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Name and Device for Arthur von Eschenbach

Arthur had already selected a name and armory in consultation with another herald, Francesco Gaetano Grèco d’Edessa, so preparing his submission forms was a simple matter of illustration and onomastic research.


Per fess argent and sable, a cross gules and in chief two fleurs de lys sable.


Arthur” is an English masculine given name. It is attested to the sixteenth century, appearing in “The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources” (S.L. Uckelman, ed. 2018).

English given names may be borrowed into sixteenth-century German names under the terms of the February 2015 cover letter. Continue reading “Name and Device for Arthur von Eschenbach”

Frequency of Last Names

Following up on my recent post with the most common first names in the Society’s armorial, here’s a list of the hundred most common last names registered to date.

It’s no surprise that last names are more diverse than first names, so this round up of the most popular bynames in the Society doesn’t have  anything that rises to the level of Bill, Bob, Mike, and Tom found in my recent post.

Still, there are clearly some entries here that are relatively common, and it’s an interesting mix of types, including locative, patronymic, descriptive, and occupational bynames. Continue reading “Frequency of Last Names”

Frequency of First Names

With over fifty thousand personal names registered in the Society’s armorial database, it comes as no surprise that a number of name elements are reused numerous times, while others are rare or unique.

I recently looked at the frequency of name elements by their position in a name, which allowed me to pull together the below list of the one hundred most common first names. Continue reading “Frequency of First Names”

Frequency of Branch Designators

As the herald of the Crown Province of Østgarðr, I am well aware that it is the only branch in the Society to bear that particular designator — a result of its distinctive history as the home territory of the earliest royalty of the East Kingdom — and I became curious as to what other unusual branch designators were to be found in the catacombs of the Society’s armorial database.

A bit of data extraction produced the following table: Continue reading “Frequency of Branch Designators”

Provincial Awards Missing From the Kingdom Order of Precedence

The East Kingdom Order of Precedence site, generally referred to as “the EK OP”, records tens of thousands of kingdom and baronial awards issued over the East’s fifty-year history.

It’s an impressive feat of data collection, given the all-volunteer nature of our Society, but it is not flawless. The reporting process involves repeated transcription of unfamiliar names, and I am given to understand that the web interface used to enter and update data in the system is not particularly easy to use, so a number of errors and omissions have accumulated over time and it can take a while to correct them. Continue reading “Provincial Awards Missing From the Kingdom Order of Precedence”

April’s Traceable Art

There’ve been 120 new illustrations added to the Book of Traceable Heraldic Art since February, bringing us to a total of 2,600 items.

This batch includes a depiction of a belladona flower and a number of other images by Nicholas de Estleche, as well as two caps — a bycocket and a cap of maintenance — and some everyday items found in medieval households, including a grater, a funnel, and a hand mirror. Continue reading “April’s Traceable Art”

An OSCAR Commentary Checklist

The SCA’s College of Arms processes around three thousand name and armory submissions per year, attempting to ensure that each is properly structured, historically plausible, and unique within the society. A distributed system of commentary allows the burden of this process to be shared among multiple heralds and minimizes the number of things that fall through the cracks.

By commenting on Letters of Intent, first at the kingdom level and then at the Society level, these other heralds help to catch problems, suggest additional resources, and highlight issues that need to be considered during the monthly decision meetings in which the senior-most heralds make the final determinations as to whether submissions will be accepted or returned. Continue reading “An OSCAR Commentary Checklist”

The Last Super-Simple Field-Only Armory

Earlier this week, I became curious about the simplest armory designs that remained available for registration in the Society — was it still possible to find two- and four-part field-only armory that didn’t use furs, field treatments, or complex lines?

I spent some time looking at all of the current field-only armory: 219 devices and badges registered over the last forty-eight years. A visual sense of the diversity of these registrations is provided by Vémundr Syvursson’s Field-Only Emblazons project from last year, in which he drew out all 202 of these that had been registered at that time.

It quickly became clear that in order to find any design spaces that remained open, I would need to take advantage of the fact that I had parsed all of the existing records from the Society’s Ordinary and Armorial into a relational database, which allowed me to run queries that would filter and group registrations to produce a summary of which combinations of lines and tinctures had been used in the past. Continue reading “The Last Super-Simple Field-Only Armory”

Family Animal Badges

Although devices (or “coats of arms”) are the most recognizable form of armorial display, their cousins the fieldless badges were equally common during the medieval period and renaissance.

We’ve recently registered a fieldless badge for each member of our family incorporating a distinctive animal and color. Continue reading “Family Animal Badges”

An Armory Conflict-Checking Checklist

[Editor’s Note: Portions of this checklist were rendered out-of-date by the new rules for considering changes to the field approved by the March 2021 Cover Letter. See the updated version of this document for a revised version of the checklist. — Mathghamhain]

SENA devotes over 10,000 words to conflict checking armory, which the below guide attempts to summarize.

It includes references to the relevant sections of SENA so you can track down more details if needed. Continue reading “An Armory Conflict-Checking Checklist”