Arms on the rider. Arms on the horse.
Investigate the object ↗John L. Severance Fund · CC0. Resized without cropping or recolouring.
THE
LANGUAGE of arms.
A coat of arms can move from a shield to a window and still be recognizable. Learn how that works, draw your own examples, and investigate what surviving objects can actually tell us.
A living visual language
Shield study no. 001
12Course
units
units
399Words in the
lexicon
lexicon
16Original shield
studies
studies
∞Possible things
to learn
to learn
✦ Start with the design
Heraldry is a way to describe a design, recognize it, and investigate its use. Recognizing a lion is a beginning. We also need to know which features identify the arms, who used them, and what supports that connection. The drawings let you test the first question; the documents and object studies help with the others. A matching surname, unfortunately, cannot do all that work for us.
✦ Choose your entrance
Choose where
to begin.
If a word is unfamiliar, start with a reading. If an arrangement is unclear, change it in the Atelier. If a claim sounds too easy, follow its source. Each route gives you a different way to test what you think you know.
Learn the language
Twelve readings explain how a shield is composed, how we describe it, and what evidence connects it to a bearer.
Enter the academyBuild a shield
Change colours, charges and ordinaries. Watch the heraldic grammar respond.
Open the atelierRead the evidence
A multilingual primary-source atlas, a field guide and links to the actual authorities.
Explore the sources✦ Try the arrangement
The blazon
atelier.
Choose a simple composition, then change one element and compare the blazons. The changed words help identify what the changed drawing communicates.
✦ Beyond the shield
An achievement
is not just a shield.
Crests, mantling, supporters, badges, mottos and signs of office have their own histories. Their meaning changes across jurisdictions and through time. Eight original research readings and a comparative anatomy laboratory let you study those differences, rather than applying one country's rules to the whole world.
✦ The material evidence
Read the arms
on the object.
The same design can appear on armour, glass, or cloth, but those objects preserve different evidence. A coin can state a royal claim; a chapel photograph can record a display on a particular day. These 35 studies work through what we can see, what the sources establish, and what we still need to investigate.
Enter the object-study collection ↗ 
A living order inside an old chapel
Modern photographic witness; arrangement shown is from 1983
Investigate the object ↗Photo by Serendigity · Public domain. Resized without cropping or recolouring.
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A city arranged around a shield
Investigate the object ↗Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund · CC0. Resized without cropping or recolouring.
✦ The introductory course
The academy.
Start in the twelfth century. Finish by researching and designing a defensible original armorial study.
View the full curriculum ↗01About 26 min reading
The visual language
How armorial identity survives changing artwork, audiences, and documentary witnesses.
Origins & identity
02About 26 min reading
Anatomy of an achievement
Read the components of an achievement as a set of relationships, roles, and institutional claims.
The whole composition
03About 41 min reading
Tinctures & contrast
Read metals, colors, furs, and contrast through worked designs and dated records, including buff, copper, Rose, Bleu Céleste, and red ochre.
Colour is structure
04About 23 min reading
Geometry of the shield
Partitions, positions, arrangements, and transformations—and why geometry alone cannot identify a bearer.
Space & direction
05About 25 min reading
Ordinaries & subordinaries
How bands, crosses, borders, and smaller geometries behave as named figures with edges and layers.
The grammar of shapes
06About 24 min reading
The world of charges
Identify a figure through its morphology, attitude, attributes, arrangement, and source-language conventions.
Animals, stars & imagination
✦ The international research programme
The world has
more than one
law of arms.
An English grant, a German register, and a Flemish statute answer different questions because they belong to different institutions. The regional chapters follow those differences through the original sources. Japanese kamon provide a further test: we can compare visual devices without assuming that every tradition uses the same categories.
✦ The scope of the research
English practice is one starting point. It cannot explain every place in which people use emblems.
81 original comparative research chapters 552 original-language research dossiers 34 source languages Graduate primary-source assignments
Beyond the undergraduate course ↗ ✦ Research & discoveries
Heraldry today.
New scholarship, newly examined objects, and heraldry still being used. A small international reading list with links to the original reporting.
Explore all news ↗When medieval merchant marks met heraldry
Mediterranean Europe
A study of merchant marks preserved in late-medieval financial documents examines how commercial symbols helped merchants maintain recognizable identities across Mediterranean trading networks. Of 738 recorded instances dated 1387–1435, the authors classified 72 as heraldic or heraldic-derived; most were not armorial.
Source: Medievalists.net · Research reporting · English
Context and connectionsA game works with heralds to reconstruct medieval arms
England and Europe
The developers of Chronicles: Medieval say they consulted the College of Arms and Lancaster Herald Adam Tuck while building the game's heraldic system. The reported research drew on rolls of arms, seals, tombs and other witnesses, with reconstructions where documentation was incomplete.
Source: Simulation Daily · Industry reporting · English
Context and connectionsA bishop's arms reconstructed from surviving seals
Lithuania
A reconstruction of the arms used by Antanas Baranauskas, nineteenth-century poet and bishop of Sejny (Augustów), is a focus of the international exhibition 'Tradicija, tapatybė ir menas' in Anykščiai. Heraldic artists Paulius Vaniuchinas and Žydrūnas Strumila worked from surviving armorial seals and impressions, with advice from historian Edmundas Antanas Rimša. At the October 17 opening, a local memorial museum presented two authentic episcopal seals and a document bearing Baranauskas's signature in Lithuanian.
Source: Genealogijos, heraldikos ir veksilologijos institutas · Institutional exhibition report · Lithuanian
Context and connectionsA blazon gives another artist enough information to draw the same arms. The drawings can differ while the identifying design remains recognizable.
The idea behind this project✦ Beyond the classroom
Follow the drawing
back to its evidence.
A crest sits above a helmet, while the arms appear on the shield. Once we can describe the parts, we can ask whose display this was and which records connect it to that person. The field guide introduces those questions and points you toward the relevant authorities.
Read the field guide ↗Explore the colour laboratory ↗✦ Following an attribution
Connect the arms
to their bearer.
Finding your surname beside a shield gives you a search lead. Establishing a right to those arms takes a documented relationship and the rules of the relevant tradition. The difference matters whether you are researching an ancestor or designing something new.
Meet the authorities ↗