Blazon - (an Heraldic Design program)

Requirements:
A PC running Microsoft Windows95, with suitable display and pointing
device. The program may run under Windows 3.1 with a recent version of
Win32s installed, but I do not support it under those circumstances.
It should theoretically run under Windows NT 4, but I have not been
able to test it.
The program will run quite happily from a floppy disk (though it will
be slow).
Installation:
Automatic from within Windows95 (select Control Panel|Add/Remove
Programs).
Under Windows 3.1, run the Install program from Windows, or copy the
files BLAZON.EXE, EMBLAZON.DLL, CHARGES.DLL, USERCHG.DLL,
BLZNHNDL.DLL, BLAZON.HLP and BLAZON.DOC to the same directory. This
file, BLAZON.DOC, and the various .BLZ files are not essential to the
running of the program, though they certainly help with examples and
instructions.
Removal:
Automatic from within Windows 95 (select Control Panel|Add/Remove
Programs) if installed from the control panel. Otherwise run the setup
program (in the Blazon directory) with the command line /Clean.
In Windows 3.1, run the uninstal program, or delete the BLAZON.INI
file (if any) from the Windows directory, and the files BLAZON.EXE,
EMBLAZON.DLL, CHARGES.DLL, USERCHG.DLL, BLZNHNDL.DLL, BLAZON.HLP and
BLAZON.DOC, together with any .BLZ files, from whichever directory
they were put in.
The Blazon icon must be removed from any program groups it was
installed in (select it while in Program Manager, and press Del).
General Instructions:
These instructions are intended for those who are familiar with
computers, but don't necessarily know about heraldry. In particular,
the program runs under Windows, and I have assumed some familiarity
with the techniques, terminology and menu structure of other such
programs.
It may be best to get a book on heraldry out of the library before
using this program, if only for the technical terms. Blazon is not
meant to be a serious tool, though it may be of interest to a teacher
wanting to brighten up a lesson on medieval history. The examples are
instructions for constructing coats of arms, chosen to illustrate how
the program works (adding and removing charges, patterning them,
changing tinctures, marshalling two sets of arms together, saving and
loading arms). Most of the information for them comes from Sir Anthony
Wagner's book "Historic Heraldry of Britain". Alternatively, think of
it as a type of drawing program and mess about with it.

Shareware:
Shareware is a method of distributing software where those who use it
pass it on to others, and so do all the work for nothing. This is
(obviously) good for the software writers, who don't have to invest a
lot of capital on advertisement and distribution; but it is also good
for buyers, who get a chance to evaluate how useful a program will be
to them before paying for it, and because the savings on marketing can
be passed on to them; and it is particularly good for writers and
users of minority-interest programs, where the expected returns
wouldn't justify the high costs of traditional marketing.
You are allowed - indeed encouraged - to pass this program on to
anyone who might want to make use of it, as long as all documentation
is included, and nothing has been altered in any way, and as long as
this condition is imposed upon the recipient. The copyright of the
software - program, library, helpfile and documentation - remains the
property of the author, and if you decide to keep and use it after the
evaluation period of thirty days, you should register and pay.
Copyright Notice:
Blazon program and documentation (C) Pete Barrett 1991 - 7.
This program, together with its attendant documentation, may be freely
copied and distributed on the understanding that:
None of the files which make up the program are separately
distributed.
The files are distributed as they are received, without
alteration.
No charge is made for the program (though a charge may be made to
cover genuine costs for materials and postage, and a reasonable
copying charge may be made by bona fide disk vendors).
These conditions are imposed on the recipient.
On receiving the program you are free to use it for thirty days. If
after that time you decide to keep it, you should send 10 (sterling)
to the author at the address below:
Pete Barrett
40, Warren Road
Stirchley
Tel.: 0121-459 3723
Birmingham
B30 2NY
(U.K.)
The payment buys a personal licence for individuals (entitling you or
your representative to use the program on any computer), or a site
licence in the case of schools (entitling the school to use the
program on any of its computers). Other institutions should contact me
to arrange what payment is appropriate.
Registration gets you the latest version. With previous versions of
Blazon I have offered the price of a drink to registered individual
users who report previously unknown bugs, but because of the
complexity of operating systems such as Windows 95, and the difficulty
of establishing in which program the bug is where OLE objects are
concerned, I have had to discontinue this for the OLE parts of the
program. However, it still applies to bugs in the program running on
its own.

