[ANSTHRLD] RE: Heralds digest, Vol 1 #539 - 7 msgs

[Tim McDaniel]

On Sun, 9 Mar 2003, Bill Butler <chemistbb3 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I believe you are still in conflict.  Although there are 2
> differences,

That was my point: I had my doubts about whether there even ARE two
differences.  The bordure is one difference.  I had my doubts about
whether the helm is large enough for the required second difference.

For a more extreme but clearer example,
    Argent, a raven sable orbed azure.
versus
    Argent, a raven sable orbed gules.

The only difference between them is the eye color of the birds: the
first has blue eyes, and the second has red eyes.  Eye color was, in
period, artistic licence.  They seem to have used whatever color they
wanted for eyes; we can find period depictions with differing eye
colors for the arms of the same person.  Therefore, we grant no
difference for eye color.

For another example, there's plenty of cases of, for example, "a lion
holding in one paw a sword" shown in one period depiction, but just "a
lion" in another period depiction of the same arms.  For a small held
object, we give no difference.

*ping*

I just had a blinding flash of the obvious: see if there's any
precedent concerning John of Gravesend in particular.  *grind grind*

Yup.  From the July 2001 LoAR:

    C{u'} Meda mac D{u'}nadaig. Device. Vert, a sword argent between
    two Celtic harps Or.
        Conflict with John of Gravesend, Vert, a sword palewise
        proper, surmounted at the tip by a helm affronty argent. There
        is a CD for the addition of the secondary charges but nothing
        for the removal of the maintained helm from John's device.

So a previous Laurel has explicitly ruled that John's helm is too
small to count for difference.

So
    Vert, a rapier argent within a bordure embattled Or.
indeed conflicts with
    John of Gravesend, 5/83, Vert, a sword palewise proper, surmounted
    at the tip by a helm affronty argent.
The only difference is the bordure.

Another lack of difference I forgot to mention before: swords are
rapiers are knives are foils are daggers are claymores are sabres are
scimitars are krisknives are katanas are ...  If it has a handle at
one end [1] and a long blade that's sharp somewhere and intended to be
cut or puncture things, it's treated as an artistic variation of a
sword, and the slight depiction changes are not treated as heraldic
differences.

> I'm not sure but you could be OK if you changed the field to
> something different, like gules or a fur, and changed the position
> of the rapier, say fesswise.

No "and" needed: either one of those is a Clear Difference as listed
in the Rules for Submission, section X.4.  CDs can be gotten (though
with occasional limitations mentioned in the details) via
X.4.a. field difference
X.4.b. addition/removal of charges on the field
X.4.c. addition/removal of overall charges
X.4.d. change of tincture of charges on the field
X.4.e. change of type of charges on the field
X.4.f. change of number of charges on the field
X.4.g. change of arrangement of charges on the field
X.4.h. change of posture or orientation of charges on the field
X.4.i. addition/removal of charges entirely on other charges
X.4.j. two of the aforementioned kinds of changes produce 1 CD

(The rules can be found under <http://www.sca.org/heraldry/>.
I don't recommend reading them unless you actually want to get into
heraldry.  On the other hand, if you DO want to get into "book
heraldry", it's indispensible to read them.)

The problem with just saying "oh, turn the sword or change the field"
is that you'll clear John of Gravesend but risk conflicting with
someone else.

Daniel de Lincolia


[1] "a handle at one end".  I have heard that there's a Fool's Tourney
sometimes held in the West.  At one of them, a pair of people decided
that, if a two-handed sword is large and dangerous, a FOUR-handed
sword must be TWICE as deadly:


          |                           |
    hilt  |           blade           |  other
  --------+---------------------------+--------
          |                           |  hilt
          |                           |

In practice, it DID prove to be twice as deadly:
in its first use, it caused the death of two people.
C.f. the hand-thrown nuclear grenade.

--
Tim McDaniel (home); Reply-To: tmcd at panix.com; work is tmcd at us.ibm.com.