Local Heraldry: Spotting Coat of Arms on British Church Fonts and Monuments

Push open the door of an old parish church and, once your eyes have adjusted, look down rather than up. The font is often the oldest object in the building: a cylinder of limestone or a lead-lined bowl that has stood in the same spot for seven or eight hundred years. On its panels, worn nearly flat by generations of thumbs, are small shields of arms.

Heraldry came to Britain with the Normans and spread quickly through every rank below the throne. By the thirteenth century, knights, bishops and gentlemen all had coats of arms, and the church was where a local family advertised both its piety and its pedigree. Fonts, tombs, brasses, roof bosses, bench ends and windows still carry those shields. Learning to read them turns a pleasant wander into local detective work.

Why the parish church is the best heraldic archive in the village

Country houses were rebuilt, sold and demolished, and their painted pedigrees went to auction or the bonfire. Churches were usually repaired rather than replaced, and their furnishings stayed put. That is why a village that has lost every trace of its manor may still hold five centuries of local heraldry inside one building.

Medieval carving survives best in stone and brass: a font panel, a roof boss, an incised slab. The Reformation removed a great deal of religious imagery, but heraldry was often left alone — it was about people, not doctrine. From the mid-sixteenth century, parishes were also expected to display the royal arms, so you will frequently find a painted board or carved panel showing the arms of the monarch reigning when it was made. A royal shield and a painted date together can pin a decoration to within a decade.

Start at the font

The font is the place to begin, because it is the one object almost every medieval church kept. On an octagonal font, look for a shield on each face of the bowl. On a round one, shields may sit between the stems of carved foliage. In East Anglia, the celebrated Seven Sacraments fonts carry shields that scholars often link to the local families who paid for the work. In Somerset and Devon you will find panels of angels holding shields, and stems carved with lions or vine.

Do not overlook the cover. Seventeenth-century font covers are often tall pyramids of painted wood, sometimes topped with a pelican, a dove or a crown, with a shield or two on the panels.

Reading font heraldry takes patience. Much of it is worn, painted over, or both. A torch held low and to one side will often reveal a chevron or a bend that disappears in flat light. Photograph from several angles before you decide what you are looking at.

Monuments, brasses and hatchments

Move on from the font and work around the building in one direction.

• Brasses: the small figure brasses of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries almost always carried four shields at the corners, showing the deceased's arms and those of the families married into. Many shields were prised out long ago, so count the empty holes as well as the surviving plates.
• Wall tablets and tombs: from the seventeenth century onwards, a marble tablet or chest tomb usually has arms above the inscription — often impaled, often quartered, and sometimes under a coronet that tells you the rank of the person commemorated.
• Ledger stones: flat slabs in the floor, usually with a shield at the head end. Many are worn smooth, but raking light can still show the outline.
• Hatchments: lozenge-shaped painted boards hung in the church after a funeral. The background is usually black behind the arms of the deceased and white behind those of a surviving spouse; a wholly black hatchment generally marks the end of a family line.
• Funeral achievements: helmets, gauntlets, spurs and swords hung above a tomb. Where they survive, they are among the most evocative objects in the church.

How to describe what you see

You do not need to identify a family to make a useful record. Blazon — the formal language of heraldry — lets you write down any shield precisely enough to look it up later. Describe the field first, then what sits on it.

• Tinctures: two metals, or (gold) and argent (silver, normally shown white), and five colours: gules (red), azure (blue), sable (black), vert (green) and purpure (purple). Ermine and vair are furs.
• Ordinaries: the broad shapes that dominate a field — chief, fess, pale, bend, chevron, cross, saltire.
• Charges: everything else — lions, eagles, fleurs-de-lys, mullets (stars), martlets (birds without feet), keys, swords, castles, hands, hearts.
• Impalement: two coats side by side, the husband's on the dexter (your left as you face the shield) and the wife's on the sinister.
• Quartering: a shield divided into four or more, showing arms inherited through different families.

One rule will save you hours. Heraldry avoids putting colour on colour and metal on metal, so if you are sure of one tincture, its neighbour is likely to be its opposite. A faded blue field with a shape on it is probably gold or silver, not red.

What the small details tell you

Cadency marks distinguish sons of the same father: a label for the eldest, then a crescent, a mullet, a martlet, an annulet and so on for younger sons. A crescent may therefore point to a second son — but cadency was applied inconsistently and often dropped after a generation, so treat it as a hint rather than proof.

Quarterings work the other way: they accumulate. Every marriage into an armigerous family could add another quarter, and a shield with sixteen quarters announces a long and well-connected pedigree. Count them and you have a list of families to look up.

Shape and style help with dating. A simple heater shield with a few bold charges usually belongs to the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Curling scrollwork, a cartouche and a mass of tiny charges point to the eighteenth or nineteenth. A bishop's shield normally shows the arms of his see on the dexter side, impaling his own family arms on the sinister. Look out, too, for rebuses — pictorial puns on a surname — and for merchants' marks, which resemble shields but are not arms at all.

A first afternoon, and a record worth keeping

Take a torch, a notebook and a phone. Check the church's opening hours first; many are open daily, some only by arrangement, and a notice on the door usually explains. Then:

1. Start at the font and count the shields before you try to read any of them.
2. Blazon each one in your notebook, even if you cannot identify it. "Azure, a chevron between three..." is a usable record; "a blue shield with something on it" is not.
3. Work around the building in one direction, noting exactly where each shield sits: the third font panel, the south side of the chancel arch, the boss above the second bay.
4. Photograph square-on, with something for scale, then take a second shot in raking light.
5. Compare your notes at home with a general armorial, the county record office, the local Victoria County History volume, Pevsner's Buildings of England and the Historic England list entry for the church. A churchwarden or local history group may already hold a survey.
6. Never touch, move or lean on brasses, furniture or textiles, and leave a donation on your way out.

If you later want to use arms yourself, or to establish a right to them, that is a matter for the College of Arms in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, or the Court of the Lord Lyon in Scotland. For most of us the pleasure is simpler: reading a small, worn shield and putting a name and a date to a face in the local story.

Photo: David Guerrero / Pexels