P.O. Box 1646

Dallas, TX 75221-1646

June 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 June Laurel meeting was held on Saturday, June 20, 1992, and considered the following Letters of Intent: East (3/5), Ansteorra (3/8), Caid (3/19), Middle (3/20), Atlantia (3/22), Atenveldt (3/27), Outlands (3/26), Calontir (3/28), Meridies (3/30), and Ansteorra (3/30).

Trimaris (3/15) and An Tir (3/15) will be considered on Sunday, June 28, at the Known World Heraldic Symposium in An Tir.

ROSTER CHANGES AND CORRECTIONS

Please remove Ottar Eriksson, Keel Pursuivant (East) from the Roster. He has moved and does not have the time for activity in the College that he had.

Please add to your Roster as Sycamore Herald (East) Esmeralda la Sabia (Andrea Gansley-Ortiz), 5920 Nicholson Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15217. She will not be commenting at this time.

An updated roster is included in this packet. (It will, of course, be outdated no later than June 28, but, what the hey!) If there are any changes or corrections which need to be made, please let the incoming Lord Laurel know as soon as possible.

RULES REVIEW AND REVISION (or, Part III in a Continuing Series)

The commentary running nearly unanimously in favor of Lord Palimpsest's suggested revised wording (proposed in his letter of March 20, 1992), the Rules for Submissions, VIII.5. is revised to read:

VIII. 5. Fieldless Style - Fieldless armory must form a self-contained design.

A fieldless design must have all its elements conjoined, like three feathers issuing from a crown used by the Heir Apparent to the throne of England. Since there is no field in such a design, it may not use charges that rely on the edges of the field to define their shape, such as bordures and orles, nor to cut off their ends, such as ordinaries or charges throughout.

The underlined phrase replaces "Ideally, a fieldless design will have all its elements linked together".

GENERAL QUESTION (or, Crux Australis, Part II)

In his LoC of 5 June, 1992, Lord Crux Australis asks "what, exactly, is required to have Laurel publish a public answer to a query?" Since he calls for a public answer, I will attempt to explain what I face here.

Lord Decion, there are several factors involved in discussing this question. One is the volume and timing of the work I do. With the volume of submissions running at about 300 actions per month, I don't remember the vast majority of decisions that get made, much less the reasons for them. Add to that the fact that at any given moment, I am dealing with four months' worth of these submissions (those reviewed at the last Laurel meeting, for which I am trying to get the LoAR done, and the LoIs and LoCs for the next three months Laurel meetings). Then, because of the time lag between the Laurel meeting, the mailing of the LoAR, the time for the LoAR to get to you and you to review it and write up your questions, I am at least a month further away from the LoAR you are inquiring about. (As an example, your June 5 letter has some questions on the April LoAR: I have already mailed out the May LoAR and am preparing for the June Laurel meeting, which preparation takes nearly a full week. So I am now two months away from decisions I probably didn't remember two weeks later.) As a consequence, I cannot simply deal with your questions as I do with much of the correspondence I receive: formulate an answer off the top of my head, type up a letter on my lunch hour at work (as I am doing right now), and mail the responses out. To answer the questions you ask every month (without your having prioritized them in any way or otherwise indicating which are the ones you really want answered and which are more rhetorical), would involve my taking all of your questions, going through and pulling the files on the specific submissions, pulling the LoAR in question, re-reading through all the commentary and the text of the decision, and formulating an answer based on that research. If your June 5 LoC may be taken as typical, you ask five different questions a month, each of which is going to take anywhere from twenty to thirty minutes to pull, research, and formulate an answer. At one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours, that's an entire evening for me, not including telephone calls coming in (I probably average three to four interruptions by telephone an evening), etc. I cannot afford to spend that much time answering one person's questions, especially since the answers to those questions are to be found in the commentary made on the submission in question, all of which you should have received. I do not pull the decisions made at Laurel meetings out of a hat, out of thin air, or from up my sleeve. They are all based on the commentary received by the time of the Laurel meeting, on prior Laurel precedent, and by attempting to consistently interpret the Rules for Submissions.

All this is even assuming that I see the questions to begin with. As the mail comes in, I try to skim through it, but I do not have the time to read each and every piece of mail. If it's clearly an LoI or an LoC, it may just get set aside for filing and for cutting and pasting. Someone else does the filing for me, so I wouldn't see it then, and I don't normally read the "cut and paste" commentary until the week before the applicable Laurel meeting, and LoAR commentary will quite likely have been separated out by then.

I guess the short answer is this: If you have an important question you want an answer to, while you may collate it in with the text of an LoC for general mailing to the College, it is more likely to be handled properly and answered if you make it a separate page or letter in your mailings to Laurel.

Now, to give brief answers to the questions you asked in your LoC of June 5:

Mikhail Andreyevich Putnikov. Is the "nature of the emblazon" completely unheraldic? If the majority of the commenters didn't have a problem with it, why should Laurel "take the extra time" (which doesn't exist in Laurel meetings: my meetings have been running nine to ten hours, which makes for a long day no matter how you look at it) to discuss it?

