P.O. Box 1646

Dallas, TX 75221-1646

Janaury 1992

Unto the members of the College of Arms and all others who may read this missive does Da'ud ibn Auda, Laurel King of Arms, send Greetings!

The January 1992 Laurel meeting was held on Saturday, January 18, 1992, and and considered the following Letters of Intent dated in October, 1991: Caid (10/2), Atlantia (10/22), Middle (10/22), Ansteorra (10/25), Atenveldt (10/25), East (10/31), Meridies (10/31), and Calontir (10/31).

The February 1992 Laurel meeting is scheduled for Saturday, February 22, 1992, and will consider the following Letters of Intent dated November, 1991: Outlands (11/10), East (11/12), Atenveldt (11/14), Trimaris (11/15), Caid (11/22), Middle (11/24), Caid (11/25), Atlantia (11/26), and Calontir (11/30).

The March Laurel meeting is scheduled for Saturday, March 21, 1992 (PLEASE NOTE THE NEW DATE), to consider the following Letters of Intent: An Tir (dated 11/9, but the packet was not received until mid-January), Ansteorra (dated 11/23, but not mailed until December 9), Caid (12/15), Outlands (12/20), Calontir (12/22), Middle (12/22), Atlantia (12/23), and Atenveldt (12/27).

The April Laurel meeting is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, April 25, 1992, to consider Letters of Intent from January, 1992 and Ansteorra (12/15).

The May Laurel meeting is tentatively schedule for Saturday, May 30, 1992, to consider Letters of Intent from February, 1992 and West, (11/14), West (11/27), and West (12/30) (whose packets arrived in mid-February).

No Laurel packets have yet been received for the following letters as of this date, and they cannot be scheduled until the packets arrive: Ansteorra (12/26), Trimaris (1/15).

ROSTER CHANGES AND CORRECTIONS

Please re-add to your mailing list former Lord Star, now Hanaper Herald for Ansteorra, Tadhg Liath (Tiomoid M. of Angle), 740 West Spring Valley #221, Richardson, TX 75080; (214) 783-8421. (He should not have been dropped from the latest roster. Sorry, Tadhg.)

Lady Brachet (West) has resigned. The new Brachet Herald is former Lady Leveret, Juturna di Parma. Please add to your mailing lists the new Leveret Pursuivant, Frederick of Holland (Flieg Hollander), 2322 Russell Street, Berkeley, CA 94705.

Lord Kraken has resigned. Please remove him from your rosters.

Lady Triton asks that you add to your rosters the Ibis Herald, (Michael Houghton), 919 16th Street South, Arlington, VA 22202; (703) 486-0522. He will not be commenting at this time.

Please add Eowyn Amberdrake (Caid, currently Herald on Staffon the Roster) to your mailing list. Her address is: Melinda Sherbring, 14124 Lemoli Avenue, Hawthorne, CA 90250.

AN HEIR TO THE KING (or, The Prince of Wails?)

As most of you have probably heard by now, the Board of Directors has chosen Baron Bruce Draconarius of Mistholme, currently Batonvert Herald, as my successor as Laurel King of Arms. His address is in the Roster. Those of you wishing to congratulate (or commiserate with) him, please feel free to do so. Plans currently call for the official transfer of office to take place at the Symposium in An Tir at the end of June, though he will be taking an increasing number of the duties of this office in a gradual change of office similar to that between Mistress Alisoun and myself last time.

The Board, and I, are grateful for the thoughts and efforts of all of those who applied for this position, and it is anticipated that the concerns and ideas of all the candidates will be given serious consideration during the current Laurel office review by the Board and in the future by myself and my successor.

To help make the transition run smoothly, please send the Laurel packets (including fees) for the April 1992 (and all subsequent) Letters of Intent to Baron Bruce, as these LoIs will be considered in July, his first full month as Laurel. I will need to receive a copy of these LoIs for the files. After July 1, all correspondence for Laurel should be addressed to Bruce.

THE LAUREL OFFICE REVIEW ("No Breasts, No Blood, No Dead Bodies, "Lame Duck" Fu, A Mere 58 on the Vomit Meter, Three Stars.")

