Mathghamhain – Page 26 – Techniques of Digital Heraldry

Heraldic Registrations of the Canton of Lions End

Lions End is Østgarđr’s easternmost branch, covering Nassau County.

Canton of Lions End

The canton’s name was submitted in July 1988, and accepted in October.

The note clarifies that the name does not contain an apostrophe:

Please note: Lions End is a place where lions go to meet. It is not what they sit upon when they sit down to eat. (I.e. it’s Lions plural not Lion’s possessive.) Lions was chosen during a naming binge to try to connect ourselves to our mundane geographic area, and is vaguely derived from Long Island (and various anagrams). The choice of the word End comes from our neighbors to the east An Dubhaigeainn (which translates to Abyss) and so we figured that before you get to the abyss you have to come to an end, and so “Lions End.”

Some additional commentary was added at the kingdom level to support this name, which received a mixed review in the LoAR when approving it for registration:

Although the analogue with Land’s End made on the letter of intent is not really accurate, the name is acceptable.

The distinction is routinely overlooked. For example, when the canton registered its arms in 1990 the acceptance was listed under the name “Lion’s End,” and only corrected sixteen years later. (Indeed as of this writing, the canton’s web site uses the apostrophe in the site’s title and home page, although elsewhere it uses the registered version.)

Azure, a bicorporate lion within a laurel wreath Or. (Returned)

The canton’s initial selection of arms featured a bi-corporate lion, an unusual charge featuring a lion’s head with two bodies attached to it.

It was returned in May 1989 with the note:

Conflict with the arms of John of Northampton, Mayor of London in 1381–83 (“Azure, a bicorporate lion guardant crowned Or.”). As Crescent has noted, this is a frequently depicted piece of armoury. Indeed, it is almost the “defining instance” for the bicorporate lion in most handbooks.

Although the rules have changed since, at the time the Society’s rules for armory conflict included checking against the arms issued by other jurisdictions, including medieval England.

Sable, a bicorporate lion and on a chief Or, three laurel wreaths sable.

A revised version of the device was submitted a few months later, and approved in May of 1990 without comment.

The lion is an allusion to the mundane county of Nassau, which has as its arms “azure, a lion rampant between seven billets Or,” which is derived from the arms of the European house of Nassau, “azure billetty, a lion rampant Or armed and langued gules.”

An attractive depiction of the arms is provided by canton’s heraldic banner.

Sable, a bicorporate lion and on a chief Or, three laurel wreaths vert. (Error)

Due to a scribal transcription error around that time, the arms listed in the Society’s armorial database differ from the registration in the tincture of the laurel wreaths, which were listed as vert instead of sable. [Edited May 23: the correction was rolled out in today’s database update and it is now listed correctly as three laurel wreaths sable.]

As a result, a number of illustrations of the branch’s arms which were taken from that blazon have been drawn incorrectly, including the version that’s currently shown on the canton’s home page, as well as the East Kingdom wiki and other places.

Following the discovery of this error, the O&A is currently being adjusted to match the original registration.

[Edited June 17: Local oral history holds that the wreaths were changed to green because of a ruling at the time that all laurel wreaths must be vert. However, the lack of commentary in the LoAR which accepted the arms with sable wreaths, and the contemporaneous registration of numerous wreaths of other tinctures, suggests that this is post-facto mythologizing — this really was due to a simple scribal error during data entry.]

A bicorporate lion atop a billet fesswise Or.

The canton submitted a populace badge in mid-2013, which was registered that November.

It features the same bicorporate lion as in the branch arms, standing on a billet (the heraldic term for a rectangle).

According to Yehuda ben Moshe, canton herald at the time, the initial intention was to register just a fieldless bicorporate lion Or, which members of the populace had already begun using as an informal populace badge. However, this was found to be too similar to another registration, the holder of which declined to grant permission to conflict, and so they looked for something simple that could be added to existing badges and settled on a billet, which is another design element present in the aforementioned arms of Nassau County.

For the curious, the territory of Lions End was previously home to the Canton of Mandan, sometimes spelled Madnan, which was formed in October 1980, had its name registered in January 1983, went defunct in May 1985, and had its name released in a December 1989 purge of defunct East Kingdom branches, according to Lord Richard the Poor’s “A Geographic History of the East Kingdom” and the Society’s armorial records. The name may have been an allusion to “Madnan’s Neck,” a seventeenth-century name for the Great Neck region, derived from “Menhaden-Ock,” its native Mattinecock name, itself a reference to the small Menhaden fish then plentiful in the region.

Court Report, Picnic in the Ruins

On the 29th of April, their excellencies Østgarðr held court at the Crown Province’s Picnic in the Ruins, under the colonnaded peristyle in the parklands of the Canton of Brokenbridge.

