ANSTHRLD - Name Check Please

[Timothy A. McDaniel]

> Ack!  Nonononononono!  Pick one heraldic style and stick with
> it.

(You seem a little testy today, Tec.  Hmmm.  Is "testy" the male
equivalent of "hysteria"?  Sorry.  Latin and Greek etymology
joke, very feeble.)

We're talking travels among Wales, France, and Scotland.  They're
all in the Anglo-Norman Armorial Hegemony (*grin*), so
> general Anglo-Norman
is a good notion.  Futhermore, the great thing about A-N style is
that it's pretty much the style that heraldry had at the
beginning, and it spread fast and kept those elements in most
places.  That means that a simple A-N coat works about everywhere
you go.  Further, old coats went away slowly, and old coats were
preferred (longer period of nobility), so you can use it any
time.

As an example, "Gules, a fess argent" (it'd conflict; it's just
an example) could be from anywhere from Aberdeen to Rome, from
Asturias to Silesia, from the 12th Century to the 16th.

I'll think about it more, because it's more pleasant than
thinking about work, but my first idea is
    Or, a fess vert between two chevrons sable.
That's

   /\
  /  \
  ====
   /\
  /  \


but fitting a shield a little better.  That motif has been
registered only twice, but it's a motif that was used by several
English families (I want to say Mowbray, but that's not right,
they have a lion ... de Lisle and FitzWalter, it appears).  This
could easily conflict, but we could play with tinctures and such.

"Per <line of division> sable and vert" is registerable, and
period examples exist of that sort of low-contrast division.
However, it's done a lot more in the SCA than in period.
Further, it can be hard to see, especially with a wavy or other
complex line.

I've become more enamored of playing with tinctures of groups,
after seeing a few period examples.  You could take a leaf
(sorry) from Brabant and do
    Or, in bend two maple leaves sable, in bend sinister
    two more vert.
That's

     black      green


     green      black

Brabrant has four lions in such a group with disparate tinctures.

A maple leaf is certainly registerable, but the more usual leaf
in period was the oak leaf.  In period, if you had an unusual
charge on your arms, it tended to be the primary charge, and
everything else tended to be dead normal.  ("Or, three narf
burnishers sable".)  Only when your charges were common did you
tend to get weirdness elsewhere ("Vair, a lion gules fretty
Or").  (Green is pretty rare in armory, maybe about 1% of all
coats.)

There's also "canting arms", where the arms are a pun on the last
name.  An Anglo-Norman seeing your name might suggest "an arm
maintaining a pen" ("bras" == French for "arm", "pen" from
English), but that's not a pun likely to occur to a Welshman, I
think.  (Please resist the temptation to have a brassiere and an
pen.  Thank you.)  A Welshman of the time didn't often have an
inherited surname, tho'.  You might still do things with heads --
"moor's heads" were surprisingly common in European armory -- but
you might get jokes about "black heads".

Daniel de Lincolia
-- 
Tim McDaniel is tmcd at jump.net; if that fail,
    tmcd at us.ibm.com is my work account.
"To join the Clueless Club, send a followup to this message quoting everything
up to and including this sig!" -- Jukka.Korpela at hut.fi (Jukka Korpela)
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