A number of issues arose in the recent review of the Laurel Office by the Board of Directors and the Corporate Officer Procedural Review Committee. The following are some of the most important ones.

Incoming!

This is simply a "heads up" bit of information - please, there is no action to be taken on this item at this time.

It came to light during the Laurel office procedural review that the issue of the College's continued protection of non-SCA heraldry is one that has never been settled insofar as the Board is aware. Certainly there appears to be nothing in the Board correspondence which would indicate that the Board has rescinded or withdrawn the mandate given to Baldwin of Erebor to cease the protection of mundane armory (with certain exceptions). As a consequence, considering the considerable lapse of time since that mandate and the apparent miscommunication(s) involved, the Board will in all likelihood place an article in Tournaments Illuminated and call for commentary from the College and the Society membership considering the question of whether the College should continue to check for conflicts against non-SCA armory. After sufficient time has passed for all those interested to comment, the Board will review the commentary received and will make some kind of decision at that time. At this time there is absolutely no predicting what that decision will be. Certainly the topic will be opened for discussion within the College when the Board places the call for commentary in T.I.

Submissions Fee Increase

The fees for submissions at the Laurel level will increase to $3.00 per action as of July 1, 1992. We carefully reviewed the past, current, and anticipated expenses of running the Laurel office in making this decision. The last time Laurel fees were raised has been quite some time ago (Wilhelm von Schüssel, I believe), and since that time expenses for postage, photocopying, office supplies, indeed, everything necessary to run the office, have increased dramatically. Laurel has been able to keep from raising expenses for the last year by being able to get the photocopying done for less than $.02 per page and by allowing the office to run at slight loss. It was known, however, that fees would have to be raised sometime this year, even had the office not changed hands in 1992. I regret having to treble the fees, but we worked the budget with an absolute minimum of overage, and this is what the figures come out to.

In conjunction with the Laurel fee increase, it is recommended that Kingdom principal and submissions heralds look at their own fee structure to be certain the submissions fees they charge are sufficient to cover the actual costs of running their offices. (For example, is your office paying for your photocopying needs, or is photocopying being "donated" by someone? If it is being "donated", it becomes a hidden expense which the next office-holder may not have adequate funds for if another "donation" is not avialable to him or her.) Each kingdom principal herald has always been allowed to establish their own submissions fees sufficient to pay for all of the necessary costs of running the herald's office.

LoAR Subscription Fee

Beginning May 1, 1992, the annual subscription fee for the Laurel Letters of Acceptances and Returns will be raised to $25.00. This is another case where the fee has not been raised for some time while costs have risen a lot. The last year's subscriptions have been run at a slight loss (they actually averaged out at about $18.50 for photocopying and postage in 1991, while only charging subscribers $18.00. This at the less than $.02 per page photocopying cost I've been getting this year). It is anticipated that photocopying costs will more than double after July 1, and it is likely that office supplies (such as mailing envelopes, for example) will be somewhat higher in southern California than in Dallas.

THE 1992 KNOWN WORLD HERALDIC SYMPOSIUM (or, Ho! for the Northwest)

A brief update on the Known World Heraldic Symposium to be held at the SeaTac Radisson Hotel near Seattle, Washington June 26-28. Registration is $10 before April 1; $11 during April; $12 during May; and $13 thereafter. The feast is $14 by pre-registration only. Registration and information packets are available from Trahaearn ap Ieaun (Peter Durham), 640 165th Avenue NE, Bellvue, WA 98008-4017; (206)643-0797.

Rooms at the hotel are $63 + tax. You need to mention that you are attending the SCA conference to get this reduced rate. The toll-free hotel reservaton number is 1-800-333-3333.

TIMELINESS OF LOIs, LAUREL PACKETS, AND LOCs

As you no doubt noticed in the Laurel meeting schedule above, there are a number of LoIs for which the Laurel packets were received long after the putative date of the LoI. We have also had some LoIs being mailed to the College two or more weeks after their putative date.

In a related issue, I received two letters of comment with commentary on letters being considered at the last Laurel meeting on the Wednesday before that meeting.

