Aux armes: notes

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen (1992). Anthem.

οἵη περ φύλλων γενεὴ τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν.
φύλλα τὰ μέν τ᾽ ἄνεμος χαμάδις χέει, ἄλλα δέ θ᾽ ὕλη
τηλεθόωσα φύει, ἔαρος δ᾽ ἐπιγίγνεται ὥρη:
ὣς ἀνδρῶν γενεὴ ἣ μὲν φύει ἣ δ᾽ ἀπολήγει.

As the generations of leaves, such are those of men.
Some leaves the wind scatters on the ground,
but the flourishing forest puts forth others in its season.
So with men: the next generation springs up, while another passes.

Homer. Iliad. Greek | English.

Notes

1 What's in a name? — unless well-mangled. Not enough, it seems, to ensure singular identity. Even though this particular subject is differentiated from others by being the only architect amongst them, this too could change. In contrast, although successively held through the generations, each British armorial bearing (colloquially, a Coat of Arms) is exclusive to a specific individual — even those of otherwise unadorned commoners, as here. Presently these 'antique fables' are the unique burden of this Geal, namely:

To each other Geal/e, greetings cousin! / fàilte co-ogha! / col ceathrar beannachtaí! / salut! cousin.

2 Commoner: an ordinary person where subject to monarchal prerogative, one without aristocratic rank or ecclesiastic privilege. Time has erased the insolence and mocks the hollow pretensions of this once forthrightly condescending term. The reflected glory from the achievements of many commoners — including the legacy of countless forgotten lives and unknown deeds whose only memorial is the survival of civilisation itself — has long made it a most agreeable title, despite the sometimes contrary diversity it must encompass.

… for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

George Eliot (1871–72). Middlemarch: Finale.

3 Personal or livery badges have been associated with English heraldry from the mid-fourteenth century: but they were exempt from formal regulation until the early twentieth century, when they were sometimes incorporated in the grant of newly assigned arms. Notwithstanding this, the College of Arms has never claimed a prerogative against their general adoption and display, which are solely constrained by Copyright Law. It follows that since the badges here are independently held, blazons are superfluous.

Given the variety in depictions of both badges, any presumptive blazons ought not to be too narrowly prescriptive. Those of the ‘Eagle and Chain’ have several settings of the Eagle: for instance one shows it with inverted wings and set entirely within the chain, viz:

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Yet, whatever its mutability, the eagle is shown throughout in a stylised manner characteristic of the heraldic bestiary before the emergence of the fashion for ‘proper’ (that is, naturalistic) renderings: even so, the earlier idiom persists.

Likewise, the second badge is somewhat variable. Since the livery colour is the presumed setting for heraldic badges (here blue), the form suits that context (fig. 1). Yet whenever the badge is a discrete object, that is, not an appliqué or printed emblem, azure (blue) hexagons fill the interstices between the stars, enveloping the central star (fig. 2) — implying the blazon a Mullet of six points within a Circlet of six of the same all conjoined Argent the first entoured with Hexagons conjoined Azure. Other adaptations (figs. 3 and 4) merely provide the customary contrast to white or pale backgrounds:

In contrast to this formal similarity, the blazon given on the previous page also allows some variety: there the stars have triadic conjunctions and the interstices are quadrilateral polygons, thus: