Cover Letter January 1987

Taigh Moran Chat

RR 2, Northside Road

Wading River, NY 11792

20 March, 1987

Unto the members of the College of Arms and any others who may read this missive, greetings from Alisoun MacCoul of Elphane, Laurel Queen of Arms!

I apologize for the disastrous lateness of this letter. There can be no excuses for the delays involved, but I do apologize (anyone who is morbidly interested in the sad tale of the mundane disasters which befell in February and March may send a SASE and will receive a down-scaled version of the Lamentations of Job!). The January meeting was held on 25 January and at that time were considered Meridies (7/14), Ansteorra (6/31), Atenveldt (10/1), Caid (10/6), Middle (10/17 and 10/18), West (10/22), East (10/23), An Tir (10/25) and Calontir (10/30). Of 381 submission elements processed, 279 were accepted, 98 were returned and 4 were pended for an acceptance rate of 73%.

The February meeting was held on Saturday, 28 February. At that time were processed the following letters: Ansteorra (10/31), Atenveldt (11/1), Caid (11/2), Middle (11/4,11/5,11/6 and 11/7), West (11/12), East (11/18) and Atlantia (11/22). The November letter from the Outlands was postponed until the March meeting due to late arrival of forms and submission fees. The results of this meeting are currently being written up and will be out to you as soon as possible.

The March meeting will be held, for sanity's sake on Sunday, 29 March. At that time the following letters will be considered: Outlands (11/15), Atenveldt (12/1), Ansteorra (12/3), Caid (12/14), West (12/17), Atlantia (12/22), Ansteorra (12/30) and East (12/31). Since no paperwork has been received for the undated letter containing various orders from Trimaris, this letter has been postponed to the April meeting.

Tentative dates for Laurel meetings in upcoming months are 25 April, 16 May, 13 June and 18 July. There is the possibility that mundane considerations or currently unscheduled Society events may cause these meetings to occur later. They will not occur earlier.

Master Baldwin of Erebor, Laurel Emeritus, finds that time constraints lie heavy upon him and has requested that he be dropped from the commenting list.

On a happier note, Aureliane Rioghail has again assumed the role of Star Principal Herald for Ansteorra. Her address is c/o Jeanne Efferding, 3210 Carlisle, *103, Dallas, TX 75204. At the same time, Andreas of Green Village, Gold Falcon Herald, has (again) a new address: John Kreipe, 7343 Holmes Road, Kansas City, MO 64131 (816-523-4189).

There have also been some changes in the heraldic establishment of Atenveldt. Robin of Rhovanion is now Corona Herald and it is no longer necessary to send separate copies of correspondence to her (the copy to Aten will suffice). The new Solar Herald is Estasia de Fiorenza (c/o Valerie Webb, P.O. Box 278, Bisbee AZ 85603).

There is also a Regional Herald for Artemisia: Letitia des Montagnes Bleues (c/o Cheri Templeton, 500 Monroe #28, Green RIver, NY 82935). She will not be commenting at this time.

I am happy to announce that the Symposium bid from the West has been officially accepted. The Symposium will take place on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley from Friday, 26 June, through Sunday, 28 June. More information should be forthcoming shortly. For preliminary information contact the Brachet Herald (Alison von Markheim, c/o Alison Lowe Douglas, Box 3266, Berkeley, CA 94703 [415-420-1860, from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.]) or the Latimer Herald (Eilis O'Boirne [415-486-0633, from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m.).

I was extremely distressed by the number of submissions with acceptable armoury that I was compelled to return in their entirety this month because the submission forms specifically stated that no changes, however minor, could be made to the spelling or grammar of the name. Unless there is some indication that a holding name would be acceptable, I am compelled to take statements that no changes may be made to the name literally and return the submission as a whole.

I acknowledge that it has been a long-standing tradition in some areas to recommend that a submittor mark "No changes" to ensure that they are consulted on any changes to the name. (I recall doing the same with my original name/device submission in Meridies nearly ten years ago.) However, this does the submittor no favour in the long run if it prevents a simple grammatical correction (e.g. , "la" for "le") and compels the return of the device as a whole.

