Heraldry

Heraldry for Beginners: How to Read a Coat of Arms

September 24, 2026

A coat of arms is not a family photograph. It is a sentence, written in a vocabulary that has barely changed in eight hundred years. Learn about thirty words and you can read almost any shield you meet — on a church brass, a pub sign, a bookplate, or a modern piece of heraldic craft.

Start with the field

The background of the shield is the field, and its tincture — heraldry never says "colour" — is named first. There are two metals, or (gold) and argent (silver, drawn as white), and five common colours: gules (red), azure (blue), sable (black), vert (green) and purpure (purple). Add the furs, chiefly ermine (white with small black tails) and vair (blue-grey and white bell shapes), and you have nearly everything you will see.

One rule governs the whole system: metal sits on colour, and colour sits on metal. A gold lion belongs on a red field; a black cross belongs on a white one. Gold on silver, or red on blue, breaks the rule and would normally be rejected. The purpose is contrast, so the design still reads at a distance — across a crowded hall, or on a rain-soaked banner.

The ordinaries: the shield's skeleton

Before the animals and flowers comes a set of plain geometric shapes called ordinaries. They are the bones of most shields, and the quickest thing to spot.

Chief — a band across the top.
Base — a band across the bottom.
Pale — a vertical band down the centre.
Fess — a horizontal band across the middle.
Bend — a diagonal band running from the top left of the shield, as you look at it, down to the bottom right.
Chevron — an inverted V, like a roof beam.
Cross and saltire — the upright cross and the diagonal X.
Bordure and canton — a border round the edge, and a small square in the upper left corner.

Note that left and right in heraldry belong to the person carrying the shield, not to you. The bearer's right is dexter and appears on your left; the bearer's left is sinister. A bend therefore runs from dexter chief to sinister base.

Charges, and how they behave

Anything placed on the field is a charge: lions, eagles, stags, keys, arrows, roses, ships, and whatever else could be carved or embroidered. A lion might be rampant (rearing upright), passant (walking, one paw raised), statant (standing), sejant (sitting), couchant (lying down) or dormant (asleep). It can be guardant, facing you, or regardant, looking back over its shoulder. A charge shown in its natural colours is described as proper — a stag proper is brown, with antlers.

Position matters as much as posture. Charges are ranged in pale (stacked vertically), in fess (in a row), in bend, or in saltire. Three objects on a shield are usually arranged two above one unless the blazon says otherwise.

Reading a blazon, step by step

The formal description of a coat of arms is a blazon, and it follows a fixed grammar. Work through it in this order:

Name the tincture of the field.
Name the principal charge and its tincture.
Add the secondary charges, working outwards from the centre.
Add anything placed on top of another charge, then borders and marks of difference.

So Gules, a lion rampant or is a red shield with a rearing gold lion. Argent, a cross gules is a white field with a red cross — the arms of St George. Add a layer: Azure, a chevron between three fleurs-de-lys or means a blue field, a gold chevron in the middle, and three gold lilies, two above and one below. Blazons are read in the order the arms are drawn, top of the shield downwards and dexter to sinister.

The furniture around the shield

A shield on its own is not the whole picture. The full assembly is an achievement, and it usually includes a helmet, its style often hinting at rank; mantling, the draped cloth shown as stylised foliage in the main colours of the arms; a wreath or torse, the twisted band that holds the mantling to the helmet; and the crest, which sits on top and is a separate grant in its own right.

Supporters — the animals or figures holding the shield up — are generally reserved for peers, knights of the great orders, and corporate bodies such as cities and livery companies. Below the shield you may find a motto on a scroll, and sometimes a compartment for the supporters to stand on. Strictly speaking, a crest is not a coat of arms. Calling the whole shield "the family crest" is the commonest mistake in heraldry, and the surest way to spot a beginner.

What arms do and don't tell you

Arms belong to a person and descend within a family. They are not attached to a surname. Two unrelated families called Smith may bear entirely different arms, and a coat of arms found beside your surname online proves nothing whatever about your ancestry.

Within a family, younger sons traditionally difference their father's arms with a mark of cadency: a label for the eldest, a crescent for the second, a mullet for the third, and so on. When families marry, arms may be impaled, set side by side in one shield, or quartered if inheritance brings several coats together. If you want to know whether a particular coat is genuinely connected to you, the records are held by the College of Arms for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and by the Court of the Lord Lyon for Scotland. Both can confirm what exists and who may use it.