We know that these people took with them the devices they had already brought in 1066 from the comtes of Flanders; Seier de Lens, the young nephew of Count Eustace II who so mysteriously disappeared after the Dover raid of 1067, had been in Scotland since perhaps that date, as Seier de Seton, living in the fortress he had built himself on the Firth of Forth which would later be known as Seton Palace. Walter, his son and heir – Walter the Fleming – succeeded him there, as he did at Odell Castle, Bedfordshire; and there can be no doubt at all that his personal heraldic emblem, the triple crescents, gules and a field or, of a second son of the count of Boulogne, flew over both places.

Descendants of Seier’s younger son, Hugh, as well as those of his younger brother, Walter, also used the triple crescents; but being now outside the continental constraint of territorial tinctures, they each changed the colours. Hugh and his family wore the three red crescents on a silver field – a device which, incidentally, flew from the masts of the Boulogne navy in their home port of Huughescluis (so perhaps Hugh was their High Admiral). Old Walter’s grandson, Walter de Preston, took the black and gold colours of Flanders, and both crescents and tinctures survive in the arms of his descendant, the premier viscount of Ireland, Viscount Gormanston. Some of Hugh’s heirs acquired the surname of Legh (or Lea), and took the crescents with them when they moved into Cheshire; here the tinctures moved away from the old tradition into azure and sable.

A better known junior holder of the crescents was David, grandson of Roger of Lilford, on the river Nene. Walter the Fleming was the Domesday lord at Lilford, and Roger must have been either Walter’s son or Hugh’s. The family’s surname here gradually changed from Holy Ford, Lilford, Olifard to Oliphant. Young David Oliphant acquired his Christian name from his godfather, the king of Scotland; and perhaps the tithe of the mill at Crailing, Roxburghshire, which that monarch bestowed on him was in the nature of a christening gift.