Essential Technical Glossary:

"Tincture" is colour. There are three types - metals (gold and silver,
represented by yellow and white), colours, and furs. The "Rule of
Tincture" (which states that metals should not be next to metals,
nor colours next to colours) should be obeyed as far as possible
if arms are to be easily identifiable (their original purpose).
The "Field" is the background of a coat of arms. It can be divided to
show more than one tincture.
A "Charge" is placed on the field or on another charge. It is best
thought of as similar to an object in a drawing program.
"Dexter" and "Sinister" are the two sides of the shield. Dexter is the
left as you look at it (the right of the person carrying it).
When a lion's tongue is of a particular tincture, it is said to be
"Langued"; (when it is of no definite tincture, it is blue).
Similarly, an eagle may be "Armed" (beak and talons of a
particular tincture), and a rose may be "Seeded".
For other technical terms choose Help/Topics.
Context-sensitive information (rather than help) is available by
pressing F1; use this - it's the most important part of the program. A
heraldic description of the selected coat or charge is available by
choosing Actions/Blazon, or (for those using a three-button mouse), by
holding down the middle mouse-button while the mouse pointer is over
the object.
Example 1:
William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke and Striguil, Regent of England
From the File menu, choose New. (Start with a plain argent field.)
Choose Tincture/Or. (Changing the tincture of the field.)
Choose Options/Show Divisions (or Shift+D). (Ensure that the Divisions
icon-panel is visible.)
Click on the icon labelled Per Pale. (The same effect can be achieved
by dragging the icon onto the shield. The field should now be
divided in half vertically)
Choose Actions/Select Lower or Sinister. (Divisions, patterns, and
some charges have two tinctures. This toggle determines which of
them will be affected by any changes from the menus. Clicking on
an object with the right mouse button, or with the shift key held
down, has the same effect as clicking on it with the left button
and choosing Actions/Select Lower or Sinister.)
Choose Tinctures/Vert. (The sinister side should be the one affected.)
Choose Options/Show Lions (or Shift+L).
Drag the Rampant icon onto the very centre of the shield. (The lion
should be large enough to fill most of the field. If it isn't, it
wasn't placed close enough to the centre. Choose Actions/Remove
Charge and try again. You can also remove a charge by dragging it
off the shield, or selecting it and pressing Del.)
Choose File/New. (A message box will ask if you want to save the coat
before blanking it. If you choose Yes, you will have to give it a
name to save it under - usual filename conventions apply.)
The coat may be saved as MARSHAL or BIGOD. (The arms were eventually
inherited, together with the office of Marshal, by Roger Bigod, Earl
of Norfolk.)

Example 2:
Piers Gaveston (d.1312), Earl of Cornwall
Choose File/New.
Choose Tincture/Vert.
Choose Options/Show Beasts (or Shift+B).
Drag the Eagle icon onto the top corner of the shield. (Its tincture
should be or by default.)
Choose Actions/Select Armed (or click on the eagle with the right
mouse button). (To change the tincture of the beak and talons.)
Choose Tincture/Or.
Repeat the last three actions five more times, placing eagles in the
centre of the chief (top) and in the other top corner, the next
two across the fess (middle) of the shield underneath the spaces
between the eagles in the chief, and the last one in the middle of
the base (bottom).
Example 3:
The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem
Choose File/New.
Choose Options/Show Crosses (or Shift+X).
Drag the Jerusalem Cross icon onto the very centre of the shield. (The
arrangement of a cross potent surounded by four smaller crosses is
common enough to warrent its own name.)
Examine the Tincture menu. (Both Or and Argent should be greyed,
because the argent field cannot have charges of either of these
tinctures placed on it if the rule of tincture is to be obeyed see the online help file for more details.)
Choose Options/Use Rule of Tincture (or Shift+T). (Enabling you to
violate the rule of tincture.)
Choose Tinctures/Or.
Choose Options/Adjust Tinctures. (Bringing up a dialog box.)
Click on the rectangle labelled Ar. along the bottom (or move the
selection marker using the arrow keys, and press the spacebar).
Tab to the box next to the slider labelled "Red" (or click on the
box), and enter the number 194. (Changing the amount of red in the
screen colour which represents Argent.)
Do the same for the boxes next to the Green and Blue Sliders. (The
same effect can be obtained by dragging the sliders.)
Click on OK or press Return. (Argent should now be represented by a
pale grey colour, against which the Crosses Or should be much more
visible. The value of 194 for the red, green, and blue values is a
good choice for ordinary VGA, but different adaptors and drivers
may need different values.)
An alternative method of making the crosses more visible would have
been to darken the representation of Or. Generally, arms which have
parts violating the strict rule of tincture (either deliberately, as
here, or inevitably when a charge overlays a field which is varied
matal and colour) need the tinctures altering to make them properly
visible - this is quite in accord with heraldic practice.
Example 4:
Sir Christopher Wren (1632 - 1723)
Choose File/New.
Choose Options/Show Ordinaries (or Shift+O).

