The Arms
Twenty-Four Arms
Historic arms from the public record, drawn from their blazons. Pick one and the line above changes with it.
The Grammar
A blazon reads in a fixed order: the field, then what lies on it, each thing followed by its tincture. Field first: a tincture, a fur, a division (per pale, quarterly, gyronny of eight) or a variation (barry of six, chequy, lozengy), with a line of partition if the edge is not straight. Then the ordinaries, the big geometric pieces, with their modifiers: cotised, fimbriated, voided, engrailed. Then the charges, counted and arranged: three mullets, in fess, two and one, between, on a. The chief, the bordure and anything overall come last. Click any word below and the page writes an example.
How It Reads
The line you type is cut into words, folded for accents and apostrophes, and read by a recursive-descent parser: one function for a field, one for an ordinary, one for a charge, each calling the next. What comes out is a tree, the arms as data. The tree is printed back to you as Read as, in a fixed house order, and that printed line parses to the same tree: the test suite checks the round trip on every example here.
The emblazoner walks the tree. Fields and ordinaries are drawn in a 100 by 120 box and clipped to the shield; every charge is a silhouette on a 100 by 100 box, scaled into the slot its arrangement gives it. Quarters, impaled halves and escutcheons are regions of their own, so a lion in a quarter is a smaller lion, not a squashed one.
A word the page does not know is named by its position with the nearest word it does know, and the shield still draws with what was understood, greyed. A misspelt tincture is read as its nearest neighbour so the bend is still gold while you fix the spelling.
The Receipts
Every claim above is a test in test/, run before every build. The table is the suite as of the last run.
| Receipt | Checks | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| AST snapshots, 30 blazons | 30 snapshots, 7 structural | pass |
| Round trip parse → print → parse | 39 blazons | pass |
| Rule of tincture | 10, Jerusalem named | pass |
| Errors name word, position, suggestion | 9 | pass |
| Petra Sancta table | 5 | pass |
| Arrangement geometry, quartering | 6 | pass |
| SVG well-formed, one path per charge | 8 | pass |
| Every charge has a drawing | 88 names, 93 silhouettes | pass |
| Contrast of every text token | 9 pairs | pass |
| Beasts: every band winds one way, one path each | 12 beasts, 3 lions | pass |
| Achievement: wreath, helm, mantling, crest, scroll | 8 round trips, 6 arms read for their tinctures, supporters refused | pass |
| Attitudes the page cannot draw | couchant, salient, statant and others | pinned: declared, drawn as the default |
What It Does Not Do
- Supporters. In England and Scotland they are granted only to peers, knights of the great orders and corporate bodies, so the page draws none. The crest, the helm, the mantling and the motto it does draw: type a crest or a motto, or pick a tradition.
- Every charge. 88 names and 93 silhouettes. A charge it does not know is named, not guessed.
- Every attitude. A lion is drawn rampant, passant, passant guardant, sejant or rampant guardant. Ask for couchant and the page says it drew rampant.
- Armed, langued, crowned. Read, printed back, not drawn.
- A bordure's edge. A bordure engrailed is drawn with a plain edge, and the page says so.
- Taste. The emblazon is flat and modern, one style for every blazon. A Victorian engraver would draw the same arms with a different lion, and both are correct.
The lions here are the part a herald would argue with first. They are drawn to read at 64 pixels in a gallery tile, which makes them stockier than any lion in a roll of arms, and that was the trade.
On Your Device
After one load the page works offline. The blazon, the crest, the motto and the tradition live in the address bar, so a link is the arms. Hatching and the shield shape are remembered on this device and nowhere else.
Rule of Tincture
Metal on colour, colour on metal, never metal on metal nor colour on colour: the one rule every herald agrees on, because arms were made to be told apart across a field. The metals are Or and Argent. The colours are Gules, Azure, Vert, Purpure and Sable, with the stains Tenné, Sanguine and Murrey. The furs, Ermine and Vair and their variants, go on either and take either, and so does a charge proper, in its natural colours.
The page checks the rule as you type and says what sits on what: Gules on Azure: colour on colour (the bend on the field). A field divided of a metal and a colour carries either. A fimbriated ordinary is separated from the field by its edge and passes. Charges on an ordinary are checked against the ordinary, not the field.
The famous breach is Jerusalem, Argent, a cross potent between four crosses potent Or: gold on silver, chosen so, and the page names it rather than pretending the rule has no exceptions.
Hatching
Petra Sancta's system of 1638 lets arms be printed without colour: dots for Or, blank for Argent, vertical lines for Gules, horizontal for Azure, diagonal from dexter chief for Vert, from sinister chief for Purpure, crossed for Sable. Turn it on with the Hatching button and the SVG you download is the engraver's version.