Heraldry

Heraldry is the science and art of describing coats-of-arms, also referred to as achievements or armorial bearings. Its origins lie in the need to distinguish participants in battles or jousts and to describe the various devices they carried or painted on their shields.

Tinctures

Main article: Tincture

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There are seven main tinctures, consisting of two metals (light tinctures) and five colours (dark tinctures), although there are a number of other rare tinctures. The names of the tinctures mainly come to us from French. The first rule of heraldry is the rule of tincture: metal must never be placed upon metal, nor colour upon colour, for the sake of contrast.

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* "Or" is usually spelled with a capital letter (Gules, a fess Or) so as not to confuse it with the conjunction "or."

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Furs, such as ermine, ermines, or vair, are regular variations of the field that represent various types of actual fur. Any charge may be of a fur.

Related Topics:
Ermine - Fur

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• Ermine is in design a field argent, semé (see variations of the field) of ermine-spots sable, but is not so regarded; it is regarded as a plain tincture.
• Ermines is the reverse of ermine – a field sable semé of ermine-spots argent.
• There is also vair and its variants. Basic vair is a row of small items shaped like bells with straight edges. The bells on the next row down are placed with their bottoms facing the bottoms of the bells on the row above, and so forth down.

There also exists, though rarely, two "stains": tenny/tawny (orange) and brown.

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Proper: Objects may also be depicted in their natural colours. In this case, they are described as "proper".

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Blazon: Historically the custom in English blazon was to reduce redundancy by referring to a particular tincture only once in the blazon, but the College of Arms has moved away from this practice in recent years.

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