The principal Rokele / Rockett arms
Three distinct blazons survive in the documentary record for branches of the family. They are presented below as they would appear on a real medieval shield, in standard heraldic tinctures.
Rokele — senior arms
Lozengy, gules and argent.
The classic Rokele shield: a diamond pattern of red and silver, with no charges. Borne by the senior Essex line that produced Sir Richard de Rupella, Justiciar of Ireland, and his descendants at South Ockendon, Willingale Doe, and Wokyndon.
Recorded in The Battle Abbey Roll, ed. Catherine, Duchess of Cleveland (London, 1889), volume III, page 76, under the entry “Rokell”. Drawn here in canonical heraldic tinctures.
Rokell of Colchester — 15th century
Gules, a fesse lozengy ermine, between three martlets argent.
The 15th-century cadet arms recorded in the parish church of Aldham, near Colchester, for Geffrey Rokell, esquire, who acquired Aldham Hall in 1463 with the abbot of St John’s Colchester. A red shield, with a horizontal band of ermine diamonds, and three silver swallows.
Recorded in Philip Morant, The History and Antiquities of the County of Essex (London, 1768), volume II, page near Aldham parish, citing the church monument. Confirmed by independent sub-agent reading of Morant volume II, lines 52961–65.
De la Rochelle of Normandy
Argent, two bends gules, with seven escallops or.
A different family from the English Rokeles, but often confused with them in family histories because the surname is similar. The French de la Rochelle were a separate Norman line based around La Rochelle-Normande in the Cotentin. They bore two diagonal red bands with seven gold scallop shells. The escallop, the badge of St James, is a frequent crusader emblem.
Recorded in Drouet d’Arcq, Armorial de la France, for the year 1360, cited in The Battle Abbey Roll volume III, page 76, where the Duchess of Cleveland uses it to distinguish the two families.
What the symbols mean
The lozenge
The lozenge or diamond is one of the oldest geometric heraldic charges. In the senior Rokele arms it covers the whole shield (“lozengy”); in the 15th-century Colchester arms it appears as a horizontal ermine band of four lozenges (“a fesse lozengy ermine”). The lozenge had no fixed symbolic meaning in early heraldry: it was simply a strong geometric pattern that worked well on a battlefield shield seen from a distance. Its persistence through three centuries on the same family arms is itself remarkable.
The martlet
The three small silver birds on the Colchester arms are martlets. A martlet is a heraldic swallow drawn with tufts of feathers in place of feet, because medieval naturalists believed swallows never landed. In English heraldry the martlet became the difference-mark of a fourth son, but earlier it was simply a decorative bird-charge. Three martlets is a common minor-arms grouping in 14th and 15th century English heraldry.
Ermine
Ermine is one of the two heraldic furs (the other being vair). It represents the winter coat of the stoat, white with the black tip of the tail. Ermine on a shield signals high status: only senior gentry and the nobility used fur tinctures, because real ermine fur was reserved by law to peers and judges. The use of ermine on the Colchester arms places the 15th-century Rokells firmly in the esquire-or-above class.
The escallop (St James shell)
The escallop appears on the French de la Rochelle arms, not on the English Rokele arms. It was the badge of pilgrims to the shrine of St James of Compostela in Galicia, and by extension a general crusader emblem. A family bearing seven escallops was almost certainly claiming descent from a crusader-pilgrim ancestor.
Why three distinct arms?
The Rokele family in England never adopted a single “family arms” in the modern sense. In the 12th and early 13th century, arms were personal: each knight bore his own combination of charges. In the later 13th and 14th centuries, arms began to be inherited from father to eldest son, with younger sons differencing them with small additions. By the 15th century inheritance had stabilised and the College of Arms started keeping records.
The senior Essex line bore the lozengy gules and argent. The 15th-century Aldham cadet line used a marked-cadenced version: the lozenge pattern reduced to a single ermine fesse, with three martlets added — the standard difference-mark of a fourth or fifth-son cadet. The Kent / Ruxley line (the descendants of Malgerius de Rokesle in Domesday Book) is not currently documented with surviving arms.
The French de la Rochelle bore entirely separate arms (two red bends with seven gold scallops). This is heraldic evidence that the English and French families were treated as unrelated even by medieval armorial practice: had they been recognised as one family, their arms would have shared at least the field colours or a core charge.
Other heraldic notes
The Cluster K Kent “Roke(s)le” line
The Kent line that descended from Domesday Malgerius (1086) produced Sir John de Rokesle who fought at Acre in 1191 (per Hasted’s antiquarian tradition), Gregory de Rokesle who served as Lord Mayor of London 1274–81 and 1284–85, and Sir Richard de Rokesle who was Edward II’s seneschal of Ponthieu and Montreuil. No certain shield is preserved for this line, but it is reasonable to believe they bore some variation of the same lozengy pattern as their Essex cousins.
The 15th-century Aldham window
The Aldham church window or monument from which the Rokell arms were recorded by Morant in 1768 no longer survives. Morant was a careful antiquary and his blazons are usually trustworthy. The arms have not, to our knowledge, been re-painted in a modern heraldic visitation.
The Norman scallop arms and the Sandlin gargoyles
Several heraldic compendia from the Tudor and Stuart period treat the Rokele lozengy arms as continuous with the French scallop arms. This is a misreading. The de la Rochelle arms are first attested over a century after the English Rokele arms, and on a separate French family altogether. The misattribution survives in some 19th-century pedigrees and should be discounted.