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Aux armes

More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys …

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

William Shakespeare (c. 1595). A Midsummer Night's Dream.


Figure: Marginalia

Prologue

One more pebble cast on the mountain of internet trivia … being a fragment from one of the few surviving artistic practices of the Middle Ages, heraldry. This was once a minor glory of Medieval art but has long since faded to gaudy ostentation, along with its original taints of feudalism and brutality. Even so, vestiges of the strange beauty of a vanished world linger in the remnants. Whether or not any such traces can be found here, for many these anachronisms will offer only "airy nothings": yet tastes vary and others may find the odd morsel here and there.

Despite the digressions, what follows is merely an illustrated ramble through the scanty [antique fables] heraldic panoply of Alan Geal — an obscure and otherwise unadorned British commoner —  and these often solemn but otherwise flippant commonplaces should not be taken as scholarship. This is not a treatise on English heraldry: if that is your object, then the following could be helpful

The Arms and Crest

Blazon

Arms

Azure semy of Mullets of six points conjoined Argent.

Crest

On a Wreath Argent and Azure within a Circlet of Chain fracted Argent an Eagle wings expanded Or grasping in the talons the Chain.

Mantling

Azure doubled Argent.


These arcane terms are explained in a glossary.

Mottoes

Below the Arms:

CLARERE AUDERE GAUDERE
Be bright: be daring: be joyful.

Above the Crest:

ΖΗΤΕΙΝ ΤΗΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑΝ
Seek the truth.

Badges


A Circlet of Chain sans the base link Argent surmounted by an Eagle wings expanded Or grasping in the talons a link fracted Argent.


Figure: the 'Seven Stars' badge


A Mullet of six points within a Circlet of six of the same all conjoined Argent.


As is appropriate to their independent nature, depictions of both badges are somewhat diverse.

Copyright © 2006 Alan Geal