Drag the Chief icon onto the shield.

Choose Tincture/Gules.
Choose Options/Show Crosses (or Shift+X).
Drag the Cross Crosslet icon onto the shield, positioning it on top of
the chief in one corner.
Choose Tincture/Or.
Do the last two steps twice more, placing the crosslets, one on the
other corner, and one in the centre, of the chief. (There should
be a line of three gold cross crosslets on the red chief.)
Choose Options/Show Lions (or Shift+L).
Drag the Head icon (the one facing dexter) onto the shield,
positioning it on the middle of the bottom (the base) of the
shield.
Choose Tincture/Sable.
Do the last two steps twice more, placing the heads one on each side
of the shield across its centre (the fess). (The three black
lions' heads should form a V shape.)
Click on the chief to select it. (The edge of the chief should start
flashing. If one of the crosses is flashing, choose Actions/Select
Parent to select the chief.)
Choose Actions/Charge to Top. (Normally only one ordinary is placed on
a coat, and it is the first charge on it. If another ordinary is
then dragged onto the shield, it would simply take the place of
the original one. But sometimes, as in this case, an ordinary,
with any charges on it, is placed over all the other charges on
the field.)
Choose Options/Show Ordinaries (or Shift+O).
Drag the Chevron icon onto the shield. (The default tincture should be
Sable, which is correct in this instance.)
Example 5:
Sir John Hawkins (1532 - 1595)
Choose File/New.
Choose Tincture/Sable.
Choose Options/Show Ordinaries (or Shift+O).
Drag the Base icon onto the shield. (The base is sometimes called a
point.)
Choose Patterns/Barry (ignore the warning of a possible violation of
the Rule of Tincture).
Choose Lines/Wavy.
Choose Actions/Select Pattern (or double click on the base).
Choose Lines/Wavy. (This time it should be the bars of the pattern
that are given the wavy lines.)
Choose Tincture/Azure. (Selecting the pattern automatically sets
Blazon up to make any change to the secondary tincture. This barrywavy azure and argent pattern is often used in heraldry to signify
water.)
Choose Options/Show Lions (or Shift+L).
Drag the Passant icon onto the shield, as close to the wavy top of the
base as possible without actually putting the lion onto the base
itself. (Once on the shield, you can reposition the lion by
dragging it if necessary.)
Choose Options/Show Sub-Ordinaries (or Shift+S).
Drag the Roundel icon onto the chief (top) of the shield.
Choose Tincture/Or. (A roundel or is called a bezant.)
Do the same for two more roundels, so that there is a line of three
bezants across the chief.