There are several options open to consulting heralds to resolve this situation: advise submittors not to prohibit changes to the name, request them to state on the forms if a holding name is acceptable, or to do as the West Kingdom has done and add a line to the forms requesting the submittor to indicate if formation of a holding name is not acceptable. Of all the options, the latter is probably the most satisfactory and I heartily recommend it to all Kingdoms. (I am returning a beautiful armorial submission because of technical problems with the name!)

Part of the reason for requiring forms for each submission has been to create an audit trail for the processing of every submission/resubmission. If no paperwork exists for a Laurel transaction, the activity that caused a given action may become muddy in future years.

A number of appeals of late have been sent through with no paperwork whatsoever (except a note saying "appeal no paperwork required" in some cases), compelling the Laurel staff to "create" paperwork stating the grounds for appeal by either typing in or copying the material from the letters of intent or comments "for the record".

Clearly this is a misinterpretation of the administrative rules which must be clarified. Therefore, let me formally state that for any appeal, paperwork consisting at the very least of the grounds for appeal, together with the most current mundane name/address for the submittor should be submitted. New emblazons need not be provided for armoury, but all appeal paperwork should include the date and grounds of the original return.

Also, it has been forcibly brought to my attention recently by a series of letters from submittors that appeals to the Laurel level are being made in several Kingdoms without consultation with the individual submittor. (For instance, a letter from a submittor saying that he had been told that his submission was being appealed and that he would like to know what was being appealed and why it had been sent back.)

That this should happen is understandable, particularly when the issue is one of borderline conflict or a "test case" on the rules. However, it has been our experience that many submittors, when told that their device has been deemed to have problems, even if told that those problems are possibly (probably!) a matter of opinion, prefer not to appeal but to change the original submission. In this situation, to appeal the return without consulting the submittor is to deprive him/her of the opportunity to make the final decision on their own submission.

Therefore, I am reluctantly compelled to require that the submittor be consulted before any appeal be filed with the Laurel Office. Normally, such consultation should be indicated by the individual submittor countersigning the appeal paperwork or the attachment of a letter from the submittor indicating his desire to appeal that particular submission. Realizing that this may seriously delay the filing of appeals on some occasions and trusting in the honour of all members of the College of Arms, a statement by the College of Arms representative that the individual has been consulted may be substituted.

I hate to be so bureaucratic about this, but there is a real problem here: doing something "for someone's own good" does not benefit that individual unless it is what he/she truly desires.

One of the hotter topics of discussion amongst the senior heralds present at Estrella War was the slackening of commenting activity amongst members of the College of Arms. It was noted by several long-time members of the College that there had been a definite diminution of the numbers of comments and depth of commentary on letters of intent over the past year or so.

This only confirms my experiences since taking over the Laurel Office. The causes for this phenomenon are debatable. Burn-out and mundane developments in the lives of several heraldic scholars who had customarily commented monthly were noted. Some felt that the Board decision last summer had "taken the heart out of" some former stalwarts of the College. It was even noted that the switch of one regular commentor to Laurel had a substantial effect (Ed. Note: I appreciate the statements as to the quality of my comments but am more likely to wryly agree that my defection has had a statistically important effect on the monthly page count of commentary!)

Whatever the cause, the Laurel Office is feeling the effects. A contributing circumstance to the amount of time it has taken to complete this letter of acceptance and return was the lack of substantial input from a respectable variety of sources in the College. For some of the letters I had only two or three serious letters of comment and the variety of outlook necessary for me to feel confident that proper decisions have been made just was not there. No matter how I respect the Crescent and Brachet staffs, I cannot feel that decisions made solely on their input are as secure as I would like. (For one thing, neither group claims extensive expertise in many branches of nomenclature.)

As a result, I find the Laurel staff (in this case largely myself) doing far more research than is really reasonable. In the case of the January meeting, several clear Society conflicts were not called by any commentor and were only caught by the visual alarm bells that went off when we viewed the emblazon sheets. As you might expect, these were triggered primarily by armoury from the "Pennsic Kingdoms" , leaving me to wonder what flagrant conflicts we did not catch from Kingdoms farther afield! I know in my soul that there were submissions accepted that should have been returned-I suspect that submissions were returned for insufficient documentation that could have been documented by members of the College if they had taken the time to comment. As it was, I spent many hours doing research that should have been done by the College.