This is a situation which cannot continue. The workload at this level makes it difficult to keep track of what is where if it is not received in a timely manner, and such a state of tardiness in packets and in commentary commentary makes it virtually impossible to adequately consider these items at their regularly scheduled time. In this situation, I often find myself torn between wanting to give the very best I can to our clients and therefore greatly increase my workload at the time of month I can least afford to (the week before a Laurel meeting), and just chucking it all and refusing to consider late arrivals in my mailbox at their regularly scheduled time (and disregarding late-arriving commentary entirely).

The rules of common courtesy, not to mention the Administrative Handbook, require that LoIs not sent within a week of their putative date should be redated. (This is especially true for those dated at the end of a month.) And I know from having done it for more than two years (as Obelisk and Star) that it is no more work to send the Laurel packet at the same time an LoI is mailed than it is to wait for a few weeks (or months) and do it later. Further, commentary mailed so as to arrive in the days just before a Laurel meeting is fair neither to Laurel's schedule the week of a meeting nor to the submitting heralds who have no opportunity to respond to it.

I realize that sometimes things come up which delay getting a letter or packet out. And I have always tried to be lenient when I have been told in advance that such is the case. But as the above listing demonstrates, what we have happening here is not any longer a minor or one-time problem. And the people being most hurt by it ultimately are not Laurel, Laurel's staff, or the submissions heralds. It is the people who entrust their submissions to us in the hopes of as rapid a consideration and registration as humanly possible.

Let's get back on track, folks. I know that your time is short. But I don't have any more time than you do, and when you get behind you force me to get behind, too. And in the end, you and I are not the real losers -- our clients are. For all of our sakes, let's get this fixed now.

WHILE YOU'RE HERE (or, As Long As I'm Being Ugly Anyway)

I need to remind the commenting heralds that Laurel is supposed to receive two copies of letters of comment. Not everyone is remembering this, and I am having to go out of my way to make an extra copy far too regularly. Please, if you send me a letter of comment, I need to receive two copies, one of which should be one-sided. (If you are sending LoCs on disketter, that counts as the one-sided copy.) I can't afford to keep making copies of LoCs at the rate of even one or two a week (which is what I've been averaging lately).

BLANKET LETTERS OF PERMISSION TO CONFLICT ( "Eleanor Leonard, picks up the badge that is grandfathered in an armoire...." )

After carefully reviewing all of the commentary on the viability of Eleanor Leonard's "blanket letter of permission to conflict", I have come to the conclusion that to begin (as Lady Harpy put it) "customizing protection" is to set a bad precedent. While I appreciate Eleanor Leonard's willingness to grant such a broad permission to conflict, to allow such a blanket letter of permission would involve at the very least a modification to the Administrative Handbook and a separate notation in the A&O, and possibly changes to the Rules for Submission themselves. Like many of you, I am extremely reluctant to complicate the Rules or Handbook with exceptions which have to be remembered and kept track of without very good cause and a much sounder basis that this appears to have. I believe the benefits of having a single standard for all armory which local heralds can understand and which can be explained to our clients outweigh those which creating special exceptions to that standard would bring.

ADDING NEW SOURCES

The following are hereby specifically added to Appendix E of the Administrative Handbook:

Renesse

Siebmacher

Public Heraldry

These are sources which were not readily available at the time the original listing in Appendix E was drawn up and hence were not included at that time. As we are, and have been, using them in the same manner as the other works listed there, these should be added to that list.

TEMPORAL COMPATIBILITY (or, "Can I Be an Elizabethan Viking?")

A term which has been receiving more use lately in some commentary regarding names is "temporal compatibility", especially regarding names which use elements from different centuries (though from the same general language or at least compatible ones). The argument is that since we do not allow names to combine elements from widely disparate cultures, neither should we allow names from disparate centuries.

A problem that I have with this argument is that it is harder to prove that a name combination is unreasonable or incompatible when the gap between the elements is temporal rather than geographical. Only one example of this is the use of a Roman or Roman-derived given with a late-period English surname. It is easy to look at such a name and state that there was no way those two cultures could have had contact and therefore argue for banning the name combination, until one looks further into the situation and finds that English Renaissance parents not infrequently named their children after classical Romans, at which point Julius Leigh or Calpurnia Haverhill become much more reasonable as they follow a documented period name formation practice. And while many of our sources give early dates for when we might expect the first documented use of a name, none of them purport to give us the last documented use.

