Today most people who posses a Coat of Arms regard it as no more than an interesting relic of an ancestral past; privately they may feel a sense of pride and satisfaction in the evidence of noble forbearers. However personal Heraldry is no longer indicative of class or privilege. The writer Stubbs has noted that in earlier times however “the coat armour of every house was a precious inheritance, which descended, under definite limitations and with distinct differences, to every member of the family: a man’s shield proved his gentle or noble birth, illustrated his pedigree, and put him on his honour not to disgrace the bearings which his noble progenitors had worn”. The Coat of Arms was the shrine of personal...
The practice of combining several Coats of Arms on one shield, known as “marshalling” arose from a desire to denote important marriage alliances. When a man married an heiress or co-heiress of an armorial family, he could incorporate her Arms permanently on his own shield, and transmit them to his descendents. He added not only her paternal Coat of Arms, but also any quarterings which may have accrued to it in the past. In this manner many present-day families carry in their Arms an heraldic record of a number of ancient families, their remote ancestors whose names have long since died out. An elaborately quartered shield is often far less artistic than a simple and less pretentious Coat of Arms;...
Some Arms were devised to record the incidents of feudal tenure. For example, the family of Argenton, who once held the manor of Wimondley, which required the tenant to present a cup of wine to the King at his coronation, bore three silver covered cups on a red shield. Sir John Argenton performed this service at the coronation of Richard II, and had the silver cup for his fee. As an example of early official Coats of Arms we have the silver sword on a black shield attached to the office of Hereditary Grand Champion of England. This was formerly borne by the Marmion family, whose descendant and successor to the Championship, the head of the family of Dymoke, still...
Arms of casual origin include the basic ordinaries of the chief, fesse, chevron, and pale and they probably owe their origin to the bands of metal added to a shield for the sake of increasing its strength. A very early instance is the gold pale (vertical band) on a red shield Gules a pale or, belonging to Hugh de Grandemesnil, in the reign of Henry I, image below. Banded and studded shields appears on the pre-heraldic Bayeux Tapestry. Such shields became heraldic in character when the strengthening pieces were colored differently from the surface (field) of the shield upon which they were laid. The shield of a branch of the Montgomery family provides an example of Arms which sprang from the emblem...
The writer Planché memorably described Heraldry as “ the shorthand of history,” but in quoting that phrase the limitations of Heraldry and the dimensions of history must not be overlooked. The idea that every Coat of Arms has a symbolic meaning is false; it is not true of Heraldry, as in commercial advertising, that “every picture tells a story.” The decoration of banners and shields, which has been a persistent custom among warlike people in all ages, was in medieval Europe systematized into what we now call Heraldry to meet a defined need, namely to provide medieval warriors with a means of identification when fully armed. Shut in his house of steel, the knight felt the same need to hang...
