August 2024 – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

Unregistered Badges of the Eastern Baronage

As mentioned in my recent post of baronial banners, House Runnymede is an association of the landed nobles of the East Kingdom, formed in an era when the baronage felt they might need to coordinate their efforts in response to royal overreach.

In years gone by, a badge was proposed for Runnymede, although it was never registered with the College of Arms. The insignia combines symbols of the House’s common greeting — tilting one’s coronet as you pass a fellow member — with its primary activity — gathering for informal conversation over drinks.

House Runnymede

A goblet argent enfiling a coronet bendwise Or.

For the landed baronage of the East.

Armorial Banners for House Runnymede

In the SCA, House Runnymede is an association of the landed baronage of the East Kingdom. Its name was inspired by the circumstances of its creation, at a time (decades ago) when some felt that a counterweight was needed to royal power; in recent years it functions more as a social and support network for the baronage.

Each year, Runnymede holds a dinner at Pennsic, and the vicereines of Østgarðr had offered to host this year’s gathering. Beyond the standard duties of organizing the venue, food, and entertainment, they wished to make the event memorable by providing their guests with personalized gifts, and I volunteered to assist with that effort.

In the months leading up to the dinner, I worked to emblazon the arms of the eighteen Eastern baronies, as well as the Crown Province, for production as fabric banners which would be presented to the guests — and now that the festivities have passed, I thought I would share those images here.

Two Routes to Ancient Names and Arms

When our local canton changed its name a year ago, we piloted the introduction of the “ancient branch name” provisions, as discussed in the October 2023 cover letter. A few months later, the administrative handbook was updated to reflect this change, as well as cover an alternate route to establishing ancient branch names and arms, as discussed in the March 2024 cover letter.

Geographic and Linguistic Indexes of DMNES

I was intrigued by a recent blog post by Anéžka Liška z Kolína, in which she describes a technique for locating names in the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources from a particular region of interest.

However, it seemed to me like there ought to be an easier way to quickly find the relevant sources for such an exploration — a quick way to see all of the bibliographic entries related to a given region and language.

As DMNES doesn’t currently provide such an index, I made a simple mirror of the site and whipped up a quick-and-dirty Perl script to look for citations and build an index page:

A Geographic Bibliography of DMNES