January 17, 1984 A.S. XVIII

TO: The Members of the College of Arms

FROM: Master Wilhelm von Schlüssel, Laurel King of Arms

Greetings:

Happy New Year! Enclosed is the January LOA&R with 124 acceptances and 32 returns, a total of 156. 1 would like to congratulate everybody for the improved quality of the submissions this month. There were 28 submissions that earned the Good Heraldry comment. The pass rate (124/156) of 80% was very high. Looking more closely at each action, there were a total of 226 actions: 111 names and 115 devices or badges. Of the 111 names, 8 were returned, 16 were changed and passed, and 87 were passed as submitted. This means that 93% of the names were passed in some form, and 78% were passed unchanged. Of the 115 devices and badges, 85 were passed and 30 were returned, a 74% pass rate. I am very pleased to see the increasingly good level of heraldry coming in and the rising acceptance rate that results. Keep up the good work!!

I am also pleased to see that the College is now keeping up with its workload better. Looking back, I note that since I took office there have been 5,527 acceptances and 1,916 returns for a total of 7,443, an average pass rate of 74%. The growth in volume is seen by the totals for each year: 1,191 in 1979, 1,060 in 1980, 1,343 in 1981, 1,726 in 1982, and 2,067 in 1983. The volume doubled in the three years from 1980 to 1983, yet the College still processes submissions in three months, plus time in kingdom.

Please get all LoCs in to me by February 4, 1984, which comment an the following 11 LoIs to be processed at my February 11, 1984 (Saturday) meeting: Atlantia (10/24), Calontir (10/25), Middle (10/26), East (11/5), Atenveldt (11/10), Atenveldt (11/14), West (11/14), Meridies (11/15), Caid (11/16), East (11/16), and Middle (11/20), totalling 152 submissions. Be sure to get your LoCs in to me by the February 4th date so that the Principal Heralds have at least a chance to reply and so there is extra time for postal delays. (Berkeley has slow mail delivery.) Please do NOT send mail express or certified, as I work during the day and Mistress Cynthia is often away from home when the mail arrives. If you must get a receipt for the mail, please be sure to allow extra days for me to be able to get to the Post Office to pick up the mail. If you must send a letter rapidly, send it special delivery, not express, unless you can get the P.O. to agree to just deliver the letter without a signature. If time is not urgent and you need a receipt, you can send mail to me at work. Address it to William Keyes, Bldg. 70, Room 110, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, One Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720. If you simply want to know your mail has been received, it is cheaper just to include a postcard with stamp for me to check and drop into the mail saying your letter arrived.

By March 10, 1984, 1 will need all LoCs on the following 7 LoIs, which will be processed at my March 18, 1984 meeting: Atlantia (12/7), Calontir (12/11), West (12/12), Caid (12/13), Atenveldt (12/14), Meridies (12/16), and East (12/23). By April 7, 1984, I will need all LoCs on the LoIs to be processed at my April 15th meeting. So far I have received: Middle (12/28), Calontir (1/9), and West (1/10). I have not received an LoC for two months from Kraken, Black Lion, and Aten, and for three months from Polaris, Triton, and Silver Quill. Four months without commenting is grounds for removal from the mailing list. If any of the above have sent me LoCs in the stated period, please send me another copy.

I am removing from the mailing list the Eastern Crown Herald (no LoC in 8 months) and Dolphin Herald (4 months). The White Stag's mundane surname is Aten, not Alten. Arval Benicoeur will remain on the mailing list as Treblerose Herald and his new address is c/o Joshua Mittleman, 74 George St., Harrington, Park, NJ 07640. The new Sycamore Herald is Ardis Bluemantle (Alice Brenner, 5634 Wilkins Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15217). She should be put on the roster but not the mailing list. The new Trillium Herald is Torbin of Amberhall (Robert Zimmerman, 291 Ontario St., #3, Toronto, Ontario MSA 2V8). He will be on the roster and the mailing list. Please add to the mailing list Eriod of Eire, Celtic names advisor, who is already on the roster. Schwarzdrachen has had problems with mail delivery. I therefore ask the Principal Heralds to send duplicate copies of their LoIs to the Aurochs Pursuivant (Edouard d'Ath (John L. Adams, c/o Kim Ann Innes,, HQ V Corps, G-1 PRMD, APO New York 09079).

