The origin of the expression ‘a coat of arms’ we have already seen, as also the cause why heraldric ensigns are borne upon a shield. Shields have been made of every imaginable shape according to the taste of the age or the fancy of the bearer, with these two restrictions, that the shields of knights-bannerets must be square, and those of ladies in the form of a lozenge. The most usual, because the most convenient, shape is that which is technically called the heater-shield—from its resemblance to the heater of an iron—with some slight variations. Our friend Sylvanus Morgan, whose ingenuity all must admire, in defiance of the oft-quoted proverb:
“When Adam digged and Eve span,
Who was then the Gentleman?”
deduces this shape for men, and that of the lozenge for women, from the spade of Adam, and the spindle of Eve!
The ground or field of every coat of arms must be either of metal, colour, or fur. The METALS of heraldry are, Or==gold, and argent==silver, and as the shield of war was antiently of metal, either embossed or enamelled, the retention of the two precious metals as the field of an escocheon is easily accounted for. The COLOURS are gules, azure, vert, purpure, sable, tenne, and sanguine. While some of these terms are French; others, though coming to us through that medium, are originally from other languages. Gules, according to Ducange, is goulis, guelle, gula sive guella, the red colour of the mouth or throat of an animal. Mackenzie derives it from the Hebrew gulude, a piece of red cloth, or from the Arabic gule, a red rose. Ghul in the Persian signifies rose-coloured, and Ghulistan is ‘the country of roses.’ It is probably one of those importations from the East which the Crusades introduced, both into the elements of armory and the nomenclature of the science. It was sometimes called vermeil[84] (vermilion) and rouget. An antient knight is represented as bearing a plain red banner without any charge:
“Mais Eurmenions de la Brette
La baniere eut toute rougecte.”[85]
The barbarous term blodius was likewise occasionally used to express this colour.
Azure==light-blue, is a French corruption of the Arabic word lazur or lazuli. The lapis lazuli is a copper ore, very compact and hard, which is found in detached lumps, of an elegant blue colour, and to it the artist is indebted for his beautiful ultra-marine. This colour, still one of the dearest of pigments, was antiently in great request, and called ‘beyond-sea azure.’[86] The lapis lazuli is found in Persia, Bucharia, and China.
Vert (French) is light green. This word was applied at an early period “to every thing,” says Cowell, “that grows and bears a green leaf within the forest that may cover and hide a deer.” Vert and venison, in the vocabulary of woodcraft, were as inseparable as shadow and substance. To vert signified to enter the forest, as in an old song of the thirteenth century:
“Sumer is i-cumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu;
Groweth sed and bloweth med,
And springeth the wde nu.
Sing Cuccu, Cuccu!
Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lhouth after calvé cu,
Bulluc sterteth,
Bucke VERTETH,
Murie sing Cuccu,” etc.
This colour was antiently called synople, and in the Boke of St. Albans synobylt, a word which Colombiere derives from the Latin sinopis, a dyeing mineral,[87] or from Synople, a town in the Levant, whence a green dye was procured.