What is a coat of arms?

Find out what a coat of arms really is
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Beginning in the High Middle Ages (c. 1000-1200 AD), due to advances in technology, men in engaging in battle began to wear long coats of chainmail, or perhaps even plate armor. They also wore heavy helmets, masking their face, and carried large, oval, or kite-shaped shields.

This presented a problem: if soldiers increasingly covered themselves with armor, how could one distinguish friend from foe on the battlefield? Identifying other knights was difficult in the fog and chaos of war, but it was a military necessity if one’s side wanted to be victorious.

Coats of arms, or heraldry, was the solution to this problem. To identify themselves, knights would emblazon or paint their shields with color, distinctive, but simple, designs, often featuring animals (ex. lions, eagles, dragons). Knights would also replicate these designs and have them sewn to their surcoats, which was a type of sleeveless thick cloth coat that was worn under one’s armor. Over time, the term “coat of arms” solidified.

Although heraldry originated from military necessity, it soon found itself at home in the pageantry of the medieval tournament. Tournaments was chivalrous competitions, or mock fights, held before the monarch, and included activities such as jousting, and the melee. Each participant or knight would proudly bear his coat of arms.

However, as the centuries progressed, the advent and rise of firearms rendered the heavy mounted knight increasingly irrelevant on the European battlefield of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the tournament faded into history, causing the military character and nature of heraldry to give way to its use as a decorative and celebratory art.

Newly, freed from the limitations of actual shields, and the need for arms to be easily distinguished in combat, heraldic artists designed increasingly elaborate achievements, culminating in the development of “landscape heraldry”, which incorporates realistic depictions of landscapes, during the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries.

Many people think having a coat of arms meant you were royal or noble, and filthy rich, which is NOT TRUE. Yes, nobles did have coats of arms, but so did many other classes of society. Other classes that bore arms included the untitled nobility, landed gentry, merchants & artisans, burghers & bourgeois, clergy, military, & academics.

In the British tradition, the coat of arms is typically passed to the eldest son upon the father’s death. As this process was repeated for generations and generations, some referred to them as “family crests”, which is a misnomer that has stuck to this day.

Many of the German nobles did not practice this primogeniture but instead had their estates, a right to bear arms, split between their male heirs.

In Italy, coats of arms are familial and conveyed (undifferenced) to all legitimate male heirs.

In Poland, coats of arms were associated with Polish knights’ clans’ (genealogiae), names, and war cries (godło), where heraldic devices came to be held in common by entire clans and fighting in regiments.