I am now sending copies of the LOA&R to over 100 people. Rising costs have made it impossible to continue the $2 discount to warranted heralds for a year's subscription without incurring a net loss. Effective immediately the subscription cost shall be $1/month or $12/year for everyone. Back issues remain $1 each, which includes postage. (Discounts can be negotiated for orders of large numbers of back issues.) Any $10 checks received hereafter will purchase a 10-month subscription.

With regard to emblazons in LoIs, I have decided to request that all LoIs include miniature emblazons of those submissions that would be difficult to visualize or check via the blazon alone. This includes any submission using an unusual charge not found in standard references or a submission that is of sufficient complexity such that it is difficult to emblazon or visualize from the blazon. These emblazons should be as clear as is reasonable practical, given that we are all volunteer labor and not everybody is an artist. I ask the commentors to stop carping about the quality of the emblazons (which, after all, are not required), just as I ask the preparers of those emblazons to do their best in drawing them. Those submissions which have simple emblazons, easy to visualize from the blazons, need not have emblazons included in the LoI, although I strongly encourage them to be included anyway, as these are usually the best heraldic cases and make the picture sheet much nicer to look at. Including the pictures for all submissions also protects against errors in the blazon. If the LoI says there is a bend and the submission actually has a bend sinister, then it cannot be properly checked by the commentors and I would have to return it so it could be resubmitted with the proper blazon. If an emblazon were included in the LoI, the commentors would see that there was an error and go by the emblazon, thereby allowing me to act on the submission. The emblazons can be made by photoreduction of the emblazon form or by a separate drawing, or the submittor can be asked to submit a small black-and-white emblazon that can be cut out and pasted together with the others to form the picture sheet for the LoI. (This is whar the Middle does, and they have a nice form for it.)

I would like to correct an error in last month's LOA&R. I stated that Larry Mannion's warrant had expired. This is incorrect. He will be a Board member in full standing until the April 1984 Board meeting, after which there will be a second Board vacancy. Those of you who know of somebody who would make a good Board member should write a letter to the Corporate Secretary nominating that person. The Board keeps a permanent file on Board candidates and re-examines the contents of the file with each new vacancy.

As I stated last month, Dragon and Brigantia are handling the printing and distribution of the Ordinary & Armorial. They are looking for investors to invest money in the printing of the O&A, to be repaid with interest from the sales. If you or anyone you know is willing and able to invest at least $100 in printing the O&A, please get in touch with either Dragon or Brigantia. If we can raise enough investment capital to print in one block, we can cut costs and save months otherwise lost while waiting for enough advance orders to come in to be able to print.

Enclosed is a copy of Duke Siegfried's final wording of the announcement to be printed in the March T.I. Please read it and send your comments to the Corporate Secretary, with copies to me.

I ask all of you to send me your comments on the proposals now under discussion in the College, if you have not already done so. These are what we should do about the proposed loosening of the name rules and the two proposals from Vesper on ignoring simple bordures or fields when checking complete difference of charge in cases where two submissions share the same plain bordure or chief, and the proposal that, when a submission consists only of a plain field with a plain ordinary (bend, fess, bend sinister, pale) with charges on the ordinary, the addition of charges onto the ordinary should count full instead of being demoted one step regarding points of difference because they are tertiary charges. (See my December letter for a fuller discussion.)

Brigantia has proposed that we increase the possibility of branches registering simple arms by adopting the rule that, for the purposes of difference, the laurel wreath in group arms (which is required to be there) be excluded from consideration as a charge unless its numbers or arrangement are so distinctive as to be uniquely identifiable. A branch arms with a single charge within a laurel wreath would be treated as a single-charge device for purposes of difference. Thus two branches having arms of Azure, a cross crosslet within a laurel wreath argent and Azure, a roundel within a laurel wreath argent, which would now conflict for having only one point of difference, would, under the new rule, not conflict due to complete difference of charge. Consider the branch arms Azure a roundel within a laurel wreath argent and an individual's device of Vert, a roundel argent. By present rules these would not conflict, having two points of difference, but via the new rule they would conflict, having then only one point of difference. What do you think?