In most (perhaps all) cultures naming customs tend to be very conservative. (How many parents today still use biblical names for their children, no matter what their religious orientation? How many still name their children with name first popularized in the early Renaissance? "John" is still one of the most popular boys' names in this country - how long ago did it originate?)

As a consequence, unless someone can convince the College that there is some compelling reason for disallowing names that our clients want simply on the grounds that they are unlikely because of a temporal gap, and that banning such temporally inconsistent names is of greater benefit to the Society than giving our clients the greatest possible leeway in selecting their Society names, I will continue to act as if the College is here to help our clients and not just build higher and higher hurdles for them to scale in the effort to register a Society-acceptable name.

RESOURCES AVAILABLE TO THE COLLEGE (Resources, Resources Everywhere, and All the Consulting Heralds Did Shrink)

A recent submission for a Japanese name was made with a notation to the effect that the submitting herald had "no resources" for Japanese names. It is Laurel's firm belief that so long as a herald has a telephone or knows how to write a letter, resources for checking names and naming practices exists -- in the membership of the College and other volunteers. In this specific instance, at the minimum Master Akagawa Yoshio could have been called and consulted. He has many times stated his willingness to assist in consultations of this sort, and his name and address have been on the College roster for some time. Just because you, as a consulting herald, have no such resources personally does not mean that you have no access to them.

The following are the names, addresses and telephone numbers of people who have volunteered to the College their assistance in consultations for the language(s) listed. If anyone else would like to have their name added for one or another language (or language group), please let me know.

Japanese:

Morimoto Koryu Edward of Effingham

Anthony F. Ferrucci Anthony J. Bryant

1203 NE 92nd Street Heights Momo #301

Seattle, WA 98115 4-23-2 Kichijoji Minami-cho

Misashino City, Tokyo

Japan 180

(Phone (from the US): 011­81­422­43-3169)

Solveig Throndardottir Akagawa Yoshio

681 Main Street Kevin Munday

Malden, MA 02148 6676 Lassen Court

Riverside, CA 95206

(617) 321-1416

(714) 684-1066

"Celtic" Welsh

Eriod of Éire Mistress Keridwn ferch Morgan

Deborah W. Bennett Heather Ross Jones

1585 Jacob Avenue 5838 Fremont Street #2

San Jose, CA 95118 Oakland, CA 94608

(510) 654-6635

Arabic

Da'ud ibn Auda

David B. Appleton

1610 Vinecrest Circle

Garland, TX 75042

(214) 276-2129

BOOKS AVAILABLE

For those of you who are interested and don't already have a copy, The Art of Heraldry by Carl-Alexander von Volborth is currently available from Barnes & Noble, 126 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011-5666. It is Item No. 1718071 and costs $12.95 (plus $4.95 s/h -- the shipping and handling charge is a one-time charge, and does not increase if you order more copies).

Mistress Adelicia requests that I remind you that copies of the Proceedings of the 1990 Known World Heraldic Symposium are still available. Their cost is $10.00, and they are available from Peggy Rudin, 7135 Vinland, Dallas, TX 75227.

MISCELLANY

"Papworth, as a great many heralds seem to have forgotten, is a Victorian heraldry book. It contains some three hundred years' out­of­period armory, and much of what is period in origin is not period in blazon. It is also not necessarily a reliable source. Papworth drew heavily on the General Armory of Sir John Bernard Burke, whose work 'gave currency to innumerable heraldic errors and illegitimate assumptions.' (Heralds of England, p. 511) J.P. Brooke­Little notes, in his introduction to the Five Barrows edition of Papworth's Ordinary, that 'A considerable number of the entries [are] of bogus arms and some are wrongly blazoned.' So, while Papworth may be the best source available to us for many things, it is a shaky foundation indeed upon which to build an argument mortared with the tone of moral outrage so beloved of certain of our learned colleagues."

Baldwin of Erebor, LoAR 18 May 86, pp. 21­22

Until next month, I remain, as ever,

Your servant,

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