What Is a Family Coat of Arms? History, Meaning & How to Find Yours

Heraldry appears in the middle of the twelfth century, across northern France, England and the Rhineland at roughly the same time. The cause was practical. A knight in a closed helm is anonymous, and a battlefield full of anonymous armoured men is a problem for everyone on it. Painted devices on the shield, repeated on the surcoat worn over the mail — hence coat of arms — solved it.

What made heraldry a system rather than a fashion was inheritance. Within two or three generations the device stopped identifying a man and started identifying a line: the son bore his father's arms, with a small mark of difference while the father lived. By the thirteenth century arms were being recorded in rolls of arms — painted or written lists compiled for tournaments, campaigns and, later, for the heralds themselves.

From the late Middle Ages the crown in several kingdoms asserted control over who could bear arms. In England that authority became the College of Arms, incorporated in 1484 and still operating from Queen Victoria Street in London. In Scotland it is the Court of the Lord Lyon, which is unusual in Europe in being a court of law: bearing arms you have no right to is, in Scotland, a legal offence, and the Lyon Court has prosecuted it. In Ireland the office of Chief Herald was created in 1943 and sits within the National Library of Ireland.

Much of continental Europe took a different path. Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries never concentrated heraldic authority in a single office, and in most of them there is no state body granting arms today. What exists instead is a long tradition of burgher arms — arms assumed by merchants, craftsmen, farmers and town officials without any grant at all, and recorded in private registers such as the Deutsche Wappenrolle. A German family bearing arms is not necessarily claiming nobility. It is far more likely to be claiming a great-grandfather who was a master baker.

These are not synonyms, and the difference is easy to see once someone points it out.

• The coat of arms is the whole achievement: the shield, the helm, the mantling that falls from it, the wreath, the crest, the motto, and — for those entitled to them — supporters on either side.
• The crest is one component of that achievement: the figure standing on top of the helmet. A crest is a plume, a lion's head, a raised arm holding a sword.

So "family crest" describes the smallest part of the design, and most images sold under that name are not crests at all — they are full achievements, or just shields. The phrase survives because it sounds approachable, and we use it ourselves for that reason. It is worth knowing what it actually means.

This is where most of what circulates online is simply invented, so it is worth being precise.

You will find long tables stating that azure means loyalty, that gules means military fortitude, that a wolf signifies reward for perseverance in long sieges. These lists are real, but they are not medieval. They come from a vogue among late sixteenth and seventeenth century writers for assigning moral qualities to tinctures and charges, and they were being dismissed by serious heralds almost immediately. A. C. Fox-Davies, the most widely read English writer on heraldry, called the symbolism of colours "absolutely and entirely fiction". No grant of arms has ever been made on the basis of what a colour is supposed to signify.

What the elements of a coat of arms genuinely tell you is different, and more interesting:

The tinctures, and the one rule that governs them

Heraldry uses two metals — or (gold) and argent (silver or white) — and a set of colours: gules (red), azure (blue), sable (black), vert (green) and purpure (purple). The governing convention, the rule of tincture, is that metal is not placed on metal, nor colour on colour. The reason is visibility: a red lion on a blue field is hard to read at distance, and heraldry existed to be read at distance. Arms that break the rule are rare enough that heralds call them armes à enquérir — arms to be enquired into — because the breach is usually deliberate and means something.

Canting arms: the pun that hides in plain sight

A very large share of medieval charges were chosen because they punned on the bearer's name. Heralds call these canting arms, and once you know the habit you start seeing it everywhere. The Shelley family bore whelk shells. The Lucy family bore luces, the old word for pike. The Corbet family bore a raven, from the French corbeau. The Trumpington family bore trumpets. Castile bore a castle; León, a lion.

This matters for anyone reading a shield: if there is a recognisable object on it, the first question a herald asks is not "what does this symbolise" but "does this sound like the name".

Marks of difference, allegiance and augmentation

Other charges carry documented meaning of a precise, unromantic kind. Small marks called cadency distinguish the arms of brothers. Borrowed elements signal service to a lord or a marriage into another house. An augmentation of honour — an element added by the sovereign to commemorate a specific act — is a recorded historical event with a date attached to it.

This is the question that matters, and the honest answer is the one the heraldic authorities have given consistently.

Arms belong to a person, not to a surname. A grant of arms is made to a named individual and passes to their legitimate descendants under the rules of the granting jurisdiction. There is no such thing as "the arms of the Murphy family" or "the O'Brien coat of arms" in the sense the phrase is usually meant. The College of Arms states this plainly, and the Court of the Lord Lyon enforces it: in Scotland, a descendant who wants to bear an ancestor's arms must matriculate them, receiving a version differenced to mark their own place in the line.

What does exist is this: over eight centuries, many thousands of people were granted or recorded arms, and those people had surnames. If your surname is Fitzgerald, it is entirely possible that arms were granted to someone called Fitzgerald in 1460. That is a fact about a person in 1460. It is not, by itself, a fact about you.

Where that leaves the great majority of people is worth saying out loud: most families have no arms at all, because most people's ancestors were not in the small group to whom arms were granted or who assumed them. That is not a gap in your family's history. It is your family's history.

You can check this yourself, without paying anyone. These are the places to look.

1. The Public Register of All Arms and Bearings in Scotland, kept by the Court of the Lord Lyon since 1672. It is the definitive record for Scottish arms, and it is a public register.
2. The College of Arms holds the official records for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Its records are not online, but the College answers enquiries and its officers will search for a fee.
3. The Genealogical Office at the National Library of Ireland, which holds the Irish records including those of the earlier Ulster King of Arms.
4. Published armorials. Rietstap's Armorial Général covers over 100,000 European families; Papworth's Ordinary of British Armorials lets you work backwards from a design to a name; Fairbairn's Crests does the same for crests. All three are long out of copyright and freely readable online.
5. National and regional registers on the continent, such as the Deutsche Wappenrolle for Germany, which record assumed burgher arms that no state office ever granted.

If you find your family in one of these, you have found a documented historical fact and you should treat it as one — including checking whether the line actually connects to you.

We should be exact about what we do, because the distinction above is the whole point of this article.

FamilyCrests prepares a keepsake about your family name. The Heritage Volume compiles what the public record holds about a surname — how many people carry it, where they were counted, the newspaper pages that mention it, the regions and periods it belongs to — and presents it as a bound account. The coat of arms that comes with it is an original image generated by our system and associated with the surname. It is an artistic interpretation in the heraldic tradition.

It is not a grant of arms, it confers no right to arms, and it is not registered with or recognised by any heraldic authority in any country. If you want arms of your own, the route is the granting authority of your jurisdiction, and we will point you at it rather than pretend otherwise. What we make is a keepsake, made well, about a name that belongs to you. The full method is set out in How Your Report Is Made.

• A signet ring — the form in which arms were actually used for six centuries, to seal a document
• A framed coat of arms — printed at full resolution, for a wall that gets looked at
• The Heirloom — the arms and the written history of the name, bound together as one piece
• A wax seal — the object the whole system was built around in the first place

A coat of arms is a document as much as a decoration. Read properly, it records a jurisdiction, a period, a family's alliances and sometimes a pun made by a herald eight hundred years ago. Read carelessly, it becomes a colour chart of invented virtues.

The version worth passing on is the accurate one — including the part where most families never had arms, and their history is no smaller for it.