I cannot continue to do this. It is arguable that I should not have done this on this occasion, but it grieved me unduly to punish the individual submittors, some of which had been waiting an unconscionable amount of time already, simply because of failures on the part of the senior heraldic establishment.

I appeal to all the commenting heralds. Please remember that our primary responsibility is no to the Board or the College or some abstract ideal, but to the submit tors who trust us to treat their submissions with due process and those with registered armoury who trust us to protect it. Even if it is a burden, take the time to write real comments (i.e., careful checks for conflict, serious attempts to document names-not merely shorthand comments that boil down to "I don't like it). Even if you cannot comment on every submission every month, attempt to give me the benefit of your wisdom in the areas in which you are strongest. Set priorities for your time: when I was Elmet and Brigantia, I had a clearly defined triage system which assumed that, if time was short, checking for Society conflicts was sacrificed to commentary on names since almost everyone in the College would check for Society conflict whereas my training gave me special skills in language and nomenclature.

Incidentally, in setting your "triage" priorities, please do not make the mistake of assuming that you can "skim" over the submissions from certain Kingdoms. I have been told that, during my tenure as Brigantia, some in the College did not really do heavy conflict or documentation checking on name submissions from the East because of my personal reputation as an expert on names. As both my immediate predecessors as Laurel will be happy to testify, the nomenclature errors may have been fewer, but when I had them they tended to be real wowsers!

I realize that it is appealing to comment on "large issues" and this is important. However, if everyone sacrifices the boring scutwork of researching submissions to the more alluring task of philosophizing on basic principles of armoury, nomenclature, etc., the work of the College of Arms will come to a grinding halt.

Please do not let that happen!

I had hoped to have solid criteria on mundane heraldry to be considered out to you by now with a view to having this "crisis" over by the summer so that we could move onto more important basic principles. Unfortunately, that is not possible.

I was verbally informed by the Chairman of the Board that the Board was not entirely happy with the criteria (based largely on input from the West and Caid) which I submitted to them at the February Board meeting. At that meeting there was a change of Board ombudsman (to John Ap Griffin, c/o John Trimble, 606 S. Bronson Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90005,213-386-1454). Since the discussions with the Chairman of the Board and Laurel Ombudsman at Estrella War ended up being in "plenary session" of the senior heralds present and focused on more general topics concerning the Board decision and Board/College of Arms relations as a whole, I requested the Laurel ombudsman to write me as soon as possible concerning the modifications which the Board desired to the criteria. I have not yet received those desired modifications and so cannot pass the final criteria on to you. Be assured that I will communicate the criteria to you all as soon as I can.

As you know, part of my mandate from the Board was to "simplify" and hopefully rationalize the Rules for Submission. I have been considering this issue for some time and hope to have "position papers (not draft rules) out in time for discussion at the Symposium. Those of you who know me well, know that I believe strongly in the productivity of debate (thank you, Socrates!) and the usefulness of the "Devil's Advocate". You may expect me to "trail my cloak" a bit in some of the position papers (i.e., WARNING!!! I do not necessarily intend to impose the wilder ideas proposed for discussion and would be horrified if they were imposed by someone else, but feel that they may stimulate productive discussion).

I would like to see "position papers" as well from others in the College who have ideas on what the theoretic underpinnings of Society heraldry should be. Note that I am talking about theory and the broad approach here, i.e., strategy not tactics. I don't want to see fine-drawn arguments about what fraction of a major point of difference a minor point of difference should be, but rather considerations of whether it is reasonable to quantify minor points of difference or perhaps even to have minor points of difference. You get the idea!

Between the meetings at the Symposium and the gatherings of heralds associated with Pennsic this year, I hope to develop a consensus on the direction in which Society heraldry should be moving. Then and only then can we try to revise the rules to reflect and reinforce that direction.

Your servant,

Alisoun