This webpage is about the subdivision of the art of heraldry that deals with the proper differencing of armorial bearings.
This is not going to be a tedious retread of the Rules for Submission. The notion of conflicting coats of arms in the SCA derives from a study of the various forms of marks of cadency, but cadencing attempts to show relationship, where avoiding conflict is an attempt to avoid appearing related to anyone. Instead, what I hope to do is show how cadency evolved in several parts of Europe: France, the British Isles, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Iberian Peninsula.
In France and the British Isles, the first evidence for cadency is in rolls of arms from the 13th century, such as the Siege of Caerlaverock. These are the oldest forms of heraldic literature, little more than lists of men and the coats of arms that they bore. Often, they list related men together.
The marks of cadency that they used were varied. The most common was the addition of a label, or charging the label between siblings. Somewhat less frequently, they would use a bordure, a canton, or a bend. I also observed examples of tertiary charges, changes in the number of charges between the generations, tincture changes in the charges and fields, and the addition of secondary charges. More unusually, I saw changes of line on a few charges.
These early practices were refined in France and the British Isles as the Middle Ages wore on. For example, it seems to have been a practice of French cadency to add ordinaries, like chevrons or fesses, to coats of arms, transforming them to what by SCA standards would be completely different coats of arms!
An example of late mediaeval French cadency in an idealized situation is contained in the armorials of the coats of arms of the knights of the Round Table. Since many of the various characters are all members of one large family or another (for example, the Pendragons or the Du Lacs), their coats of arms are, by and large, cadenced from the coats of arms of the "founders."
The most typical marks of cadency turn out to be the use of orles or bordures, geratting (the addition of a semy of secondary charges), tincture changes to fields and charges, and overall charges like bends and fesses. Labels were also used, but not as frequently as these ordinaries. In the real world, marks of cadency dropped out of use in France, to such a degree that by the 18th century, only the royal family used them.
In the British Isles, cadency took on a very specialized nature. By the end of the 15th century, the English king's heralds were given the power to assign the marks of cadency to the various descendants of an armiger. Late mediaeval English cadency has been captured, as it were, in a number of books, some in print, and some in manuscript, which have managed to come down to our own day.
One of these books was by a comparative rarity-at the time-an authoress. The lady was Juliana Barnes, who was a prioress, and her book was the Book of Saint Albans, a sort of catch-all collection of essays, presumably by her, of various genteel pursuits-including heraldry. Among other things, she brought up cadency. Barnes specified eleven charges to be used in differencing by geratting, which seems to have been popular in her part of England. They are:
They seem to have been used indiscriminately by families to simply mark brothers off from one another, with no hint of an order.
However, that was not the only form of cadencing. There is plenty of evidence that the earlier marks of cadency were also in use.
In England, the time when one could choose from a wild variety of marks of cadency came to a close when the Tudors and their heralds took over. They started the practice of regular heraldic visitations, which were not to be discontinued until after the Glorious Revolution. The heralds were given writs from the king and the Earl Marshal, who was the heralds' superior, to go to a specific shire and ensure that people were not illegally claiming coats of arms or refusing to use marks of cadency. The modern system of English cadency, which dates from at least Elizabeth I's reign, assigns a single charge to each son.
The charges may be secondary or tertiary. Often, they're placed at the chief of the shield. English custom reserves argent marks of cadency to the royalty. Gules marks of cadency are preferred for the rest of England. Sometimes, marks of cadency were tertiaries. Usually, whether they were secondaries or tertiaries, they were drawn smaller than the secondaries and tertiaries that were part of the original coat of arms.
There are a couple of problems with this system. Among other things, a grandson has to add his mark of cadency onto the previously given mark of cadency, creating, in at least one case, three cadencing charges, one atop another! Another problem is that the symbols for a nephew and an uncle may be identical, making it hard for a herald to identify which particular individual is in that surcoat and armor.