These arms were granted to Sir John Hawkins in 1565. Four years later,
an "augmentation of honour" was added to his arms, for his feat of
plundering a town in the West Indies, when his men only outnumbered
the Spanish garrison two to one. The augmentation was a canton or,
with a scallop shell between two palmer's staves sable. I have not
included a palmer's staff in the charges in Blazon, so we have to
ignore the augmentation. These are his arms between 1565 and 1569.
Example 6:
Richard Beauchamp, 5th Earl of Warwick
Choose File/New.
Choose Tincture/Or.
Choose Patterns/Chequy.
Choose Actions/Select Pattern. (Selecting an object's pattern
automatically selects the secondary tincture as well. The pattern
can also be selected by double-clicking on the object.)
Choose Tincture/Azure.
Choose Options/Show Ordinaries (or Shift+O).
Drag the Chevron icon onto the shield. (A flashing border or box shows
the charge that is currently selected. Changes from the menus
affect the selected charge.)
Choose Tincture/Ermine.
Choose Actions/Select Parent. (The flashing border is now round the
whole shield.)
Choose Marshalling/Quarter. (Marshalling is combining two coats
together. There are several methods. You can switch between them
from the lower part.)
Double click on the blank part of the shield. (Displaying the new, and
at present blank, coat that has been added.)
Choose File/Open.
Choose WARWICK3 from the file selector, either by choosing it from the
list of files, or by typing into the Filename text box.
Choose Actions/Select Parent. (The quartered coat should be shown on
the shield.)
Choose Actions/Blazon... (The dialog box should contain the "blazon"
of the quartered coat.)
Double click on the first or fourth quarters. (Displaying the chequy
coat with an ermine chevron.)
Choose Actions/Name Arms.
Type the name "The Earldom of Warwick" into the edit box in the
dialog.
Choose Actions/Select Main Coat. (Returning to the main coat in one
command.)
Choose Actions/Blazon... again. (The blazon of the marshalled coat
will this time use the name of the quarter, rather than its
blazon.)
Choose File/Save as... Type WARWICK5 into the text box.
These were the arms of the ancient earldom of Warwick quartered with
the family arms of Beauchamp.
Example 7:
Oliver Cromwell (1599 - 1658), Lord Protector of England, Scotland and
Ireland
Choose File/New.
Choose Tincture/Sable.

Choose Options/Show Lions (or Shift+L).

Drag the Rampant icon onto the middle of the shield. (The lion should
fill most of the field. If it doesn't, drag it off and try again.)
Choose Tincture/Argent.
Choose File/Copy to Clipboard. (These were Cromwell's family arms,
which he bore on an inescutcheon when Lord Protector.)
Choose File/New. (Click on No when asked if you want to save the arms
- they are saved on the clipboard for later use.)
Choose Options/Show Ordinaries (or Shift+O).
Drag the Cross icon onto the shield.
Choose Tincture/Gules.
Click on the field to select the whole coat.
Choose Marshalling/Quarter. (The cross gules for England goes into the
first and fourth quarters.)
Double click on the second or third quarters (the blank ones). (The
coat in these quarters, which in this case is just an argent
field, now fills the shield.)
Choose Tincture/Azure.
Drag the Saltire icon onto the shield. (The saltire will be argent by
default, which is what is wanted to represent Scotland.)
Choose Actions/Select Main Coat. (The coat quartered of England and
Scotland now fills the shield.)
Choose Marshalling/Quarter. A dialog box asks if you want the coat put
into a grand-quarter, or whether you want to make room for the
other coat in the third quarter. Choose the latter.
Double click on the third (blank) quarter. (Again, the blank coat
fills the shield.)
Choose Tincture/Azure.
Choose Options/Show Misc. Charges 2 (or Shift+2).
Drag the Harp icon onto the middle of the shield.
Choose Actions/Select Main Coat. (The quartered coat of England,
Scotland, and Ireland which now fills the shield was the arms of
the Commonwealth.)
Choose Marshalling/Add Escutcheon of Pretence. (There should be a
small blank shield in the centre of the quartered coat.)
Double click on the Escutcheon of Pretence in the middle of the
shield.
Choose File/Paste from Clipboard. (Bringing Cromwell's family arms
onto the shield.)
Choose Actions/Select Parent.
The normal method of combining personal arms with arms of office is
impalement (choose Marshalling/Impaling to see the effect of this),
though some traditional offices (especially in Scotland) use a
different method. It is said (granted, by an enemy) that when
Cromwell's body was dug up after the Restoration, a plaque of his arms
impaling the Stuart Royal Arms was found in his coffin.
Example 8:
Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (ca.1472 - 1530), Archbishop of York
Click the Blank Page icon on the toolbar.
Click the right mouse button over the shield to bring up the context
menu for the field.
Choose Tincture/Sable.
Click the Ordinaries toolbar button (the one showing a shield with a
bend).
Drag the Cross icon from the icon panel onto the shield.
Access the context menu for the Cross.

