It has an institution founded in 1484 that still grants arms, a court that has sat since the fourteenth century, and a body of records — visitations, rolls, grants, funeral certificates — that is the reason so much European heraldic reference is written in English.
It is also the tradition most often misdescribed, because its rules are widely quoted and were never widely enforced.
Where It Starts
Not with 1066. The Norman conquest brought the nobility, but hereditary heraldry is a century later than Hastings.
The earliest firmly dated evidence anywhere is the enamel made around 1160 for the tomb of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, showing a blue shield of gold lions — and it counts as heraldry rather than ornament because his grandson, William Longespée, is recorded bearing the same device. In England arms appear on seals from the mid-twelfth century and multiply rapidly after 1200.
The written record begins with the rolls of arms. Matthew Paris compiled shields at St Albans around 1244; Glover's Roll, of roughly 1253, is the earliest true English roll, recording about 215 coats. The Dering Roll of about 1270 lists 324 shields of knights of the south-east. These were working reference books.
The College of Arms
Incorporated by royal charter in 1484 under Richard III, dissolved under Henry VII and re-established in 1555, and still working from Queen Victoria Street in the City of London. Its building survived the Great Fire because the heralds carried the records out.
It comprises thirteen officers of arms — three Kings of Arms (Garter, Clarenceux and Norroy and Ulster), six Heralds and four Pursuivants — who are officers of the Royal Household under the Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk. Their jurisdiction covers England, Wales, Northern Ireland and much of the Commonwealth.
The College does four things: grants new arms by Letters Patent on the Earl Marshal's warrant, records pedigrees, advises on the right to bear arms, and organises state ceremonial. Its records are private, but searches are made on request by an officer.
The point worth taking from this is that arms are still granted in England today, to living people, and the requirement is not a title. It is being a suitable person, and paying the published fees.
The Visitations: the Backbone of the Record
Between about 1530 and 1688, Kings of Arms toured the counties under royal commission to record who was entitled to arms and to disclaim those who were not. Anyone using arms without authority was required to sign a disclaimer, sometimes read out publicly in the market place.
These heralds' visitations are the single most useful body of English heraldic evidence, because each entry ties a coat of arms to a named family, a named parish and a date, with a pedigree attached. Most are published, many by the Harleian Society, and a great many are digitised.
They are also the reason English heraldry has a documented lower boundary. The visitations tell you not only who had arms but who was caught pretending to.
The Rules — and How Loosely They Were Kept
English practice is precise on paper. Arms descend to all legitimate male-line descendants; only one man at a time bears them undifferenced; the rest use marks of cadency — label for the eldest son during his father's lifetime, then crescent, mullet, martlet, annulet, fleur-de-lis, rose, cross moline, double quatrefoil.
In practice cadency was applied unevenly from the start and was largely abandoned outside the royal family, where it is still rigorously observed. This is unlike Scotland, where differencing is compulsory and enforced by a court.
Enforcement in England rests with the High Court of Chivalry, which heard the celebrated Scrope v. Grosvenor case from 1385 to 1390 — Chaucer gave evidence — and has sat exactly once since 1737, in 1954. The rules are clear; the policing is not.
What English Arms Look Like
English design is comparatively restrained: one helm, one crest, a shield that does the work, supporters only for those entitled to them.
- The lion, in every attitude, is the commonest charge in the tradition. The three lions passant guardant of the royal arms date from Richard I's second great seal of 1198.
- Crosses in dozens of named variants — patonce, moline, botonny, fleury, formy — where the variant, not the cross, is the identifying feature.
- The martlet, a bird drawn without feet, which is both a cadency mark and a charge in its own right.
- Roses, particularly in families with Tudor connections, the red of Lancaster and white of York combined in the Tudor rose.
- Ordinaries — chevron, fess, bend, chief, saltire — which carry no meaning beyond themselves. The idea that a chevron signifies protection comes from seventeenth-century books, not from heralds.
English Surnames: Where They Came From
Hereditary surnames arrived with the Normans and spread from the top down, universal among landholders by 1300 and general across the population by about 1400. Four sources:
- Occupational — Smith, Wright, Taylor, Turner, Baker, Cooper, Thatcher, Fletcher (arrow-maker), Chandler (candle-maker), Walker (a fuller who trod cloth).
- Locative — from a place held or come from: Middleton, Ashford, Preston, Hale. These are the most genealogically useful, because they point at a map.
- Topographical — from a feature nearby: Hill, Brook, Wood, Atwater, Underhill.
- Patronymic and nickname — Johnson, Wilson, Richardson; Brown, Long, Short, Armstrong, Whitehead.
Smith is the most common surname in England, Scotland, Wales and the United States — and precisely because of that it was adopted independently by an enormous number of unrelated families. Armorials list many distinct Smith coats. The plural is the honest answer.
Where to Look
- Burke's General Armory (1884) — the standard index of British and Irish arms by surname. Out of copyright, freely readable, and the uncredited source behind most "family crest" products.
- Papworth's Ordinary of British Armorials — indexed by design rather than name, so you can identify a shield you have found.
- The published visitations, county by county.
- Fairbairn's Crests, for crests and mottoes.
- The College of Arms itself, for records not in print, searched by an officer for a fee.
English Ancestry Abroad
English surnames travelled further than any others, through settlement in North America from the 1600s and across the Empire afterwards. Self-reported ancestry figures are unreliable for exactly this reason — English descent in the United States is so old and so thoroughly mixed that it is under-reported in surveys relative to more recent migrations.
What is reliable is the surname itself, and the English parish register system, which begins in 1538 and is one of the longest continuous vital records series in the world.
What the Record Holds for Your Name
The Heritage Volume sets out what the historical record holds for a surname — its origin, what it meant, where its bearers were concentrated, and the arms associated with it. How Your Report Is Made explains which parts come from public records and which our system builds.
To check a specific coat against the armorials yourself, see our guide to verifying a coat of arms.
Display the arms in a framed coat of arms, or carry the crest on a signet ring.
