Arms: Gules, a fess between six martlets Or.
Plain English: A red shield with a gold horizontal band between six small gold birds.
The family
The Beauchamps were a widespread and important medieval family, with several distinct branches. The arms represented on the St Thomas’s ceiling are associated particularly with the family of Richard Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury, rather than the better-known Beauchamps, Earls of Warwick, whose arms were different.
Richard was a younger son of Sir Walter Beauchamp and Elizabeth Roche. His family had substantial Wiltshire connections, including estates derived through the Roche family.
The arms
The coat associated with Bishop Richard Beauchamp is Gules, a fess between six martlets Or — a gold horizontal band on a red field, with six small gold birds around it.
A martlet is a conventional heraldic bird, traditionally represented without visible feet. The combination of the fess and six martlets provides a distinctive pattern even where much of the original colouring has been lost.
Salisbury and Wiltshire
Richard Beauchamp became Bishop of Salisbury in 1450 and remained bishop until his death in 1481. He was therefore Bishop throughout much of the period in which the St Thomas’s ceiling was probably being created.
He was an important royal servant as well as a bishop. He became the first Chancellor of the Order of the Garter and supervised the construction of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, where his arms still survive. He was buried in his own chantry chapel at Salisbury Cathedral, later demolished during eighteenth-century alterations.
On the St Thomas’s ceiling
The Beauchamp arms appear at:
At SA7-W they form part of a more complicated quartered shield.
Given Richard Beauchamp’s long tenure as Bishop of Salisbury from 1450 to 1481, these arms have an exceptionally close contemporary connection with Salisbury.
Sources
College of St George, Windsor — Richard Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury.
Salisbury Cathedral — history of the Beauchamp chantry chapel.
RCHME and Buckeridge — identifications of the St Thomas’s ceiling heraldry.