Choose Section/Engrailed.
Click the Lions toolbar button.
Drag the Passant icon from the icon panel onto the centre of the
cross.
Drag the Head Guardant icon from the icon panel onto the middle of the
top arm of the cross. (A head guardant can be referred to as a
face, and a lion guardant is frequently referred to as a leopard.)
From the leopard s face s context menu, choose Tincture/Azure.
From the leopard s face s context menu choose Langued/Gules.
Do the same three more times, so that the lion passant gules is
surrounded by four leopard s faces azure, langued gules.
Click on the Sub-Ordinaries toolbar button.
Drag a roundel onto the shield, making sure it goes directly onto the
field. (This is a dummy to ensure that two ordinaries can both go
on the same shield - see the arms of Sir Christopher Wren, Example
4.)
Click on the cross engrailed to select it, and choose Actions/Charge
To Top.
Click on the Ordinaries toolbar button.
Drag the Chief icon from the icon panel onto the shield.
From the chief s context menu, choose Tincture/Or.
Choose Actions/Charge To Top. (The chief will obscure one of the
leopard s faces, which of course it should not really do. Blazon
is imperfect in this respect - see the Note on Style later in this
document.)
From the context menu of the roundel placed on the field previously,
choose Delete.
Click on the Miscellaneous Charges 1 toolbar button.
Drag the Rose icon onto the centre of the chief.
Click on the User-Defined Charges toolbar button.
Drag the middle Imported Metafile icon onto the chief, to one side of
the rose.
Do the same again, but placing the user-definable charge placeholder
to the other side of the rose.
From the context menu of one of the user-definable charges, choose
Load, followed by chough.wmf from the Open File dialog box.
From the context menu of the same charge, choose Copy.
From the context menu of the other user-definable charge, choose
Paste.
From the context menu of the same charge, choose Blazon.
Enter a Cornish Chough sable, beaked and legged gules into the edit
box, and click OK or press Return.
Enter the blazon for the other Cornish chough in the same way. (Chough
rhymes with rough, incidentally. It s a red-legged bird of the
crow family, and this particular charge could equally well be
blazoned a Cornish Chough proper .)
This is an interesting coat. The sable field and cross engrailed would
appear to come from that of the Uffords, Earls of Suffolk, and the
leopard s faces azure from that of De La Pole, likewise Earls of
Suffolk (Wolsey was from Ipswich). The lion passant probably
represents Pope Leo X, although Pope Leo s badge was apparently
purpure, not gules (but compare the originally purpure, now gules,
lion in the arms of the kingdom of Leon). The red rose is for
Lancaster (Wolsey assisted in the establishment of the Tudor dynasty
in England), and the Cornish choughs suggest the arms of St. Thomas of
Canterbury (for Wolsey s name). These arms became the arms of Christ
Church College, Oxford (founded by Wolsey, and originally called
Cardinal s College).

Notes:
To keep the program manageably small, only a few of the many possible
charges are available, but these include the most important.
When small charges already on a shield are dragged around it, Blazon
tries to do what is wanted. When several charges are placed one on top
of another, the whole stack will be moved if possible, but only the
top one will be deleted if it is dragged off the shield.
When a charge is added to arms, Blazon tries to choose sensible
defaults. In particular, it assumes that you want a lion, cross, etc.
placed in the centre of the field to fill the whole of it - if you
want a smaller one, first place the charge in a corner, then move it
to the centre. Blazon chooses a default tincture from the metals and
colours only, and sometimes chooses one which is difficult to see
(particularly when a charge is placed on another charge) - simply
change the tincture to what is required. Charges are placed on a five
by five grid that covers the shield, but some charges when placed in
some positions can overlap others, and some charges when placed on
another charge will not be completely on top of it.
A full-size lion rampant in the centre of the shield can be changed
into a lion passant by clicking on the appropriate icon, but not vice
versa. This is to prevent it obscuring charges which may be just above
or below the lion passant. However, there is nothing to stop you from
putting charges on first, and then adding a lion rampant to the middle
of the shield. Smaller sized lions (sometimes called "lioncels") can
be interchanged without restriction.
The bordure and tressure, which should follow the edge of the shield,
will not be shown properly on marshalled arms, and it is probably best
not to include them.
Display from the Options menu brings up a dialog from which you can
alter the shape of the shield and the way tinctures are shown. There
are two monochrome displays (hatching is a shading technique for
showing different tinctures) and colour (if available). A Heater is
the traditional shield (so-called because it resembles a flat-iron).
Women's arms are traditionally displayed in a Lozenge. A Banner is a
square armorial flag.
It is a good idea to design complex arms on a banner. The grid the
charges are placed on is not square, but is distorted along the edges
of the lozenge and heater, which can make it difficult to select or
drag charges.
Save and Save as... normally produce files with a .BLZ extension,
storing the information in an internal format. Blazon assumes that is
what's required, but it is possible to override the default extension
by typing one into the selector explicitly.
Clipping Problems:
In order to solve the problems that previous versions of Blazon had
with lack of space in the Windows GDI (system resources), and (a
related problem) printing on LaserJet printers, Blazon now does its
clipping internally, rather than using Windows regions. I believe that

