There are times where you might want to find examples of a certain charge in period heraldry; you may want to know whether a certain charge was used at all, or you may simply want to see the different ways a charge could be emblazoned or used. In this post I’ll walk you through the methods I use when such a task becomes useful or necessary.
In most cases you’ll need to figure out what the name of the charge would be in the language of the source you’ll be checking. Google Translate is often sufficient for this, though for some searches it’s useful to know the period spelling of the name, or alternate period names, as well, and I’ll go into ways to find these as I discuss specific regional sources.
Italian
This method relies on finding charges used for /canting/, effectively a (usually) simple visual heraldic pun on the bearer’s surname. If you can figure out potential cants, you may be able to track down the armory looking up surnames. The Insignia series (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Cod.icon. 266 to 280) is by far the largest online collection of Italian armory in one place, and conveniently, Coblaith Muimnech has created a index of the surnames found in this collection, Surnames from a 16th-Century Italian Armorial.
As an example, here’s how I’d go about finding images of maces in Italian heraldry:
- Figure out some potential Italian words for ‘mace’.
- Google Translate gives ‘mazza’.
- I’m also going to check Florio’s 1611 Dictionary of the Italian and English Tongues. This dictionary is Italian to English only, so the Google Books text search feature is invaluable.
- First I’ll check for the word I got from Translate, to see if there are any spelling variations I should consider. ‘Mazza’ is in there as ‘any kind of beetle or club with a great head or knob at the end. … Used also for a Sergeants mace caried before Princes, or great officers’, plus there are the related words ‘mazzo’ with ‘mace’ as a secondary meaning and ‘mazzina’ meaning ‘little club or mace’.
- Next, I’ll search the text for ‘mace’, which gives me ‘verga’ with a secondary meaning of ‘a Sergeants Mace’; and a few words that are cognates with the English ‘scepter’: ‘scetro’, ‘settro’, and ‘cetro’.
- Now that I have a list of words that may have been used for canting, I’ll look for names that are similar.
- Checking names starting with ‘verg-‘ and ‘scet-‘/’set-‘/’cet-‘ don’t give any useful results.
- Checking names starting with ‘maz-‘ and ‘mas-‘ (because z and s are sometimes swapped in Italian) give me multiple examples of maces.
German/Austrian
There are two very useful sources that can be used for this purpose for Germanic armory.
The first is Heraldik-Wiki. This site is a general wiki about German heraldry, and includes a lot of historical background. One advantage to this site is that you only need the modern spelling of the word to search it.
So here’s how I’d use this site if I wanted to find examples of ‘roof tiles’:
- Use Google Translate to determine that the modern German word for ‘roof tile’ is ‘Dachziegel’.
- Search for ‘Dachziegel’ on the wiki.
- This gets me to this page, where there are multiple modern emblazons of roof-tiles, plus arms from 1602 showing a lion holding a roof-tile.
- The article also mentions some alternate terms we can use in further searching: ‘Ziegel’ and ‘Schindel’
The second useful source is the Field Search page in the Austrian State Archives https://www.archivinformationssystem.at/feldsuche.aspx. For this source we’ll be using potential cants again to find charges, so having period spellings would also be useful.
Back to our ‘roof-tile’ search:
- I already have the search terms ‘Dachziegel’, ‘Ziegel’, and ‘Schindel’ from the wiki article. After checking Google Translate for words for ’tile’ in general, to let me cast the broadest net possible, I can add ‘Fliese’, ‘Kachel’, and ‘Platte’ to my list.
- There’s another step I could do here for finding additional words or spellings using period dictionaries (there’s a German-Italian and Italian-German dictionary from 1605, and a French-German and German-French dictionary from 1601, that I’ve found useful for this), but I’ll leave the details as an exercise for the reader.
- Now I’ll go the Austrian State Archives, and set the language to ‘en’ in the top right corner.
- I’ll set up my search as follows:
- First line search by ‘Title’ ‘contains’ with the search term ‘wappen’ (‘wappen’ means ‘arms’, and this will narrow down my search only to items in the archive that are armory-related)
- Second line search by ‘Title’ ‘contains’ with the search term ‘zieg’ (this will bring up any entries containing that string, which covers ‘Dachziegel’ and ‘Ziegel’ in one fell swoop)
- Restrict the time period to between 1300 and 1650 (the start date there is arbitrary, but the search requires a start date when you enter an end date)
- Check the ‘Images available online’ box.
- My search looks like this:
- Click ‘Search’.
- There are 12 results. On the left select ‘Switch to image list’.
- Click on the thumbnail images – the site will open a new window with the full-size image.
- The third result, from 1533, gives me exactly what I’m looking for.
- Searching for ‘schind’ gives me another likely example from 1585.
Hungarian
The Hungarian National Archives has a database of Hungarian armory, and all the items are searchable by charges, so there’s no need to worry about cants. Look up the modern Hungarian word for your charge in Google Translate, and enter it in the Search (“Keres”) field. So to find an example of a comb in Hungarian armory, use Translate to find that the Hungarian word is “fésű”, and search for that term in the database. This gives a single result, which you can click into to see armory depicting a lovely 3-sided comb.
English
English is trickier that some other areas, because there isn’t any kind of database of charges or surnames that point to actual emblazons. What I’ll typically do is look for the charge in the Dictionary of British Arms (DBA, a 4-volume set which is available for free download: Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, Vol 4), figure out what surnames used that charge and then look up those names in the few indexed online sources (most of the sources used to compile the DBA aren’t online), like this armorial manuscript from the late 16th C (University of Victoria Library, Ms.Brown.Eng.2, index is at the end), or Thomas Jenyn’s Book from the early 16th C (New Haven, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Takamiya MS 105, index is at the beginning).
For example, if I were looking for examples of scythes in English armory:
- I’d search the DBA for the word ‘scythe’, which shows me that scythes appear in the armory of Stopyndon/Stoppyngton/Stopingdon, Alcok, Sneyd/Sneyde, and Praers/Praerys/Praierys/Prers/Preyers.
- Checking those names against the index of Ms.Brown.Eng.2 shows me there are ‘Pryeres’ on ff. 138 and 156, and ‘Sneade’ on f. 227; no luck with the other names.
- The folio numbers are at the top right of the page and can be hard to read. In this case they equate to images 112-113, 130-131, and 199-200, and only the final one is a match, giving us the image we’re looking for.
Other Regions
I’ve yet to find a reasonably straightforward method for other areas, like France or Iberia, aside from just looking through armorials and noting unusual charges you find.
