Dallas, TX 75221-1646

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 attached Letter of Acceptances and Returns covers the following Letters of Intent considered at the Laurel meeting held Saturday, April 27, 1991, which considered the following letters of intent: An Tir (dated 12/6 but mailed in January), Caid (1/7), Atlantia (1/10), Middle (1/15), Atenveldt (1/16), Outlands (1/20), Atlantia (1/27), West (1/30), and Calontir (1/31).

The May Laurel meeting is scheduled for Saturday, May 18, 1991, and will consider the following letters of intent dated in February, 1991: Ansteorra (2/10), Middle (2/15), Meridies (2/24), West (2/25), Atlantia (2/27), and Calontir (2/28).

The June Laurel meeting is scheduled for Saturday, June 22, 1991, and will consider the following letters of intent dated in March, 1991: An Tir (3/1), Caid (3/1), Ansteorra (3/11), Caid (3/12), Atenveldt (3/15), Trimaris (3/15), Meridies (3/20), East (3/25), Calontir (3/31), and West (3/31). The following two letters of intent dated in March will be scheduled to be considered at the traveling Laurel meeting to be held at the Heraldic Symposium in Atlantia on Sunday, June 30: Atlantia (3/18) and Middle (3/16). Commentary for all LoIs to be considered in June must be in to me well before the regular Laurel meeting on June 22.

The July Laurel meeting is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, July 27, 1991, and will consider Letters of Intent dated in April.

ROSTER CHANGES AND CORRECTIONS

The enclosed roster for the College of Arms contains the changes noted below. Please double-check all of the information on this roster and update your mailing lists accordingly. If you know of any further changes or corrections which need to be made, please let me know.

Master Vasili iz Naitemneshoi Dollina, Baron Red Spears and Palimpsest Herald, asks that he be removed from the mailing list as he finds that his new duties do not leave him the necessary time to comment. We will miss his presence in the College of Arms.

Please remove the Corona Herald of Atenveldt, Aislinn Rowena MacKenzie, and the Archive Herald of Trimaris, Elfwyn de Barfleur, from the mailing list for non-commenting.

Lady Vesper, Mistress Alison von Markheim, has retired from that office. We wish her all the best in her "retirement". Please retain her on your mailing lists as she desires to continue commenting. The new Vesper Principal Herald is Lord Caiomhin O Fiodhabhra (Kevin Furey), P. O. Box 1735, West Sacramento, CA 95691; (916);371-4458.

Lady Eastern Crown, Alison MacDermot, has a new address. It is 25 Seneca Street, Troy, NY 12180. Her new telephone number is (518) 272-3055.

Lady Merlon (Caid), Mistress Éowyn Amberdrake, got married this month (on Mother's Day??!?). We wish her all the best in this new endeavor.

A REQUEST

It would be very helpful to me if all submissions and commenting heralds would send me a single-sided copy of their comments as well as a double-sided (or two single-sided copies if what you normally send is single-sided). If all I receive is a one copy, I have to go out and make another copy, so that I have one to cut and paste and one for the files. If you could send me two copies (one single-sided), it would save me an average of two trips out to make copies each week. (Commenters sending me comments on diskette need only send one double-sided hard copy for the files, thank you very much.) This request applies to all regular correspondence: Letters of Intent, Letters of Comment, and Letters of Responses to Comments.

LINNAEAN PROPER (or, Carthago Delenda Est, Part II)

I really appreciate all of the commenatary on this issue -- and there was plenty! I discovered after reading some of the commmentary that I had worded my proposal a little more strongly than I had really meant to: my thought had been to suggest banning natural "proper" which required Linnaean specificity, a "Dyson's Metalmark butterfly", or a "female American kestrel" proper. My apologies to those of you who thought that I proposed banning all natural propers. (Naturally, heraldic "propers" -- swords, trees, roses, etc. -- were not ever considered to be a part of this proposed ban.)

Much of the commentary favors restricting excessive natural propers, without banning them entirely. Further, some evidence was presented that some "propers" were permitted in late-period heraldry, so that a certain amount of naturalist "proper" is a period practice. So it is that, henceforward,

PRECEDENT: The College of Arms will no longer register flora and fauna in their natural "proper" tinctures if to do so they require the Linnaean genus and species. Proper is allowed for natural flora and fauna where there is a widely understood default coloration for the charge so specified.

My rule of thumb here is that if you have to look it up in a book, it is excessive. An elephant "proper" most everyone knows - it's basically gray, as is a natural dolphin proper. A brown bear proper or a brown horse proper, no problem. Natural tigers, trees, zebras, bald eagles, blackberry vinev, and such-like may be registered as "proper". Lord Black Boar (Atenveldt), Phillip of Loch Shelldrake, suggests a similar rule of thumb: one adjective to describe the proper charge is fine (a Bengal tiger proper, a brown bear proper), but "a blazon of several adjectives should be given the heraldic hairy eyeball".