the algorithm is stable and working properly, but I have not been able
to test it exhaustively, so note the following points:
1) It is slower than clipping using Windows, and the more points are
involved, the slower it is.
2) Occasionally something which should display does not. This is a
fail-safe mechanism in the clipping algorithm to prevent it hanging
the computer.
3) Occasionally something which should not display may. This is a
genuine bug which I want to hear about (see page 2).
Hatching:
I do not advise the use of hatching on high resolution devices, such
as printers. The lines appear too close together to be easily
distinguished from solid black. Reducing the resolution on your
printer will result in acceptable results.
Non-VGA Monitors:
The lower
panels to
shouldn't
the icons

vertical resolution of EGA monitors causes the icons on the

be slightly obscured by the labels beneath them. This
be a serious problem, but care should be taken to identify
correctly.

A Note on Style
The rules of heraldry do not prescribe a style of drawing. A look at
the way that the artists of various eras have drawn lions, for
instance, would show that the stylised forms of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries gave way to a naturalistic style in the
seventeenth and eighteenth, with a return to a more stylised form in
the late nineteenth century. Even within these broad periods, however,
the actual way that the charges are represented depends upon the
aesthetic sense of the heraldic artist, and the use to be made of the
drawing. This is further complicated by the fact that some instances
of charges are traditionally more ornate than others (eg. the lily of
Florence is shown with stamens, and with petals more obviously petallike than those of the fleur-de-lys; and the garb in the arms of Wasa
(to be seen in the royal arms of Sweden) is generally highly
stylised). Also, while some animals (eg. the lion) have obtained a
stylised form over the years, others (such as the horse) are always
drawn naturalistically.
When drawing the charges, every detail must be drawn separately, every
point calculated and stored, and all this takes time and memory.
(These points are stored in the file CHARGES.DLL, and the drawing
routines are in EMBLAZON.DLL - "emblazoning" is the technical term for
translating the heraldic description, or "blazon", into graphic terms
and depicting the arms in some way.) Therefore I have generally
preferred straight lines to curves, and have ignored much of the
detail that could have been included in some charges. The result is
that charges in Blazon look like flat cut-outs laid on the field,
whereas they are often drawn with shading to emphasise their threedimensional character. Animals, too, look rather flat. This doesn't
matter so much in the case of the lion, which is often drawn in
precisely this way in any case; but dragons and wyverns are usually

