Bellairsia: Something About the Crabtree-Gore Coat of Arms

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Something About the Crabtree-Gore Coat of Arms

Blazing a trail.

The Crabtree-Gore Family Coat of Arms is something Sir Bertram carries with him and reads often to give him strength (The Pedant and the Shuffly, 19-20). The formal description of the Crabtree-Gore coat of arms is:

Crabapple Tree displayed and fructant on a field of Gore counterfessed with Grume - the roots of the tree clutchant, grasp a toad, couchant, vert, who mumbles an armed leg d'or.

A blazon is the formal description of a coat of arms and Bellairs parodies the language with Bertram’s coat of arms, including tincture (color) and attitude (position of animal or object). Because heraldry developed at a time when English clerks wrote in Anglo-Norman French, many terms in English heraldry are of French origin. Some of the details of the syntax of blazon also follow French practice: thus, adjectives are normally placed after nouns rather than before [1].

Fructant: such a tree is bearing fruit or fruiting.

“If there is an object on your coat of arms doing something, the action must be described in the form of a French participle, ending in -ant. I don't know if this word has ever really been used in heraldry [2].”

Gore: an emblem or device formed by two inwardly curved lines starting from the dexter chief (for the viewer, the upper left) corner and the middle base point and meeting in the fess point (lower center) [3].
Fess: an emblem or device on a coat of arms that takes the form of a band running horizontally across the center of the shield [4]. A counterfessed background would seemingly be a series of horizontal bands of two alternating colors. Or perhaps the words, as evidenced in the illustration.
Grume: a clot of blood [5].

"As gore can mean the same thing [6], Bellairs might have used sanguine [7] (reddish purple) if he knew or remembered it [2]."

Clutchant: to clutch.

"Certainly John’s invention [2]."

Couchant: in heraldry represented as crouching with the head raised [8].
Vert: in heraldry, the name of the tincture equivalent to the color green [9].
Mumbles: to chew something gently with closed lips [10].

"I'm sorry he didn't also say mumblant, but I guess the image might have been hard to interpret if he kept that strictly to the rules [2]."

Armed: in heraldry, colored in a different tincture from the beast or bird itself [11].
Or: in heraldry, the name of the tincture equivalent to the color gold[12].