PENTACLES (Part III)

At the meeting of the Board of Directors held April 20, after careful consideration and much discussion from all sides of the issue, the Board declined to overturn the return by Laurel of the device of Cerridwen of Raventree, which had a pentacle (a mullet voided and interlaced within and conjoined to an annulet) as one of its charges. By declining to review, the Board is leaving in place a long-standing ban on pentacles in SCA armory (first by Ioseph of Locksley [1 Sept. 73], then by Karina of the Far West [in correspondence 7 Jan. 1976 and in an LoAR 10 March 1978], and by Wilhelm von Schlüssel [24 October 1979]). For their reasons, I quote from a letter from the Laurel Ombudsman to Laurel after the meeting:

"I think there are four parts to our reasoning:

1)Both Corpora and the Rules for Submission, approved by the Board, give Laurel the responsibility and the authority to make this sort of determination; you were not acting outside your scope.

2)Nobody appears to believe that in this case that authority was exercised injudiciously, whimsically, or with any sort of personal favoritism or prejudice.

3)You made it clear throughout the process that the device was not returned for its specific religious content as perceived by the submitter and her co-religionists, bur for the specific anti-religious content as perceived by a far larger number of people, both within and without the SCA. Whether this latter perception is with "good" cause, whether the distressed person "should" feel that way, is not the point -- we're not here to declare or enforce moral correctness.

In fact, as I understand it at least one ancient and important Christian symbol -- the ixΘoσ -- has in the past been banned for entirely non-religious reasons. Presently [and probably forever] an ancient Buddhist/Norse/Native American religious symbol -- the fylfot -- is banned, again for reasons having nothing to do with its religious affiliations. The heraldic unacceptability of the one, and the extra-religious connotations of the other, rendered them unsuitable for SCA use.

4)The Board has a duty of care for the whole organization. We heard from a number of people who have had problems in the communities because of perceptions of the SCA as not merely tolerating, but actively encouraging, various anti-social activities. Again, the rightness or wrongness of their perceptions is not at issue; those perceptions are simply part of the larger environment within which the SCA must operate. We can reasonably expect that the SCA will come up against similar perceptions in the future, and we cannot reasonably expect outsiders to understand the subtleties of authority underlying 'registration,' which to them will inevitably imply official recognition, approval, and sanction.

After a great deal of thought and discussion we believe that the Board's responsibility in this situation is to protect the SCA as a whole against a situation that is very real in the experiences of a significant number of our members.

A PROPOSAL FOR DISCUSSION (or, Da'ud's Dud?) [Well, I don't have a name that starts with a "B", so it can't be "B's Bombshell" like my two immediate predecessors]

Something I would like to have you think about, research, think about some more, and discuss at the Symposium and by mail afterwards: The idea of modifying the Rules for Submission to grant (as we do currently for fieldlessness) a CVD for non-SCA armory. The second required CVD would have to come from something besides fieldlessness, addition or removal of a bordure, chief, or any of the standard cadency marks. The actual effect would be to reduce the amount of difference we require from non-SCA armory to a single CVD which could not be obtained by the addition or removal of a standard cadency charge.

The projected goal of this proposal is, of course, to make simple armory easier to register, as well as to lighten the workload on the heralds. Famous royal armory (England, France, Scotland, Aragon, Castile) would be excepted from this proposal. (Crud, I just realized that even under this proposal, I couldn't pull the fields off of my two badges -- they'd still conflict. Well, phooey.) Most of the really simple armory with which we have conflicts are not SCA devices, but non-SCA (found in Papworth, Fabulous Heraldry, Scots, Rietstap, the Military Ordinary, etc., etc.). Granting a CVD because a piece of armory is outside of our organization would still protect non-SCA armory, but at a reduced level, putting us closer to (but still requiring more than) actual heraldic practice in regards to protecting armory from different heraldic jurisdictions.

[Mind you, an even more radical proposal would be to reduce the amount of difference we require for everything to one CVD and drastically reduce the categories from which a CVD could be obtained, again, specifying that it could not be obtained from addition or removal of a cadency charge. But I don't think we're willing to make so radical a change in our standards.]

In any case, think about it, and let's discuss it. I am not proposing this for implementation any time in the near future (if ever). I do present it as something to consider and discuss before either accepting or rejecting it.

MISCELLANY

Q.What is the term used in French heraldry for sidestepping the Rule of Tincture?

A.The word "cousu" (stitched to) may be used in the blazon, so that, for instance, gules may be charged on azure. E.g., Argent, three lozenges azure, a chief cousu embattled Or. (Belot)

From "The Heraldry Gazette", September 1990, pp. 2 & 12

As a student of French heraldry, I was interested in the item on the term cousu. This is used only for the chief; where English blazon is not concerned about a shield gules with a chief azure, the French is more sensitive.
However, the arms quoted "argent three lozenges azure a chief cousu embattled or", the term is not strictly accurate. Since metal is being placed next to metal, "stitched to" is no appropriate and here the French use the rare term soudé, meaning soldered, by extension of the same principle. As an example of the use of soudé, the arms of the commune of LE GRANDLUCE, Sarthe, are:

D'or au lion d'azur, armé et lampassé de gueules, au chef soudé d'argent chargé de trois pommes de pin de sinople.

Or a lion rampant azure armed and langued gules a chief soldered argent charged with three pine cones vert.

Letter by Brian Timms
from "The Heraldry Gazette"
December 1990, p. 6

[Do NOT try this in the SCA! Da'ud]

Until next month, I remain, as ever,

Your servant,

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