The Meaning Behind Your Family Motto: How to Find and Understand It

The first thing to understand is that a motto is not regulated the way the shield is, and the rules differ sharply by country.

In England and Wales, the motto forms no part of the grant of arms. The College of Arms may record one, but it is not granted, it is not protected, and an armiger may change it whenever he likes. Two branches of the same family can use different mottoes without anything being irregular.

In Scotland, the position is the opposite. The motto is recorded in the Public Register along with the arms, it belongs to the arms, and it appears above the crest rather than below the shield. A Scottish clansman's crest badge carries the chief's motto on the strap precisely because the motto is part of the chief's recorded identity.

So "our family motto" is a much stronger statement in Edinburgh than in London.

They are not original to heraldry. Shields carried devices from the twelfth century; mottoes appear on seals and in rolls of arms gradually from the fourteenth, and only become a standard part of the display in the fifteenth and sixteenth.

Two separate sources fed into them, and telling them apart is most of the pleasure of the subject.

The first is the war cry, the cri de guerre — a phrase shouted to rally men who could not see each other's faces. These are the oldest, they tend to be short, and they are often a place name or a lord's name rather than a sentiment.

The second is the personal device or impresa — a Renaissance fashion in which a gentleman adopted an emblem with a terse phrase attached, the two meant to be read together as a riddle. This is where the reflective, aphoristic mottoes come from, and it is a court game rather than a battlefield one.

1. War cries

• "Crom abú" — "Crom to victory", the cry of the Fitzgerald Earls of Desmond, taken from the castle of Croom. Its rival "Butler abú" belonged to the Butlers of Ormond, and the pair were shouted at each other for two centuries. Irish war cries of this -abú type were common enough that an Act of 1495 tried to suppress them.
• "A Douglas! A Douglas!" — the plainest form of all: the name itself, shouted.
• "Dieu et mon droit" — "God and my right", the English royal motto, traditionally connected with Richard I and in continuous royal use since the later medieval period.

2. Puns on the family name

Heraldry's oldest reflex is wordplay, and the motto is the natural place for it. These are worth knowing because they are checkable and often very old.

• Fortescue — "Forte scutum salus ducum", "a strong shield is the safety of commanders". The name itself means strong shield.
• Cavendish, Dukes of Devonshire — "Cavendo tutus", "safe by taking heed". The pun is on the first syllable.
• Vernon — "Ver non semper viret", which reads as "spring does not always flourish" and, cut differently, as "Vernon always flourishes". The same six words, two meanings.
• Onslow — "Festina lente", "make haste slowly", which glosses the family name in two words.

3. Statements of faith

Very common after the Reformation, on both sides of it.

• "In Deo confido" — in God I trust.
• "Crux mihi ancora" — the cross is my anchor.
• "Soli Deo gloria" — glory to God alone.

4. Commemorations of a specific event

These are the mottoes that function as compressed history, and the good ones repay looking up.

• Maxwell — "Reviresco", "I flourish again", paired with a crest of a stag and the holly of the name's later fortunes. The word carries the family's recovery after ruin.
• Bruce — "Fuimus", "we have been". Four letters of past tense, doing a great deal of work.
• Nelson — "Palmam qui meruit ferat", "let him who has earned it bear the palm". Adopted by the admiral himself.

5. Declarations of intent

• House of Orange — "Je maintiendrai", "I will maintain". Deliberately unfinished: maintain what is left to the hearer.
• Prince of Wales — "Ich dien", "I serve", in German, and attached to the Black Prince by a tradition connecting it to the field of Crécy.
• Campbell — "Ne obliviscaris", "do not forget". Also deliberately unfinished.

Four habits that will keep you out of trouble.

Check the language before the meaning. Latin is the default, but Norman French is common in older English arms, and Gaelic, Welsh, Scots, Italian and German all appear. A motto in Scots or Gaelic tells you something about the family before you have translated a word of it.

Expect the pun. If a Latin motto seems slightly strained, read the first syllables against the surname. Heralds thought this was the highest form of wit and they were not joking.

Do not trust a smooth translation. Mottoes are compressed on purpose and many are grammatically incomplete. "Fuimus" is not a sentence. The gap is the point, and a translation that fills it in is adding something that was left out deliberately.

Treat clan slogans and mottoes as different things. In Scotland a clan may have both: a motto recorded with the chief's arms, and a separate Gaelic slogan or war cry. Clan Donnachaidh is the name of the Robertsons — "children of Duncan" — not a battle cry, and the two are constantly conflated online.

The motto is recorded in the same places as the arms, and in Britain and Ireland you can check most of it yourself for nothing.

• Burke's General Armory (1884) prints the motto with each entry for British and Irish families. Out of copyright and freely readable.
• The Public Register of All Arms and Bearings in Scotland, kept by the Court of the Lord Lyon, is the authority for Scottish mottoes and has run since 1672.
• Fairbairn's Crests indexes crests and mottoes together, which is useful when you have one and want the other.
• Rietstap and the Continental armorials record mottoes less consistently, because outside Britain the motto was often not considered part of the arms at all.

One caution. Because English mottoes were freely changeable, several different mottoes may be recorded under the same surname — and, as with arms themselves, a surname is attached to many unrelated families. There is rarely one motto per name.

Worth saying, because most articles on this subject never do: since the motto is the least regulated element of an achievement, adopting one is entirely legitimate almost everywhere. People have been doing it for six hundred years.

If you do, the tradition suggests three things. Keep it short — most are three to five words. Make it compress rather than explain. And if you can get a pun on the name into it, you are working squarely within the form.

The Heritage Volume sets out what the historical record holds for a surname — where the name comes from, where its bearers were concentrated, and the arms associated with it. How Your Report Is Made explains in detail which parts of it are drawn from public records and which are built by our system, before you buy anything.

For the rest of the achievement the motto sits under, start with our guide to reading a coat of arms.

Display the arms and the motto together in a framed coat of arms.