Although they were of modest origins, traced back to the early to mid 1500s, a branch of the Yea family of Oakhampton house and farm near Wiveliscombe, Somerset claimed a coat of arms. The descendants of Richard Yea, whose will of 1548 has survived, claimed a heraldic device consisting of a ram surmounted by a crest of a talbot (a kind of hunting hound common in England in the medieval period), both white on a green background, and the motto esto semper fidelis (I am always faithful).
It is unclear on whose authority the arms were granted, to which member of the Yea family and when. But the award was apparently made after the Visitation of Somerset in 1623 when Richard’s descendant David Yea of ‘Wiveliscomb in the Hundred of Kingsberie’ was recorded as ignobilis, one who had usurped the title of gentleman. No crest for the Yea family appears in Colby’s transcript of this Visitation. However, this crest was reportedly found in castings of water pipes during reconstruction work at Oakhampton in 1734. It also appears in the entry for the Yea Family in Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage of 1850, as confirmed to the authors in correspondence from the College of Arms in April 2019.
The coat of arms shown below appears on the two pages immediately before the main text in Monday’s reference work The History of the Yea Family. It was reproduced from the submission made by Sir William Yea himself to the College of Arms on 25 May 1759 in which he declared under oath his pedigree and the Yea coat of arms, crest and motto. Sir William claimed these had been in use in the Yea family for ‘upwards of two hundred years’. The authors have been unable to verify that claim independently.
Descendants of Richard Yea became increasingly prosperous through advantageous marriages to daughters of wealthy Somerset families. One such alliance was the marriage in 1756 of William Yea to Lady Julia Trevelyan, daughter of George Trevelyan and his wife Julia Calverley, both of which families had been honoured with baronetcies. Those family ties may have helped William himself to be raised to the baronetcy, granted to him by George II in 1759.
According to Alfred Monday in his standard reference work The History of the Family of Yea (p.77), the coat of arms adopted by Sir William following his marriage and elevation to the baronetcy, as shown above, were those of the Yea family impaled with those of the Trevelyan family. These were described in detail by Monday, together with two additional quarterings unknown to him, but apparently those of the Lacy and Brewer families. The baronetcy died out in 1864 for want of male heirs, and with it the Coat of Arms fell into dis-use.
David Yaw and Mike Darch, September 2025
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