I have a small website where I try to sell custom made label buttons. In addition to these made-to-order buttons, I also offer several specialty lines of ready-to-wear items, and this time of year, I’m usually concerned with one of those lines in particular: Irish heraldic buttons. St. Patrick’s Day is coming up.

I am in no sense an expert in heraldry. Still, while there are plenty of button sites like mine, I don’t know of any other with a product line like that and I don’t know why it should be true. I realized the other day that heraldry could offer a wide range of opportunities for specialization, and for artisans in almost any field, from ceramics to embroidery, weaving, carpet-making and even quilting.

It is true that we no longer live in the age of chivalry and that not all Americans are caught up in studying their ancestry and ethnic heritage, but surprisingly many of us are. For example, Overture reports that in November 2004 he searched the web for the exact phrase “Irish heraldry” 140 times. Please note that this does not include possible searches for related terms such as Gaelic, Celtic, shields, crests, coats of arms, etc. And he says nothing about searching for heraldic information from any other part of the world or about heraldry in general. In fact, during the month of November the word “heraldry” was used in 11,869 searches, so it seems that there may well be a market.

On the other hand, heraldry can be considered quite a nerdy subject in the modern world. I have noticed that many people today fall below the snuff line when it comes to their basic knowledge of heraldry. They don’t have to know anything about it if their goal is simply to copy an occasional coat of arms onto some product they’ve made, like some plates or a sampler. However, a few paragraphs of information on coats of arms may be of interest to anyone who can see the possibilities in using heraldic themes as a quasi specialty in their work.

A discussion of heraldry must begin, first of all, with the idea of ​​the shield. The shield, I guess, is probably the oldest piece of weaponry besides the club. The earliest shields were made of tough hides stretched over wooden frames. Its shape was probably rounded, and the round shield served very well at least during the days of the Roman legions.

As bulletproof vests became more cumbersome, in the heat of close combat it became increasingly difficult to determine who was who. A first step toward solving this problem came when warriors began painting identification symbols on their shields. By the time of the Middle Ages, these symbols were becoming strictly codified and proprietary. The people tasked with tracking them down were high-ranking government officials called heralds, and a technical language, something that seems to us today to be a strange mixture of English and French, was growing around them to describe them.

In all probability, this language was not really strange at all, but very similar to the common speech of the time, that is, the period after the Norman conquest of England. However, people who seriously discuss heraldry still use these terms today, and that’s certainly one more reason why the study isn’t cool anymore. Of course, it shouldn’t be mandatory to use “o” for gold or “vert” for green when writing modern English, but that’s how they insist on doing it.

To satisfy a herald, a complete “coat of arms” had to include many things in addition to the basic crest. By the time the practice of heraldry had spread throughout Europe, a coat of arms included at least the escutcheon, motto, helm, crown, crest, mantle, and possibly various other things as well.

Surprisingly, the shape of the shield didn’t seem to matter much. Heraldry books usually show ten or fifteen different common forms. And not all heraldic shields were intended to resemble an actual battlefield shield. The right to a coat of arms, for example, was often granted to women, and the shield in such cases was typically drawn as a rhombus or diamond-shaped object. Many shields, such as so-called “jousting” shields, are sometimes drawn as crazy, asymmetrical, freeform shapes.

Very often the area of ​​a shield was divided, perhaps to indicate the merger of two powerful families. In such cases, all charges (images or “orientations”) shown on both original shields would generally be preserved, with each group being limited to its own partition of the merged shield. There were, of course, technical terms for any number of different ways of dividing the area of ​​a shield: by pallet, by fess, by chevron, by saltire, and so on. Different stylized lines were even used to separate the segments. A simple straight line might suffice, but it could also be “tangled”, “embassy”, “jagged”, “wavy”, “dovetailed”, etc.

As for the charges, they deserve a separate treatment. They include not only lions and eagles in various poses, but a wide variety of birds, mammals, fish, and mythological beings. Human body parts. The sun, the stars and many forms of vegetation. Structures and ships, books and bells. And each of them has its own specialized meaning. For example, a dragon represented vigilance, a serpent wisdom, a boar a fierce fighter, a swallow someone who had been robbed of the land. A cross might indicate that the bearer or one of his ancestors had fought in the Crusades, and a sailor’s arms often showed a ship.

As is obvious from those few examples, the meaning of some charges still makes some sense to us, while in other cases their meaning is puzzling. Different types of crowns can indicate different ranks of nobility; that’s quite logical. But a finger ring, for example, could symbolize a fifth son, and a tower could represent wealth.

Heraldry is a colorful subject in every way. One continually encounters larger than life characters. Here’s one, pick more or less at random:

Sir Francis Drake was definitely a sailor, and his arms definitely showed a ship. And what a ship! Most ships I’ve seen in heraldic designs appear to have one mast, but this one has three. There is a dragon or griffin sitting in the stern with outstretched wings. The ship rests on a large globe showing us the Atlantic Ocean, and above the ship a hand emerges from a cloud pointing at the ship, something that looks very much like a microphone attached to the bow. (I do not know what it is.)

All of that is merely the crest and, as you might expect, the crest rests on a crown and the crown is on the rudder. Beneath the helmet we finally come to the shield, a shield of surprising simplicity given the complexity of its surroundings: on a black background, a wavy silver band (horizontal area) represents the sea between two wavy stars that represent the pole stars. Everything commemorated Drake’s circumnavigation of the earth in 1577.

These arms were granted to Francis Drake by Elizabeth I, but he seems to have been quite a headstrong individual and kept adding fragments to which he really had no right. This tendency led him into a long feud with an unrelated Drake family from which he stole items for his own arms. (In fact, he did it twice. After the other family successfully defended his claims against him and he removed the offending arm pads from his arms, he later decided to put them back where they didn’t belong.)

All the major online bookstores have, or can be found, many pages full of books on heraldry, from modern works to out-of-print classics and aimed at experts or beginners.