose son, Guillaume de Boureck, known as de Boucq, or le Boucq, esquire, living in 1397, married Catherine du Ponchel, daughter of Jean, knight, and Jeanne de Dampierre, herself a natural daughter of Louis II, Count of Flanders. The present manuscript devotes several leaves to the du Ponchel family (ff. 26, 27). On the other hand, we do not know the possible link with another branch of the Le Boucq family, associated with Valenciennes and which bore azure with three golden beehives: Noël Le Boucq and Jacques Le Boucq (1520-1573), his son, were important heraldists and designers, the first author of a Traité de blason et recueil d'armoiries (Paris, BnF, fr. 11463) and the second to whom is attributed an Armorial de Flandre et du Hainaut (Paris, BnF, NAF 25664) but also the famous Recueil d "Arras, a set of drawings depicting characters belonging mainly to the nobility of the North and to the families of Hainault, or characters of the late Middle Ages and of the first half of the 16th century (Arras, BM, no 266 (ms. 944.2); see A. Châtelet and J. Paviot, Visages d'antan : le Recueil d'Arras (XIVe- XVIe siècle) (2007)). The land of Carnin, located in French Flanders and belonging to the ancient castellany of Lille, was the cradle of an old feudal family to which it gave its name. This family bore the following arms: Gules with three golden leopard heads. Jacques de Carnin, knight, lived in 1267. The present armorial also gives pride of place to the Tiefferies and Lannoy families, both allied to the Le Boucq de Carnin. We owe the Le Boucq-Carnin alliance to Jean le Boucq who married in 1481 Antoinette de Carnin, daughter of Hugues, lord of Beaumanoir and Planquelez-Douai, with whom he was buried in the church of the Jacobins of Lille. He was the father of Antoine le Boucq, squire, lord of Lassus, in Blandain, married in 1539 to Marie de Farvacques and died in Tournai in 1561, who was the first to add to his name that of the family of Carnin to which his mother belonged. It is thus his son Antoine who had the present Armorial drawn up for his family. At the end of the book, this manuscript features an amazing ink and watercolor drawing of an army or procession of arquebusier animals (monkeys, boars, bears, horses, wolves) around walls and a river, done almost contemporaneously or around 1600 (ff. 56v-57). The heraldic bestiary is not far away. This drawing is made on paper with one of the two fi