Re: coat of arms (fwd)

[clevin@ripco.com (Craig Levin)]

Poster: clevin@ripco.com (Craig Levin)

Tibor:

> You, sadly, are quite mistaken.  And no herald could do a thing about it.

Sure I can. I can bitch and moan as well as anyone else! :-)

> The registration of arms, in period, was the exception and not the rule.
> Check out the fine research by Pedro de Alcazar.

Depends on what you might call registration. If you mean, "going
to the king or his minions and dumping a large sum in front of
him/them and getting arms back," hell, that happened all the
time. If you mean that (effectively) buying off the powers that be
was the _only_ way to legally get arms, then it is indeed the
exception, even in such heraldically strict areas like Scotland,
until the Middle Ages had all but ended. Heralds would make rolls
of arms for various reasons, but rarely with the object of making
them legal documents-more for menmonic purposes so that they
could identify people at court, in battle, and on the list
field.

Title to arms was established by long use, which could be
attested to by ancient documents and monuments (ie., stained
glass windows with your arms in them, carvings of them on old
family graves, etc.) and the attestations of other gentry and
heralds to both your genteel life and your use of those arms. If
you couldn't come up with ancient proof or the approval of the
other gentry, my guess is that nobody liked you much, because your
family sepulcher was defaced and they tore up-or hid-any old
documents from your sires to theirs.

-- 
http://pages.ripco.com:8080/~clevin/index.html 
clevin@ripco.com
Craig Levin
=======================================================================
List Archives, FAQ, FTP:  http://sca.wayfarer.org/merryrose/
            Submissions:  atlantia@atlantia.sca.org
        Admin. requests:  majordomo@atlantia.sca.org