given an amount of detail to make them more natural (if the idea of a
natural dragon makes sense), and fish are often drawn with their
scales, and this detail is lost in Blazon. Other animals, even
heraldically common ones such as deer (referred to as stags, bucks,
and hinds), I have simply not been able to render tolerably well. (It
is interesting to notice that it is far easier to produce a
naturalistic rendering with a bitmap, even a small one like the icons,
than using a vector representation - compare the lion icons with the
lion charges when placed on arms.)
A related problem is that charges traditionally vary in size,
depending upon what other charges are present in the arms. The
Ordinaries, for instance, occupy nominally one third of the area of
the field; but they tend to be larger if charges are placed on them,
and smaller when charges are placed around them (compare, if possible,
representations of the arms of the City of Durham, where a cross is
charged with five lions, with those of the See of Durham, where a
cross is placed between four lions). To size the cross correctly in
these circumstances (particularly if you consider the arms of
Cambridge University, which has a cross, charged with a book, between
four lions) is simply too awkward, so Blazon uses the same size
charges irrespective of their environment. The result is that charges
can sometimes overlap where perhaps they really shouldn't.
These problems are unfortunate, but I do not believe that I could have
solved them effectively without making Blazon a very different
program, which would have detracted from its educational use; and that
is, after all, the main thing.
Technical Restrictions:
Those in the know will notice the following:
Only Ordinaries and Sub-ordinaries can be parti-coloured, so that it
is not possible to have a lion eg. barry, as in the arms of the
University of, I think, Marburg.
There are no counter-changed charges or proper colours.
Charges placed on ordinaries or sub-ordinaries with sloping parts (eg.
a bend), will not slope with them.
Charges which would normally occupy the whole field cannot be squashed
to fit into part of the field, as in the arms of eg. Lyons.
It is not possible to put several charges onto one charge (other than
an ordinary) as in eg. Medici.
Only some varied fields and charges are implemented - the most common
that is not is compony. It is not possible to specify how many bars,
gyrons etc. they include.
The lozengy pattern implemented is that common in mainland Europe, not
that usually used in Britain.
Only some of the possible sections are available from the Lines menu.
Gyronny cannot have its edges sectioned.
The rule of tincture doesn't work in quite the way you might expect on
marshalled coats. With it operating (Use Rule of Tincture checked), a
charge overlying all the quarters cannot have the tincture of the
field of any of the quarters, but there is no restriction on placing
eg. a bordure sable over quarters which have fields of azure and
gules. Without it, there is no restriction at all as to its tincture.

For the sake of clarity I have used the term "Per Cross" (which I
understand is actually correct, if rare) for the partition of the
field, restricting "Quarterly" to the method of marshalling.
In order to include more than four quarters on a shield, one of the
quarters must itself be quartered. There is no way of having a
quarterly of eg. nine.
Background Reading:
Boutell's Heraldry - J.P.Brooke-Little
If you can ignore the blatant snobbery (starting with the title surely the original author's original name should be Bottle?), which
may be due to any or all of the numerous authors since it was first
published, the present author's learning is undoubted, and this book
contains a great deal of useful and interesting information.
The Observer's Book of Heraldry - Sir Iain Moncreiffe(?)
This is the book that originally got me interested in the subject as a
child. I haven't seen it for ages, it's surely out of print, and I may
well be remembering it through a fog of nostalgia. Nevertheless, if
you see a copy in a second-hand bookshop, it would at least be worth a
look.
Historic Heraldry of Great Britain - Sir A.R.Wagner
Most of my examples have come from this book. It gives pictures, with
some background information, of the arms of 150(?) historically wellknown people.
In point of fact, any book on heraldry will furnish useful
information, and is not likely to be out of date (after all, the
information hasn't changed substantially for several hundred years).
Legal Matters:
A person's arms are their personal property, and no one else is
allowed to "use" them (a technical term and difficult to define, but
basically it implies showing arms with the implication that they
identify yourself, rather than anyone else). In England, this is of
the nature of a legal technicality, but in Scotland it can lead to a
swingeing fine. Nor is displaying a made-up coat ("bogus arms")
legitimate, since arms have to be granted by the crown (and paid for
by the recipient!); again, the Scots are more severe than the English.
You can, however, display any arms you like as decoration, as long as
the legal owner doesn't object, and, in the case of arms of living
individuals, you are suitably registered with the Data Protection
Registrar. All my examples are properly attributed arms of historical
individuals or bodies, and this is one way of ensuring legality.
The tressure in Blazon is simple, not the "double tressure flory
counter-flory" of the Royal Arms, which is referred to as the "royal
tressure" in Scotland, and usually denotes descent from a Scottish
King. This is deliberate - the Royal Arms are Crown Copyright, and
need the permission of H.M.S.O. before they can be displayed in any
form.
I've mentioned these legalities because Blazon was developed for its
legitimate antiquarian and educational uses, not to enable people to
break laws, however trivial the breaches may be. For further details,

and the opinions of people who think that such breaches are far from
trivial, look in any of the books mentioned above. It's also worth
remembering that the Scots take these matters far more seriously than
we do in England.