How Family Crests Were Passed Down Through Generations

Arms identify a person, not a surname. That is the principle, and every complication below follows from it.

If arms identified a name, two brothers could bear the same shield and the system would fail at exactly the moment it was needed — on a field, at a tournament, on a seal attached to a deed. So the working rule was: only one man at a time bears the undifferenced arms, and everyone else in the family bears a version marked as his.

In most traditions that man was the head of the house, and the arms descended in the male line. The eldest son took his father's arms undifferenced on his father's death; during his father's lifetime he bore them with a mark.

English practice settled on a fixed series of small charges, the marks of cadency, placed on the shield in the chief point:

• Label — a horizontal bar with short arms, or points, hanging from it. The eldest son, and only during his father's lifetime.
• Crescent — second son.
• Mullet, a five-pointed star — third son.
• Martlet, a bird drawn without feet — fourth son.
• Annulet, a plain ring — fifth son.
• Fleur-de-lis — sixth son.
• Rose — seventh. Cross moline — eighth. Double quatrefoil — ninth.

Two things about this list are worth knowing, because most sources state it as if it were law.

It was never rigorously enforced in England. Cadency marks were used inconsistently from the start, frequently dropped after a generation, and by the seventeenth century were largely ornamental outside the royal family. Where the system is strictly observed is in the arms of the British royal house, where every member bears a differently charged label and always has.

And the label is temporary. An heir apparent's label disappears when he succeeds. A shield bearing a label is therefore a dated object: it tells you the bearer's father was still alive.

Scotland took the same principle and made it binding. Under the Court of the Lord Lyon, a son does not simply inherit his father's arms — he petitions to matriculate them, and receives them differenced in his own name, entered in the Public Register.

The usual Scottish instrument is not a small charge but a bordure — a border around the shield, in a tincture and pattern that identifies the branch. Cadets of cadets take bordures upon bordures, and the resulting shields can be read backwards to the parent line with some precision.

The practical consequence is that Scottish arms are individually attributable to living people in a way English arms usually are not, and that no Scot lawfully bears his father's arms without going through the Court.

When a man married, the standard display placed the two coats side by side on one shield, split vertically: his arms in dexter — the bearer's right, your left — and his wife's in sinister. This is impalement.

Impaled arms are personal to the marriage. They are not inherited: the children do not bear the impalement, they bear their father's arms, differenced by cadency.

An impaled shield is therefore a snapshot of one couple, and dating it is often possible from the wife's arms alone.

The exception that generates almost all heraldic complexity is the heraldic heiress: a daughter whose father died leaving no sons, and no brothers to carry the arms on.

When such a woman married, her arms did not die with her. Her husband displayed them on a small shield in the centre of his own — an escutcheon of pretence — and, critically, their children could quarter both coats.

That is the mechanism. Each heiress married into a line adds a quarter permanently, and each of her own quarterings comes with her. Over generations the arithmetic compounds.

A quartered shield is numbered left to right, top row first: quarter 1 is dexter chief, quarter 2 sinister chief, and so on. Quarter 1 is the paternal coat — the family name. The rest are the heiresses, in the order they came in.

Where there are more than four coats, the shield is divided into however many compartments are needed and the numbering runs the same way, which is why some are read like a page of text.

The extreme cases are genuinely extraordinary. The 1st Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, whose name had accumulated into Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, bore a shield of 719 quarterings. The Lloyd of Stockton pedigree ran to 323. These are display objects rather than working arms — nobody could identify a man at fifty paces from 719 quarters — but as documents they are dense and checkable, because each quarter asserts a marriage that either happened or did not.

An unmarried woman or a widow bore her arms on a lozenge, a diamond shape, rather than a shield — the reasoning being that a shield is a weapon of war. A widow bore her late husband's arms impaled with her own, on a lozenge.

Modern practice has loosened considerably. Women in England may now be granted arms on a shield, and in Canada arms are granted transmissible to all children regardless of sex. The rigid version people repeat is a description of one period, not of the whole tradition.

The popular version of this is wrong, and it comes from fiction. There is no such thing as a "bar sinister" — a bar is horizontal and cannot be sinister — and the phrase entered English through nineteenth-century novels.

Illegitimate descent was marked, but by specific grant rather than automatic convention, and the usual instruments were a bordure wavy or a baton sinister — a short diagonal staff, couped at both ends, running from sinister chief to dexter base. The royal dukedoms created for the illegitimate sons of Charles II carry batons sinister to this day.

Meanwhile plenty of entirely legitimate families bear a bend sinister as an ordinary part of their design, for no reason but how the shield was drawn. The two are not the same charge and never were.

The one alteration that adds rather than distinguishes. An augmentation of honour is an element granted by the sovereign to commemorate a specific act, and it descends with the arms.

Because an augmentation is granted for a named reason on a named date, it is the most evidentially solid thing on any shield: where you see one, there is a document.

Most families that once bore arms no longer know it, and the reasons are mundane.

Male lines fail, and with them the undifferenced arms. Records burn — the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland at the Four Courts in 1922 took centuries of Irish material with it, though the Genealogical Office's own heraldic records survived. Families emigrate, and a seal ring crosses the Atlantic while the paperwork does not. And in England, the lack of enforcement meant that a family could simply stop using arms and nothing happened.

What survives is the published record: armorials, visitations, registers, seals on deeds, hatchments in parish churches, monuments. That is where a shield is found again, and it is found as an entry about particular people in a particular place — not as a design belonging to a surname.

The sequence that actually works is: establish the genealogy first, then look for arms attached to the family you have proved you descend from. Doing it the other way round — finding arms for a surname and assuming a connection — is how most inaccurate family heraldry starts.

Our guide to checking whether a coat of arms is genuine lists the armorials and registers to search, most of which are free.

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 states plainly which parts come from public records and which our system builds.

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