The Accedens of Armory (1562) is the first edition of Gerard Legh’s heraldic treatise — his only work, and, in J. P. Cooper’s words, “perhaps the most popular heraldic work of the later 16th century.” It is written as a colloquy between “Gerarde the Herehaught” and “Legh the Caligat Knight,” and it was printed in London by Richard Tottel, whose shop stood at the sign of the Hand and Star between the Temple gates on Fleet Street. Later editions, from 1597, were published under the spelling The Accedence of Armorie, and it is under that title that the work is now usually cited.
This page is a bibliographic record. No text is transcribed here yet.
The first edition survives in several copies, but the only freely available digitization I have been able to identify is a scan of the Early English Books 1475–1640 microfilm, hosted by the Internet Archive (view the scan). It is legible enough for reading and for collation, but it is a grayscale microfilm derivative: detail is soft, the folded plate is difficult to read, and the scan’s OCR is unreliable. The copy that was filmed, and the library that holds it, are not identified on the item.
The edition is recorded as STC (2nd ed.) 15388. The ESTC number for this edition has not yet been confirmed.
The 1597 edition, which first uses the Accedence of Armorie title and for which a high-quality public-domain scan exists, is recorded separately at The Accedence of Armorie (Ballard, 1597).
Nothing has been transcribed or checked yet. When a transcription is made, the 1562 text should be compared against the later editions, since the 1597 and 1612 printings are close reprints and the 1612 is described as “newly corrected and augmented.”