Someone recently asked if there was an listing of which charges had been used most or least often in the Society’s armory. It turns out that this isn’t an easy question to answer using the standard Morsulus armorial interface, but since I’ve imported that data into a SQL database I was able to put together a query that generates such a listing.
The data below is current as of the LoAR dated January 2018, which was posted in March. It includes over fifty thousand total registered armory items, including those which have since been released.
Some other important caveats result from the way this listing was constructed:
- It includes all of the armorial description categories, so in addition to charges, the listing also shows the frequency of field tinctures, divisions, treatments, and arrangements.
- This listing is based on the categories as coded in the armorial database, so it doesn’t distinguish between individual charge types that are grouped under a common heading; in other words, lions, panthers, domestic cats and their cousins are all grouped together under “cat.”
- Some individual charges are grouped under one category but are considered to also conflict with charges that appear under other categories; in other cases, a single category includes multiple types of charges which don’t conflict with each other.