208 quarterings of 2012 Quarterings Heraldry Home
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This is a project that started some 15 years ago in 1997. My father had then given
me a pedigree of our armorial ancestors done by the College of Arms and I knew of the
odd computer program to do genealogy with so I thought it would be interesting to see
if I could use one such program to draw an armorial pedigree. The first step was to
understand the genealogy and this soon led to finding some serious problems with that
received pedigree, not least that six of the coats of arms were not genealogically
possible.
Slowly I began to find a few more arms that we could quarter and at intervals of about three years I had tried to get the blazons for them, still conscious of my purpose of an armorial pedigree; each of these investigations failed because of difficulties in finding adequately referenced blazons for the arms. By 2009, twelve years after the project's start, I was fairly satisfied with the genealogy and was striding into finding the arms for all the fathers of heiresses. The publication of the third volume of the "Dictionary of British Arms: Medieval Ordinary" later that year meant that I had most of them covered. There were two or three presentations of different versions of the results until in 2011 I had in fact got all the arms drawn for the armigers of the master pedigree and was able to present the final version to the Chiltern Heraldry Society, with all of an earlier achievement of arms, an index to that, the full armorial pedigree about 2 m high by 2 m wide and a full schedule of all the blazons with source references. 2012 has seen a few tidyings up of the edges. Three more quarterings had been discovered in 2011 but just too late to include in the printed achievement, though they did get into the pedigree. (They were the quartered Mortimer and Ulster arms of the 4th earl of March and the arms quartered twice of Llewellyn Fawr ap Iorwerth, prince of Wales.) The work needed was first to renumber all the quarterings, which took me four iterations over three or four days to get right, second to renumber the schedule of blazons, third to completely redraw the achievement of arms with its index. The results are currently all in electronic form, viewable by anybody and will be printed later. Having done all that there are still six heiresses whose fathers' arms are unknown, principally because they lived in the early middle ages. Further these heiresses are multipliably so by parallel heiress lines of ancestry, so that between them these arms, if found, would give a further thirteen quarterings. It may be that subsequent scholarship will reveal some of these: perhaps the final volume(s?) of "The History of British Arms - Medieval Ordinary" will assist. Meanwhile I am republishing as I do not have a great deal of hope.By the way, I was right: I chose the Reunion program for the project and have stuck with it and it contains all the genealogy and has drawn the pedigree containing all the individual coats of arms. The pedigree is a little over two metres wide by just under two metres high. It can be printed by firms that do large-scale 'Banner' printing. This is best done on plastic, not paper as it is stronger. The print definition can easily be 300 dots per inch and the colours should be excellent. I was very pleased with the results from Service Graphics Ltd, of Chessington, Surrey, www.servicegraphics.co.uk. The drawings are diagrammatic rather than artistic. The arms themselves were drawn on a separate program, almost entirely using graphics components from the public domain - I am no artist and many thanks to those who have provided the heraldic images. I had started with scans of the charges on the exemplification by the College of Arms, but these suffered from pixellation. So I have now found or made vector images of nearly all the charges, giving the advantage that the resulting image can be enlarged with no distortion and that it prints well. The mechanical appearance is the inevitable result but it achieves the objective of displaying the arms reasonably correctly.
Tim Powys-Lybbe Anastasia is a heraldic ancestor by two lines of descent so this brings in two of these unusual arms and also a further two instances of her maternal grandfather's Brewer arms. thus adding four quarters and making a total of 212. It will be some time before I get the achievement and the armorial pedigree redrawn. Tim Powys-Lybbe |