Heraldry

Heraldry is the art and science of blazoning coats of arms. Heraldry is used by the royalty and nobility as a sign of status, and as such is an important part of Tamrielic feudal society. Most noble Houses have their own designs, and variants of these designs are adopted only by members of the House. Coats of arms are commonly used by knights in tourneys and on the battlefields as a way to identify allied from enemy soldiers in the heat of battle. Conversely, mystery knights that want anonymity use blank or unknown coats of arms.

Heraldry in Tamriel and in the Real World[]

Heraldry in Tamriel serves largely the same purpose as in medieval Europe, but Tamrielic heraldry is significantly less formalised. In this regard, Tamriel resembles early medieval or Dark Age societies, before the rules of heraldry were properly developed and widely accepted. While real-world heraldry makes extensive use of words and jargon specific to blazonry, Tamrielic arms are mostly described in standard English. Most of Tamriel uses escutcheon-shaped coats of arms, but Redguard Houses favour circular coats of arms that are not widely seen anywhere else.

The arms of a House belong to that family, as in Germany and Italy, and may be used by all trueborn descendants of that House. Bastards may sometimes use the arms of their parent's House with an added distinction.

Tinctures[]

Traditional real-world heraldry limits the number of tinctures to two metals (argent for white and or for gold), five colours (gules for red, sable for black, azure for blue, vert for green, and purpure for purple), and two furs (ermine and vair), and limits how these tinctures can be placed together. Tamriel instead uses a much larger palette, makes no distinction between metals and colours, and describes tinctures using simple English words instead of heraldic vocabulary. Real-world heraldry follows the rule of tincture, which dictates that "metals" may not be placed over other metals, and "colours" may not be placed over other colours. While this rule is sometimes broken in real-world heraldry, it is altogether absent in Tamriel and many Houses have arms that would violate the rule of tincture:

In traditional heraldry no distinction is made between white, silver, and light grey, which are all named "argent". Likewise, both gold and yellow are called "or". In Tamriel, white, grey, and silver are treated as distinct tinctures and can be used together on a coat of arms.

Many of the available blazons of Tamrielic coats of arms are notable in their lack of detail. In some cases the blazons manifest in quite poor designs rendering them of little use for recognition on the battlefield.

For practical reasons, traditional heraldry uses a very limited set of tinctures; it was not always practical or possible to reproduce subtler colour variations in the numbers and time constraints found. Besides, coats of arms are meant to be recognisable from far away and are often employed in shields and other pieces of equipment that are subject to abuse, neglect and disrepair. Even today, many pigments show some degree of colour degradation, often severe, when consistently exposed to sun rays, rain, and other influences. This limited palette is not the case in Tamriel, where heraldic descriptions include ambiguous or subtle colours.

Devices and Charges[]

Charges are objects or figures placed on a shield. Many of the devices and charges used in the heraldry of Tamriel derive directly from traditional sources and include creatures such as lions, stags, and birds, and symbols such as stars, weapons, and ships.

Ordinaries[]

Some charges with simple geometric shapes are so common that they are often classified separately as ordinaries. These include:

Ordinary	Description	Example
Fess	a horizontal band
Pale	a vertical band, meaning an upright stake, whence "palisade"
Bend	diagonal band, from dexter chief to sinister base. "Sinister" and "dexter" mean left and right respectively, but they are from the point of view of someone holding the shield, so they are reversed from an observer's viewpoint.
Bend sinister	the bend sinister goes the other way, from sinister chief to dexter base.
Chief	a broad band across the top of the shield; "chief" also describes a location near or towards the top of the shield.
Cross	meaning always an upright cross; a very common ordinary in European heraldry (with an obvious religious meaning), but seems to be less common in Tamriel.
Saltire	a diagonal cross
Pile	roughly equilateral triangle with the top edge of the shield as its base
Pall	a Y shape
Pall reversed	an upside-down Y shape
Bordure	a border parallel with the edge of the shield; somes simply called 'border'
Orle	a shield-shaped ring—similar to a bordure but does not reach the edge of the shield, leaving a small gap of the main field tincture.
Tressure	a thinner orle
Double tressure	two tressures, one inside the other
Chevron	a horizontal band with a kink in the middle, so that it slopes upwards towards both edges of the shield; it is a mirrored version of real-world chevrons, which slope downwards
Canton	a square in dexter chief

Variations of the Field[]

The field of a shield, is sometimes made up of a pattern of colours, or variation. A pattern of horizontal (barwise) stripes, for example, is called barry, while a pattern of vertical (palewise) stripes is called paly. A pattern of diagonal stripes may be called bendy or bendy sinister, depending on the direction of the stripes. Other variations include chevrony, gyronny and chequy. For further variations, these are sometimes combined to produce patterns of barry-bendy, paly-bendy, lozengy and fusilly. Semés, or patterns of repeated charges, are also considered variations of the field.

