Heraldry as art: An account of its development and practice, chiefly in England

by G. W. Eve

Fig. 73.

Fig. 74.

Fig. 75.

Fig. 76.

Other ordinaries may also be made flory in a similar way, and a partition line may be flory counterflory, so that each division of the field interpenetrates the other in a very beautiful counter-change.

The Bordure (Fig. 71) was extensively used in the Middle Ages as an addition to the arms of a family by which to distinguish its individual members from each other, as it still is in Scotland, and in its application to historic personages is a subject of great interest; for example, the shield of John of Eltham bore the arms of his father, Edward II, the lions of England, differenced with a bordure charged with fleurs-de-lis, in allusion to his mother, Isabella of France. The shield (Fig. 77) appears on the tomb of his nephew, Prince Edmund, at Kings Langley, but a much finer example is that from Prince John’s own monument in Westminster Abbey, at p. 77. This part of the subject will well repay pursuit, though space forbids its further consideration here.

Fig. 77.
Arms of Prince John of Eltham. From the Monument to Prince Edmund of Langley at Kings Langley.

It should be noted that when a chief or a canton occurs in the same arms with a bordure it surmounts the latter, or rather the bordure stops when it touches the other, for both are usually represented as in the same plane. Also, when a coat with a bordure is impaled with another, as in the arms of husband and wife, the bordure stops at the junction with the other coat. Nevertheless, the charges on the bordure, if any, and of specified number, remain, with the rest of the arms, unaffected by its diminution.