Thomas’s daughter Margaret, painted in 1562, with the beast in the background.

After a long-ish break – the January lecture failing due to technical glitches – I returned to the Oxford University Heraldry Society for a lecture about the Tudor era nobleman Thomas Audley, 1st Baron Audley of Walden, and the mysterious animal that features as his heraldic supporter.

At the end of the lecture I asked a question that had been intriguing me for a while – why, in the early Tudor period, was there such an explosion of historically-prominent senior officials with the first name Thomas?

Phillips gave the answer that, prior to the reformation, Thomas Becket was one of England’s most venerated saints and so of course a high proportion named their sons after him. That just left me with the new question of why there weren’t so many Thomases in high office between Henry II and Henry VII’s reigns, but I didn’t get time to ask that one.

On an unrelated note, today marks the tenth anniversary of my registration as a Wikipedia editor. In terms of edit count rankings, I have climbed to number 5452. There was no grand celebration – not even an automated reminder – but I did discover a Ten Year Society to join, albeit one with little activity thus far.