I would like to propose a more limited version for the College's consideration, similar to Vesper's first proposal above. The addition of the laurel wreath generally results in a point of difference between branch arms and other arms, which allows for simpler branch arms. The only problem, as I see it, comes when you compare two branch arms, both of which are required to have at least one laurel wreath. If one has more laurel wreaths than the other or if the laurel wreaths are of different tinctures, or if the laurel wreaths are in different positions on the field, then you still get a point of difference for them. Only when the laurel wreaths are of the same tincture and in the same position do they tend to make the two submissions conflict by not allowing the rule of complete difference of charge to be invoked. Thus I would propose that, when two branch arms share a common laurel wreath (both color and position), the laurel wreath be temporarily ignored so that a check can be made to see if the remaining arms have complete difference of charge. if such is the case, then they do not conflict. This would also eliminate the conflict between the two branch arms given above, but would not result in the conflict between the branch arms and the individual's device listed above. The laurel wreath is really there and does form part of the visual effect of the arms, so I would hesitate to ignore it entirely. Please comment on these proposals. What do you think?

Last spring, after I found out through discussion with Mr. Brooke-Little, Norroy and Ulster King of Arms, that the rule in mundane heraldry with regard to charges that are overall or surmount other charges is that the tincture of the overall or surmounting charge is checked against the tincture of the field for purposes of the Rule of Tincture and not the charges underneath, I changed our rules to conform to the mundane practice. In mundane heraldry, charges placed overall or surmounting other charges are drawn so as to fill up most of the field, thereby having most of their area on the field. Thus it is quite logical for the field to be what is checked against for reasonable contrast. This was the period heraldic style. SCA submissions that follow this style will conform naturally to the rules as they now stand.

What I have noticed is that we frequently get submissions that do not follow this period style. They draw surmounting charges as just barely spilling onto the field, with most of their area on the charge they surmount. Or there are enough charges underneath an overall charge that most of the charge lies on these underlying charges rather than the field. An example is the device I recently had to return from the Middle. It had a field fretty, with a single charge of the same category of tincture as the field. In mundane heraldry, the fretty lines are rather thin and more than half of the field shows through. In this case, and in several other fretty devices in the SCA, the fretty is drawn with thick lines so that most of the field is covered with the fretty. The result in this case was that there was sufficient contrast, but the submission broke the rule and, to be consistent, I had to return the submission. There was sufficient contrast because the submission was not following period style, and yet the violation of style was not such as to make it look heraldically bad.

The question I ask then is: should I grant exceptions on a case-by-case basis to those submissions which do have enough contrast, even though there is a surmounting or overall charge of the same category of tincture as the field, or should I always apply the rule consistently so as to force people to conform to the period style? Which is more important, the period style or sufficient contrast plus reasonable style? If I do start making exceptions, this could be taken as encouragement to have charges just barely slop over onto the field, which is poor practice. That isn't something we want to see. On the other hand, there are some cases, like fretty, where I could then pass devices that are really quite reasonable-looking. If I were to grant exceptions, I would require that the color of the surmounting or overall charge and the color of the field form one of the pairs of colors I have authorized for use in gyronny or for placing colored charges on ermine variants with a color as the main background. Thus, if the field were azure, and the overall charge were gules, then I might give an exception. If the overall charge were vert, then I would not, as vert blends into azure. In order for such an exception to be granted, at least two- thirds of the area of the charge would have to be on the underlying charge or charges. (I feel if the split is 50/50 then the mundane rule should apply.) What do you think?

I would like to ask that whenever any of you wishes to comment to me on any decisions made in the LOA&R on any specific submission, you not only give me the name of the person and which submission you are commenting on, but tell me the kingdom the person was listed under so that I and others can easily find the submission in the LOA&R you are referring to. When you cite a conflict, be sure to give the complete name and blazon of the conflict. Be sure to order the LoIs you comment on in the same chronological order that I use when I announce which LoIs will be processed at each meeting. You need not list a submission if you have no comment. Save space and just list the ones you do have comments on. Give the name of the submittor, not just the number of the submission. The above will help me process comments better.

Pray believe, my Lords and my Ladies, that I remain

Your servant,

Master Wilhelm von Schlüssel

Laurel King of Arms

wvs:CFCVS