Not a Seal, Token, Bird and Heart with Crossed Swords

Not a Seal, Token, Bird and Heart with Crossed Swords, Image by StuE, Found by Nasher.
Found in Baldock, Hertfordshire, 19mm, 6.9g.

Bird (with crown?) // heart with saltire of swords

A token.

From David Powell, "The style and size both suggest very late 17th cent or early 18th, and are both common choices of subject; having said which, the bird does not often sit on a twig, nor is the heart often pierced by swords rather than arrows. Those, however, are minor details. The radial dashes round the edge on one side probably derive from the edge decoration on Williamson pieces, and the further one gets from the Williamson period {1648-72} the less pieces tend to have such features. My gut feeling is early 18th.
I have never managed to get to the bottom of the heart, which appears on both main series and lead tokens; sometimes shot through, sometimes not. The device is also common on engraved love tokens, where its meaning is more obvious, but such a meaning can scarcely apply to commercial pieces. I have written on the device in LTT occasionally {LTT_48}, and even given it its own separate number in my classification system {LTT_65,73}, but I have never exhaustively worked out its meaning.
The bird, similarly, could be associated with the Vermin Acts {LTT_36,99}, but that may not be its only reason for its selection. Maybe small birds were eaten more in those days, and the issuers of some bird tokens were those who dealt in them. Alternatively it could indicate receipt of a payment for licence to shoot birds, although I think that the pieces are too common for that to be the norm.
Both the bird and the heart could also be subject matter for a shop sign; a well-known object selected purely for its recognisability, without necessarily any reference to the nature of its issuers trade.
Put all that together and ask why two such sides should be paired, and we have a mystery. Again one could speculate, but it would be no more than that."