[ANSTHRLD] Gules ermined Or

[tmcd at panix.com]

"Stephen Macthomas" <macthomas at houston.rr.com> wrote:
> You may wish to consult with the submitter about a simple charge
> that he or she may wish to add to the field,

Field-only armory is common enough in period, rare enough in the
SCA, and usually easier to draw.  It's true that adding a primary
charge would clear this, but I wouldn't minimize field-only or field
primary.

Field primary ... they could slap on an uncharged canton.  (Or other
peripheral ordinary, but "bordure" is the largest category in the
genord.pl per-category split of the Ordinary.)

> or perhaps a divided field with half being the proposed 'Gules
> ermined Or' and the other half being, um, something that's not
> 'Gules ermined Or.'  My first inclination would be to do "Per
> chevron gules ermined Or and Or ermined gules." or something
> similar.  It's still very simple, it maintains the desired color
> scheme, it's very distinctive - not many custom furs around - and
> it's rather striking to look at.  YMMV of course.

My Mileage is that I don't recall seeing period examples of "foo
ermined bar" except for foo==argent and bar==sable (to wit, ermine),
though I haven't made a big study and I wouldn't be surprised at
seeing a few examples of erminois, pean, or counter-ermine.  But it is
registerable withal.

When it comes to lines of division, "per chevron" was rare early, and
I guess probably rare late too.  They might consider quarterly, per
pale, or per fess for a more common (and easier) partition.  If
they're more ambitious and want something that's common early and
hardly used in the SCA, they could go for barry.

"Foo vairy bar", on the other hand, comes in a wide variety of
attractive patterns from period -- even from early days, they didn't
stick to just argent and azure.  Vairy has the same "it's a fur ==>
it's plain" problem as ermined, though, so it'd have to have something
done with it as well.

For more ambition, I was surprised to see multiple examples of
"Lozengy gules and vair" in various places in early Anglo-Norman
armory (a bend, for example).

Daniel de Lincolia
--
Tim McDaniel, tmcd at panix.com; tmcd at us.ibm.com is my work address