Some of it comes from films, some from souvenir shops, and a surprising amount from books that were bestsellers in 1611 and have been quoted ever since without anyone checking the date.
Here are ten claims you will meet constantly, and what the record actually says.
Myth 2: Only nobles and royalty had arms
False, and by a wide margin. Heraldry began with the military class, but it spread fast and it spread down.
By the fourteenth century arms were borne by merchants, lawyers, guilds, abbeys, universities, towns and prosperous farmers across Europe. In the Low Countries and northern Germany, Bürgerwappen — burgher arms — were used by townspeople with no claim to nobility at all, and they survive in quantity on seals and gravestones. In Poland the system ran differently again: arms belonged to a herb, a heraldic clan shared by many unrelated families.
The most striking case is French. Louis XIV's Armorial Général of 1696 required registration of arms across the kingdom — and it was frankly a revenue measure, with arms assigned to people who had not asked for any, including tradesmen and shopkeepers. Roughly 110,000 entries were recorded. It is the opposite of an exclusive list.
"Only for nobles" is a nineteenth-century romanticisation, not a medieval fact.
Myth 3: A family crest and a coat of arms are the same thing
Technically false; colloquially fine. The crest is one component — the figure standing on top of the helmet, originally built in boiled leather and genuinely worn in tournaments. The coat of arms is the whole achievement: shield, helm, torse, crest, mantling, motto, sometimes supporters.
The word drifted for a practical reason. A full shield will not engrave onto a signet ring or stamp legibly into wax; a crest will. So the crest went onto seals, silver and bookplates while the full achievement stayed on the wall, and the part people handled daily became the name for everything.
It only matters when you are trying to establish what exists. "Show me the crest" and "give me the blazon of the arms" produce very different conversations.
Myth 4: The symbols tell you what your ancestors were like
This is the big one, and it is false. The tables you find everywhere — lion means courage, wolf means reward for perseverance in long sieges, gold means generosity — are not medieval. They come from a genre of heraldic writing that began in the late sixteenth century and mapped charges and tinctures onto planets, gemstones and virtues.
The most influential English source is John Guillim's A Display of Heraldrie (1611), reprinted for a century and the direct ancestor of every symbol-meaning list circulating today. Working heralds treated it as ornament. A. C. Fox-Davies, whose A Complete Guide to Heraldry (1909) remains the standard reference, called the symbolism of colours "absolutely and entirely fiction".
What charges do record is more specific and more checkable:
- A pun on the name. Heralds call it canting, and it is the single commonest reason a charge is where it is. Shelley bore whelk shells; Lucy bore luces (pike); Corbet bore a raven, from corbeau; Castile bore a castle.
- A relationship. Quartered shields record marriages and inheritances, quarter by quarter. Borrowed charges record whose man you were.
- A specific granted event. An augmentation of honour is added by the sovereign for a named act, and there is a document behind it.
A genuine body of symbolism does exist, but it is religious, dynastic and national rather than moral — the pelican in her piety for Christ's sacrifice, the escallop for the pilgrimage to Compostela, the fleur-de-lis for the French crown, the roses of Lancaster and York.
Myth 5: You can buy a coat of arms
False as usually meant. Arms are granted, not sold. In England you petition the College of Arms; in Scotland the Court of the Lord Lyon; in Ireland the Chief Herald; in Canada the Canadian Heraldic Authority. There are fees, because the work has a cost, but you cannot buy a grant the way you buy an object, and no shop can sell you one.
What you can legitimately buy is a representation of arms recorded in history — the same way you can buy a print of a map or a facsimile of a charter. What to avoid is anything that dresses that up as entitlement: certificates of ownership, "your family arms" sold to every surname on the list, or a single shield presented as belonging to everyone who bears a common name.
Myth 6: A bend sinister means illegitimacy
Almost entirely false, and it comes from novels. The bar sinister of popular fiction does not even exist as a heraldic term — a bar is horizontal and cannot be sinister.
Illegitimacy was in fact marked in various ways over the centuries, most commonly by a bordure wavy or a baton sinister, and always by specific grant rather than automatic convention. Meanwhile plenty of perfectly legitimate families bear a bend sinister for no reason but design.
Myth 7: Heraldry is a European invention with no equivalent elsewhere
False. European heraldry is the most heavily documented system, not the only one. Japanese kamon are a hereditary family-emblem system of comparable age and greater graphic discipline, still in everyday use on formal dress and gravestones. Ottoman sultans used the tughra, a calligraphic monogram functioning as a personal seal of state. Ethiopian, West African and Polynesian traditions all developed hereditary emblems of rank.
What makes European heraldry unusual is not the idea but the bureaucracy: heralds, registers, a formal descriptive language, and courts that adjudicated disputes.
Myth 8: My surname is too common to have any heraldic record
Backwards. Common surnames usually have more heraldic records, not fewer, precisely because many unrelated families carried them and some of those families were armigerous.
The difficulty with a common name is not scarcity. It is the opposite — you have a long list and no automatic way to know which entry, if any, connects to your line. That is a genealogical question, and honest sources say so rather than picking one for you.
Myth 9: Arms can only pass through the male line, everywhere, always
Overstated. Male-line descent was the default in most traditions, but it was never the whole story. An heraldic heiress — a daughter with no surviving brothers — transmitted her father's arms to her children, who quartered them. That mechanism is why great shields accumulate dozens of quarters.
Practice has also moved. The Canadian Heraldic Authority grants arms transmissible to all children; Scotland, England and Ireland have all modernised aspects of inheritance and differencing. The rigid rule people repeat is a snapshot of one period in one country.
Myth 10: A coat of arms proves descent from a knight
No. It proves, at most, that someone of that name bore those arms. Knighthood is a separate thing entirely, arms were borne by people who were never knights at all — see Myth 2 — and the great majority of surviving arms belong to landowners, merchants and office-holders rather than to anyone who fought.
The real interest of a coat of arms is not rank. It is that it is a dated, located, describable object connected to specific people in a specific place, which is considerably more than most family stories can offer.
What the Record Can Actually Tell You
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, blazoned properly. It is a documented account rather than a certificate of entitlement, and How Your Report Is Made sets out exactly how it is assembled and what it does not claim.
If you want to go further, our guides to reading a coat of arms and checking whether one is genuine pick up where this leaves off.