Suder Il Khan and Lada Il Khatun called for those who were attending their first, second, or third event to come forward, and presented them each with a gift of candles in the province’s livery colors, reminding those assembled that these gentles represent the future of our society, and the newcomers were heartily cheered by the populace.

Traceable Art Update For April

I’ve continued adding charges to the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art, drawing from both the Pennsic Traceable Art collection and from period sources, and it’s now up to over 800 pages of illustrations.

Of these, I’m particularly fond of this image of a tent from Guillim’s Display of Heraldry (1611).

There’s also a new External Resources page that lists charges which are found in the PTA or PicDic but do not have corresponding images in this collection, and a Contributing page with some preliminary notes about how to send in your own art for inclusion.

Name and Device for Alaxandair Mórda mac Matha

Alax is is my son, and wanted a name that reflected his mother’s Scottish ancestry, and a device suggestive of his primary interest in the society: youth combat.

Sable, an escutcheon within an orle Or.

Black and yellow are the colors of the martial offices, and after trying dozens of different designs he settled on these nested shield shapes.

Alaxandair is a Gaelic form of Alexander, first recorded as the name of a Scottish king born at the end of the 11th century (Alaxandair mac Mael Choluim), as well as two 13th century successors (Alaxandair mac Uilliam and Alaxandair mac Alaxandair), and then appearing more widely in records in the 13th and 14th centuries.

Device for Christophe de Frisselle

Azure, a pale checky sable and argent.

Christophe was introduced to me through the East Kingdom’s “Ask a Herald” service. He already had a design in mind that was a good match for his 12th Century Sicilian Norman Crusader persona.

However, I soon discovered that, although visually distinct, it conflicted with the populace badge of the Shire of Caer Adamant, azure, a pale vert fimbriated Or, as the College of Arms does not consider fimbriation when calculating heraldic difference.

I contacted the shire’s herald, Don Simeon ben Iuçef de Alcaçar, and through him reached their seneschal, Baron Adolphus Benner, who consulted the local populace and officers and granted Christophe the necessary “permission to conflict” that would allow his arms to be registered.

[Update, Dec 2017: This device was accepted for registration.]

The Lost Cantons of Østgarðr

The Crown Province of Østgarðr currently contains four cantons:

Northpass (established as Viking’s Hall 1983/12, renamed 1984/12, name registered 1985/05, full status 1985/08),
Lions End (established 1988/02, name registered 1988/10, full status 1989/03),
Whyt Whey (established 1989/08, name registered 1990/01),
Brokenbridge (name registered 2006/09).

But over the course of its nearly fifty-year history, it turns out there have been nine other affiliated branches, eight of them founded in a two-year period from 1979 through 1981. Continue reading “The Lost Cantons of Østgarðr”

Arms and Badge for Lady Sofya Gianetta di Trieste

Or, a Florentine fleur-de-lys and on chief gules two mullets of eight points Or.

Lady Sofya came up with an initial design for her armory last year, but the submission paperwork was never finalized and she wanted to make a few tweaks.

Her persona resides in northern Italy and she’d previously selected the Florentine fleur-de-lys as her primary charge, as well as choosing red and gold as her personal colors. In the course of the design process she identified the eight-pointed star as a recurring theme in Italian heraldry and included that as well.

Arms for Lady Magdelena Caminante

Per bend sinister purpure and vert, a bend sinister argent, overall an inverted triangle Or.

Lady Magdelena’s armory registration was returned for a redraw as the submitting herald had made the triangular charge “barely overall.” She liked the design, so we adjusted the proportions to address the issue by ensuring that all three corners of the triangle lie on the field rather than on the bend, and it is now being resubmitted.

My Name and Device

My SCA persona is of mixed post-Viking Irish and post-Roman Welsh descent, living in northern Wales one thousand years ago, so I tried to select a name and armory that felt appropriate for that context.

Per fess argent and vert, a bear passant gules.

The Irish and Welsh of 1017 did not have a concept of personal armorial designs, which arrived in the British Isles with the Normans fifty years later, but heraldry is such a pervasive element in the SCA that I was willing to be anachronistic about it.

However, I still wanted to use a very simple design that was reminiscent of the earliest period of heraldry — per-fess fields with a single central charge are found by the twelfth century.

Heraldic Search Shortcuts

I’ve put together an integrated search page that allows you to easily run search queries against a number of different websites that contain useful heraldry information.

It was inspired by similar collections of search shortcuts posted by Morsulus Herald and Sofya la Rus, but I’ve added a bit of JavaScript to make the interface less repetitive. I’ve extended the list of search targets with some other useful sites including OSCAR, some of the onomastic reference books posted by Wenyeva atte grene, and some old armory books I have been using as sources for images for the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art.

I hope it may prove useful to others — if there are websites that seem of general interest that I have omitted please feel free to point them out and I’ll see if I can add them as well.