Copyright © 1995 - Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc.
In November of 1976, Karina of the Far West published a 26-page booklet of heraldic precedents of the SCA College of Arms. The document was a collection of excerpts from Laurel letters, ordinaries, minutes, and other such sources, organized into categories. Mistress Karina's intention was to use this body of material, together with the comments of her predecessors in the Laurel office, as the basis for a codification of the rules of SCA heraldry. This project, unfortunately, never reached fruition.
In June of 1980, I published two companion volumes to Mistress Karina's collection of precedents. These collections were drawn from the Laurel letters of acceptance and rejection, and covered the tenure of Karina of the Far West and the first year of the tenure of Wilhelm von Schlüssel.
Volume one of the Laurel Precedents was compiled in haste. As Mistress Karina said in her cover letter, "It is incomplete, sketchily cross-indexed, and occasionally mis-alphabetized; let me know what else is wrong with it." Some of the quotations were also inaccurate, and others were attributed incorrectly.
My own volumes didn't fare much better. I allowed myself too much liberty in editing quotations, over-categorized the quotations I selected, and sometimes failed to include enough of the original context for the quotations to make sense. I also missed several letters from Mistress Karina's tenure; and the subsequent flow of rulings from the Laurel office has rendered my volume on Master Wilhelm's tenure almost obsolete.
The second edition of Precedents of the SCA College of Arms is an attempt to correct many of the flaws of the first edition. The present volume has been recompiled from the original sources, in hopes of producing a document that is both accurate and useful.
ABOUT PRECEDENTS
A precedent is an action or decision "that may be used as an example in dealing with subsequent similar cases." The Laurel Precedents documents are founded on the philosophy that heraldic decisions should, whenever possible, be based on previous decisions. Every decision should, of course, be made on the basis of the best information available at the time; but once a specific practice has been adopted or rejected, the precedent set thereby should not be lightly disregarded.
Knowledge of SCA heraldry can be derived from four sources: (1) the Rules for Heraldic Submissions, (2) policy statements made in the Laurel correspondence, (3) explicit comments made on submissions that have been processed, and (4) the submissions themselves.
The Rules for Heraldic Submissions have the advantage of being explicit, but they cannot be comprehensive; one still needs to know how the rules are to be applied. Policy statements are often more directly applicable than the rules, but they, too, require substantiation. Comments made on submissions provide immediate examples, but the reader may have difficulty determining the general principle from a single instance, particularly when the comments are sparse or inaccurate. The submissions themselves are the most accurate gauge of what has been approved, but they are not readily accessible, and they cannot explain why a specific action was taken, particularly in the case of a rejection.
The Laurel Precedents documents are drawn from the second and third of these sources. They are made up of quotations from the formal correspondence of the Laurel Sovereign of Arms. They are a codification, in the words of the persons who made the decisions, of what has been called the "case law" of the SCA College of Arms. The Precedents do not replace the Laurel letters as a source of information, but they can make that information more accessible, by presenting those portions of the Laurel letters that seem best to explain SCA heraldic policy, selected, categorized, and edited.
SELECTION
The quotations in the Laurel Precedents documents were chosen because I felt they (1) conveyed SCA policy, (2) clarified obscure points, (3) demonstrated the use of terms, or (4) expressed the attitude of the Laurel Sovereign who made them. If two quotations said approximately the same thing, I generally chose the one that said it better; if they were of equal merit, I usually chose the earlier one; but if they differed in nuance, or contradicted each other, I tried to include both of them.
CATEGORIZATION
In categorizing the quotations, I have laid a great deal of emphasis on relevance. In general, a quotation appears under a subject heading only if it is relevant to that topic. Omnibus categories (such as BIRD) tend to include quotations that apply to the category as a whole. Rulings applying to a single element of a general category (such as OWL) appear under the heading of that element only. This differs from my policy with the first edition, which was to include a quotation under both the general and the specific subject headings.
I have identified several topics, which I have termed issues, under which I have attempted to assemble enough quotes to constitute a general discussion of the topic at hand. ARTISTIC LICENSE, for example, attempts to show what freedoms (and limitations) we have given the herald painter; DIFFERENCE is made up of expositions on points of difference; and SHIELDS ON SHIELDS contains various rulings on apparent augmentations, inescutcheons, and arms of pretense.
EDITING
The editorial standards for the second edition are higher than they were for the first. My goals in editing the quotations in the second edition have been accuracy and clarity. The idea has been to convey the text of each quotation as accurately and completely as possible, while noting or correcting obvious errors, and omitting material that is not relevant to the general sense of the quotation.
Each paragraph in the Laurel Precedents represents a separate quotation. The implied speaker is the person whose letter is being quoted. In the handful of cases where Laurel has quoted someone else directly, I have enclosed the quote in double quotation marks and given the name or initials of the speaker, in square brackets, at the end of the quotation.
Omissions from the beginning and end of a quotation have been done silently. Anything left out of the middle has been marked with an ellipsis ("..."). Errors involving hyphenation or running together of words have generally been corrected without comment. Most other emendations have been enclosed in [square brackets].
Editorial changes have been made for the following reasons:
No effort has been made to standardize the spelling of words appearing in the Laurel quotations. American and British spellings were freely mixed in the originals, and you may find several different spellings of any given heraldic term (cotise, for example). so long as I could find a citation for a given spelling, I used it.
Because the machine on which these documents were prepared does not recognize French accents, I have had to adopt non-accented spellings for some of the heraldic terms. I have usually used the English -y form, if one could be found. Contourné has thus become contourny, semé and semée have both become semy, vêtu has been represented by vetu, and so forth.
CITATIONS
Each quotation is identified in the document by the initials of the person being quoted, the date of the source document, the entry number of the document in the reference list, and the page number on which the quotation occurs. For example,
REFERENCES
Spelling was checked using the UNIX program spell. I also consulted the following references in the course of editing this volume:
The American Heritage Dictionary. Houghton Mifflin, second college edition 1982.
Donald Attwater. A Dictionary of Saints. Penguin Books, 1965.
J. P. Brooke-Little. An Heraldic Alphabet. Arco Publishing Company, revised edition 1975.
The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Two volumes. Oxford University Press, 1971.
Rodney Dennys. The Heraldic Imagination. Clarkson N. Potter, 1975.
Charles Norton Elvin. A Dictionary of Heraldry. Heraldry Today, 1969.
Julian Franklyn and John Tanner. An Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Heraldry. Pergamon Press, 1970. The New Columbia Encyclopedia. Columbia University Press, 1975.
Oxford American Dictionary. Avon Books, 1980.
James Parker. A Glossary of Terms Used in Heraldry. Charles E. Tuttle, 1970.
George Cameron Stone. A Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor in All Countries and in All Times, Together with Some Closely Related Subjects. Jack Brussel, 1961.
Mary-Claire van Leunen. A Handbook for Scholars. Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.
Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. G. & C. Merriam Company, second edition 1960.
John Woodward and George Burnett. A Treatise on Heraldry, British and Foreign, with English and French Glossaries. Charles E. Tuttle, 1969.
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