10 Famous Coats of Arms in History & What They Mean

Blazon: Gules, three lions passant guardant in pale Or — three gold lions walking, heads turned to face you, on red.

Among the oldest royal arms in continuous use. Richard I used a single rampant lion on his first great seal and two lions combatant on the shield; the three passant guardant lions appear on his second great seal of 1198 and have been the arms of England ever since. They now sit in the first and fourth quarters of the Royal Arms of the United Kingdom, and on an England shirt.

The story that is not true: that each lion stands for a territory — England, Normandy, Aquitaine. It is repeated everywhere and there is no medieval authority for it. The likeliest explanation is the dullest: three was a good number for the space.

Blazon: originally Azure semé-de-lis Or — a blue field strewn with an indefinite number of gold lilies, running off the edges. Later Azure, three fleurs-de-lis Or.

The reduction from many to three is usually attributed to Charles V in the 1370s, and the three are traditionally explained as the Trinity — an explanation that is devotional rather than documentary.

The design's afterlife is extraordinary: it is on the arms of Quebec, on the flag of New Orleans, on Florence, on the Medici chief, and on the badge of a great many families granted French royal favour.

Blazon: Or, a lion rampant Gules armed and langued Azure, within a double tressure flory counter-flory Gules.

In use from the reign of Alexander II in the early thirteenth century. The distinctive element is the double tressure — the narrow double border with fleurs-de-lis alternating inwards and outwards — which is unusual enough that it became a mark of royal favour in its own right: Scottish kings granted the right to bear a tressure to a handful of subjects as an honour.

Its use is restricted by statute. The Lion Rampant is the personal banner of the sovereign in Scotland, and flying it is, strictly, an offence.

Blazon: Or, a double-headed eagle displayed Sable, usually charged with an inescutcheon of the family's own arms.

The double head is a Byzantine inheritance, adopted in the West for the Holy Roman Emperors from the fifteenth century — before that the imperial eagle had one head. The two heads are generally read as east and west, the empire's double claim.

Worth separating: the eagle is the emblem of the office, not the family. The Habsburgs' own arms are Or, a lion rampant Gules for Habsburg proper, and the eagle carried whichever inescutcheon the reigning emperor was entitled to. The double-headed eagle later passed to Austria-Hungary, to the Russian Empire, and to Serbia and Albania in their own forms.

Blazon: Or, five torteaux in orle and in chief a roundel Azure charged with three fleurs-de-lis Or.

The Medici palle — balls — are the best-documented case of arms changing to record a political event. The early versions carry varying numbers of red roundels, as many as eleven in some fourteenth-century examples, settling later at six and then five. In 1465 Louis XI of France granted Piero de' Medici an augmentation: the topmost ball was replaced with a blue roundel bearing the French royal lilies, and it stayed there.

So the shield you see carved across Florence records a specific transaction on a specific date — which is exactly what augmentations are for.

What the balls themselves represent has never been settled. Coins, pills, dents in a shield: the explanations are all later than the arms.

Blazon: Gules, two keys in saltire, one Or and one Argent, interlaced in the rings.

The keys of Peter. The gold key is conventionally read as the power to loose in heaven, the silver as the power to bind on earth, and the cord joining them as the union of the two.

What is unusual is that the arms belong to an office and change with its holder only in part: every pope combines the keys and tiara with personal arms of his own. Papal heraldry is also the source of the ecclesiastical hat system, in which rank is shown by the number of tassels.

Blazon: quarterly, Gules, a triple-towered castle Or for Castile; Argent, a lion rampant Purpure for León.

The purest canting arms in Europe: a castillo for Castile and a león for León, side by side. They are also one of the very few prominent uses of purpure, a tincture rare enough that many armorials record the León lion as gules instead.

Quartered by Ferdinand III in 1230, these two shields are still the first and second quarters of the arms of Spain, and their descendants appear on the arms of a dozen Latin American states.

Blazon: Azure billetty Or, a lion rampant Or armed and langued Gules — a blue field scattered with small gold rectangles, and a gold lion over them.

The billets are the distinguishing feature and are unusual as a strewn charge. William the Silent led the Dutch revolt against Spain; his descendants gave the Netherlands its monarchy and England its William III. The house name is why the Dutch national colour is orange, though the flag is not.

Blazon: Or, an eagle displayed Sable.

The eagle is a Roman inheritance used as an imperial device long before heraldry existed — the Carolingian connection people cite is symbolic rather than heraldic, since hereditary arms are three centuries later than Charlemagne. As arms the single-headed black eagle on gold belongs to the Holy Roman Empire from the twelfth century, and the double-headed form supersedes it for the emperor from the fifteenth while the single eagle remains the King of the Romans'.

It survives, simplified almost to a logo, as the Bundesadler in the modern German coat of arms.

Blazon: Argent, a sinister hand couped at the wrist Gules — a red left hand, severed at the wrist, on silver.

The Lámh Dhearg is among the oldest emblems in Ireland, associated with the O'Neills of Tyrone and, through them, with the province of Ulster. The famous legend has rival claimants racing by sea for the kingship, first hand to touch the shore to win, and one of them cutting off his own hand and throwing it ahead of the boats.

It is a good story and it is folklore. What is documented is the emblem's long association with the Uí Néill and its later adoption into the badge of a baronet of Ulster, created by James I in 1611 — which is why English and Irish baronets bear a red hand on their arms to this day.

Blazon: Argent, a cross potent between four plain crosslets Or — gold on silver.

Metal on metal, in the most conspicuous possible way: the single most famous deliberate breach of the rule of tincture in all heraldry. These are the textbook armes à enquérir, arms to be enquired into, and no herald has ever treated them as an error.

Whether the breach was intended from the start or is an artefact of how the arms were recorded is still argued. What matters is the principle it established — that a rule broken openly is a signal, not a mistake.

Blazon: Azure, a garb Or — a gold wheatsheaf on blue.

Not famous as an image, but famous as a verdict. In 1385 Sir Robert Grosvenor was found displaying Azure, a bend Or, the arms of the Scrope family. The case ran in the Court of Chivalry for five years, produced hundreds of sworn depositions — one of them from Geoffrey Chaucer, who testified to having seen the arms on campaign in France — and was decided by Richard II in Scrope's favour in 1390.

Grosvenor gave up the bend and took the wheatsheaf. His descendants, the Dukes of Westminster, bear it still. It is the clearest proof on this list that arms were property worth years of litigation, and that the evidence which counted was what people had seen with their own eyes.

Three things, and they are the same three that make any coat of arms readable.

They are simple. One or two charges, flat colour, strong silhouette. Every design here works at the size of a coin.

Their meaning is specific, not moral. A castle for Castile, a wheatsheaf awarded by a court, lilies granted by a king on a date. Not one of them means courage or generosity — they record names, grants and events.

The famous explanation is often the wrong one. Three lions for three duchies, a severed hand in a boat race: the stories attached themselves later because arms invite stories. The documented history underneath is usually stranger and always more checkable.

Every shield on this list began as one person's mark. So did every other coat of arms in the record.

The Heritage Volume sets out what the historical record holds for a surname — its origin, where its bearers were concentrated, and the arms associated with it. How Your Report Is Made explains exactly which parts of it come from public records and which our system builds.

To decode any of the blazons above yourself, start with our guide to reading a coat of arms.

Display the arms in a framed coat of arms, or carry the crest on a signet ring.