Ito Nori. I disagree with your statement that "if we stop registering mon then we don't need to protect them." If we stopped registering English-style armory, would we stop protecting English armory? The two actions are not cause-effect related.

Gareth Strengmakere. What were the blazons of the two devices? (Remember, I'm at work doing this on my lunch hour, and don't have the files to look up here.) Would I call conflict between "Azure, a sword argent" and "Azure, an arrow argent"? I don't know. Certainly, I'd give them a CD as primary charges, and probably as secondary charges. As tertiaries, I'm not so certain. In any case, I don't know, considering the way both swords and arrows tend to be drawn in the SCA, that I'd apply RfS X.2 (Sufficient Difference) between them.

Elric ap Madog. Would we allow the combination of the name "Elric" to be used with a black sword in the armory? I don't know. Is this "Elric" of the black sword as well-known as Corwin of the rose? (Not that I'm all that familiar with either.) Given that the commenters were probably split on the issue (since I didn't make a call on it), I'm not sure I would call it either way without more research, including re-reading the applicable commentary on this submission.

Morgan O'Breen. Does this conflict with Sauron? I don't know. (What is Morgan's blazon? What is Sauron's blazon? I don't have this stuff memorized; it's been a long time since I've read The Lord of the Rings.) Why use a marginal call if another more solid reason for return exists? People gripe at me enough about subjectivity and the need for being able to predict, through objectively and consistently applied rules and decision, prospective Laurel calls. I have to make enough "judgment calls" every month without going out of my way to find more.

A FINAL WORD AS LAUREL (or, Ten-Ten and On the Side)

Well, this is my final LoAR as Laurel. It's been a fun two years. I said, when I took this office, that I would "make every attempt to be consistent, fair, and impartial. I will also make mistakes ..., and sometimes appear inconsistent, unfair, and biased.... I will try to be accessible to you, to kingdom and local heralds, and to submittors.... I try to answer all correspondence within a week of receipt...." (Cover Letter, August 7, 1990, pp. 2-3) I also said that I would resign from this office before I burn out, so that I would want to remain active in the College afterwards. I think I have done that. I have also tried to "make the trains run on time", and I believe I have done that, as well. Not everything that I wanted to do got done, but there's only so much time in the day, and so many days in the month.

I could not, of course, have done it without a lot of help. My thanks go out to many people, so many that I am not going to try to list them all here for fear of forgetting one. But I especially want to thank those I have come to rely on as my "mainstays": Debbie Thomas (Ailith ferch Dafydd), my administrative assistant, Ken and Sue Montgomery (Conor Diarmuid mac Ruis and Rhiannon o Goed Niwlog), David Heiligmann (Cyndcyrn Conn Corr), and Jane Fisher (Sorcha ní Fhaoláin), who were always there except for very rare occasions when they simply could not rearrange their schedules to attend. It would have been a lot tougher without them.

This is not goodbye. I am not going away now. We're trying to establish a new way of doing things here: keeping the people who become Laurel active in the College after they step down. (And I have already told Bruce that if he burns himself out before he steps down from this office, and goes away afterwards, Guido and I will drive out to his house and do ugly things to him!)

So, look forward to hearing from me on a regular basis, and having me turn up at various heraldic events as I can. I've got some projects in mind and some things I'd like to do, and I may occasionally call on you for ideas and critiques.

Until then, not goodbye, but "au revoir".

MISCELLANY

"To Mr Robert Castle of Glatton

Whereas by vertue of his Ma[jesty's] commission under the Great Seale of England you were warned by the bayliff of the hundred of Normancrosse to apeare before me Lancaster Herald of Armes at Stilton, where I sat in his Ma[jesty's] behalf and service to register all the gentlemen of name and of armes w[ith]in the same hundred, according to the tenour of his Ma[jesty's] said Commission; and you not only made default of appearance there, but after, by myself being warned to Huntington, have likewise made default of your aparaunce there also, to the hindrance of his Ma[jesty's] service and contempt of the Great Seale of England. And forasmuch as I fynde in the last visitation of this shire, which was about the beginning of the reigne of the late Queene Elizabeth of happy memory, that your family had then no Coate of Armes prooved or allowed unto them, and that since that tyme you have falsly and w[ith]out true ground usurped the auncient armes of one Castle of Warwickshire, these are therefore to require you, and in his Ma[jesty's] name streightly to charge and command you, that from henceforth you do not only forbeare the using or the bearing of the said armes w[hich] you have hitherto usurped against all right and custome of the lawe of armes, but also any other armes whatever, untill you know the Earle Marshall's pleasure therein; and hereof fayle you not, as you will aunswere the contrary at your perill for your further contempt hereof. Given under my hand at Huntingdon the 28 day of August, A D'ni 1613, and in the eleventh yeare of his Ma[jesty's] reigne of England, France and Ireland, and of Scotland the seaven and fourtieth.

NICH. CHARLES, LANCASTER

Marshall to Clarenceaux King of Armes."

From "Charles' Visitation" by John Bedells, The Coat of Arms, Volume IX, No. 157, Spring 1992, pp. 190-191

[Wouldn't it be nice?]

Pray believe that I remain, as ever, your servant,

Da'ud ibn Auda

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