Divisions of the Field[]

The field of a shield in heraldry can be divided into more than one tincture, as can the various heraldic charges. Many coats of arms consist simply of a division of the field into two contrasting tinctures. These divisions are considered to lie next to each other rather than on top of each other and thus the rule of tincture can be ignored. For example, a shield divided azure and gules would be perfectly acceptable. A line of partition may be straight or it may be varied. The variations of partition lines can be wavy, indented, embattled, engrailed, nebuly, or made into myriad other forms.

In general, if the field is divided and every segment has to be blazoned (e.g., each has a different charge on it), they are blazoned in the following order: dexter to sinister, then chief to base. In the case of "party per cross" or "quarterly", the four segments are typically numbered in that order.

Marshalling[]

To marshal two or more coats of arms is to combine them in one shield, to express inheritance, claims to property, or the occupation of an office. This can be done in a number of ways, of which the simplest is impalement: dividing the field per pale and putting one whole coat in each half. Impalement replaced the earlier dimidiation—combining the dexter half of one coat with the sinister half of another—because dimidiation can create ambiguity between, for example, a bend and chevron. "Dexter" (from Latin dextra; right) means to the right from the viewpoint of the bearer of the arms and "sinister" (from Latin sinistra; left) means to the left. The dexter side is considered the side of greatest honour.

A more versatile method is quartering, division of the field by both vertical and horizontal lines. This practice originated in Spain after the 13th century. As the name implies, the usual number of divisions is four, but the principle has been extended to very large numbers of "quarters"; the largest number recorded being the arms of the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, featuring a total of 719 "quarters".

Quarters are numbered from the dexter chief (the corner nearest to the right shoulder of a man standing behind the shield), proceeding across the top row, and then across the next row and so on. When three coats are quartered, the first is repeated as the fourth; when only two coats are quartered, the second is also repeated as the third. The quarters of a personal coat of arms correspond to the ancestors from whom the bearer has inherited arms, normally in the same sequence as if the pedigree were laid out with the father's father's ... father (to as many generations as necessary) on the extreme left and the mother's mother's ... mother on the extreme right. A few lineages have accumulated hundreds of quarters, though such a number is usually displayed only in documentary contexts.

The third common mode of marshalling is with an inescutcheon, a small shield placed in front of the main shield. In Britain this is most often an "escutcheon of pretence" indicating, in the arms of a married couple, that the wife is an heraldic heiress (that is, she inherits a coat of arms because she has no brothers). In continental Europe an inescutcheon (sometimes called a "heart shield") usually carries the ancestral arms of a monarch or noble whose domains are represented by the quarters of the main shield.

Inheritance and Younger Children[]

In Tamriel arms belong to a family, and any trueborn child may use the family arms. This is similar to the practice in German heraldry, and converse to the practice in British heraldry, where only the head of the family may use the family arms; other members of the family have to difference their arms in some way. In Tamriel this is not compulsory, though some choose to adopt their own personal arms, usually a minor variation on the arms of their House.

Bastards[]

Bastards do not have the right to use the arms of their families. Thus, a typical Tamrielic custom is that when a bastard uses a sigil (when knighted for example), they add a distinction from the arms of their parent's House, called "breaking". A bastard that wants to emphasise his affiliation and minimise his own bastardy may decide to use the same sigil as their lordly parent, perhaps illegally. Other bastards might choose to combine multiple sigils, using imagery from both their parents (if the other parent is a noble) or adding their own charges.

Additionally, those bastards that choose to take a new surname upon receiving lands and a knighthood would also be required to create their own arms for their new House, which would effectively be a cadet branch of their parent's House.

Canting[]

Canting arms are used by some Houses. Canting arms are a type of heraldic pun, whereby the blazon of the shield makes a direct reference to the name of the family. In other Houses the canting refers not to their name of the family, but to their ancestral seat.

House Words[]

In real world heraldry there are family mottos that are often shown on a scroll under the shield in a coat of arms (except in Scottish heraldry where they are placed above the shield). In Tamriel these are called House words, and are not displayed on the coat of arms.

Quotes[]

You Tamrieli are all the same. You sew some beast upon a bolt of cloth and suddenly you are all lions, or bears, or wolves. You are no such things—only men.

—Akaviri man to a native of Tamriel