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.
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.
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.
Each paragraph in the Laurel Precedents represents a separate quotation. The implied speaker is the Laurel Sovereign of Arms 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 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 little has been market with an ellipsis ("..."). Obvious typographical and spelling errors (including errors in capitalization) have 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 quotation. 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 seme, vêtu has been represented by vetu, and so forth.
For example,
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin, new college edition 1976.
The American Heritage Dictionary. Houghton Mifflin, second college edition 1982.
Jost Amman and Hans Sachs. The Book of Trades (Ständebuch). Dover Publications, 1973. Reprint of 1568 edition.
J. P. Brooke-Little. Boutell's Heraldry. Frederick Warne, revised edition 1973.
The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Two volumes. Oxford University Press, 1971.
Rodney Dennys. The Heraldic Imagination. Clarkson N. Potter, 1975.
Julian Franklyn. Shield and Crest: An Account of the Art and Science of Heraldry. MacGibbon and Bee, third edition 1967.
The New Columbia Encyclopedia. Columbia University Press, 1975.
James Parker. A Glossary of Terms Used in Heraldry. Charles E. Tuttle, 1970.
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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