The Scots, today, are the major cheerleaders for cadency, and, indeed, the modern Scots system is most elaborate, involving the use of differently tinctured bordures and changing the lines of the bordures to differentiate one man from another. The mediaeval Scots also seem to have favored the bordure above other marks of cadency, although some have also noted a fondness for mullets.
The Holy Roman Empire, composed as it was of several different cultures, is a bit complex to handle as an entity on its own. Instead, the regions within the Holy Roman Empire will be separately discussed.
In Germany, cadency took root early on. Originally, changes to the tinctures of the field or of the charges were the typical mark of cadency. Later, when crests became an inheritable part of an individual's heraldic achievement, cadencing, at least on paper, was often done by displaying the many crests that an individual was entitled to use. This was done practically nowhere else; in Mediterranean Europe, displaying crests seems to be the exception rather than the rule, and in the rest of Atlantic Europe, displaying a single paternal crest is generally the practice, with exceptions like augmentations of honor.
In the Low Countries, today's Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium, marks of cadency also took an early root-in fact, one scholar, Beryl Platts, thinks that heraldry was invented in this area. One author has stated that they used the canton as a mark of cadency, adding that it may have also been used for purposes of marshalling. However, my examination of a roll of arms of the Low Countries from the 16th century also shows that they also used a number of marks of cadency, including bordures, overall charges, secondaries, etc..
In Italy, the oddball of the Holy Roman Empire, although heraldry did take root there, it was something of an exotic graft onto a stock that still drew from roots that lay deep in the soil of Antiquity. Marks of cadency were used in Italy in the fourteenth century, according to Bartolo de Sasso Ferrato, the earliest scholar of heraldic law, but by the end of the seventeenth century, cadency was honored more in the breach than in the observance.
In the Iberian Peninsula, where concern for limpieza de sangre-that is, descent without a trace of Moorish or Jewish parentage-became a manic quest by the end of the Middle Ages, it became important not just to show one's paternal descent, but also one's maternal descent. Some of the familiar marks of cadency saw occasional use in the Iberian Peninsula, like the bend and the label, but here, as in Scotland, the bordure took on its challengers, and all but drove them from the field. In fact, these days, cadency within a set of brothers seems to be more the exception than the rule.
However, unlike the Scots, the Iberians rarely changed the line of the bordure to create a mark of cadency. Instead, they added a bordure that would be reminiscent of the maternal coat of arms. For example: A who bears Or a delf sable marries B who bears Gules a mullet argent. Their son would bear Or a delf sable within a bordure gules mulletty argent. The coat of arms of the royal house of Portugal is an example of Iberian cadencing by bordure.
Also, the Iberians pioneered quartering. The first example was apparently the royal house of Castille and Leon, in the 13th century. The concept moved from the Iberian Peninsula to the rest of Europe fairly quickly. It is a general principle, seemingly throughout Europe, that quartering removes the need for cadencing the combined coats of arms. Instead, the quartered coat of arms, as an entirely new and indivisible coat of arms, must be differenced, sometimes by placing the cadencing charge in the fess point. Additionally, in much of Europe, augmentations of honor also created a new coat of arms from the original coat, with its previous marks of cadency plus the augmentation.
SCA applications of the various systems of cadency certainly could exist. For example, people in a close-knit household who want to show a common lineage would be natural candidates for filing letters of permission to conflict, and then cadencing in accordance with the customs of the household's culture.
I used a number of resources in writing this opus. I used a mix of primary and secondary sources, most of which are commonly available.
The primary sources were Bergman's Armorial de Flandre du XVIme Siecle, the Zurich Roll of Arms, and Brault's Eight 13th Century Rolls of Arms in French and Anglo-Norman Blazon.
The secondary works were Gayre of Gayre and Nigg's Heraldic Cadency, Fox-Davies' Complete Guide to Heraldry, and Rothery's Concise Encyclopedia of Heraldry. Also, I used my own webpage, The Use of Brisures in the Coats of Arms of Characters in Arthurian Literature.