Heraldry Tinctures

In Scotland, displaying a coat of arms that was never granted to you can lead to a prosecution before a heraldic court.^{1, 4}

That court, the Court of the Lord Lyon, keeps a Public Register of All Arms and Bearings that was established by an Act of the Scottish Parliament in 1672.¹

Heraldry works with a small, fixed palette.² The metals are gold and silver, called or and argent, and the colours are red, blue, black, green and purple, called gules, azure, sable, vert and purpure, with tenné and sanguine as further shades.² The furs, such as ermine and vair, form a third group.² The central rule is that colour is not laid on colour, nor metal on metal, so a shield usually carries metal charges on a coloured field or the reverse.²

The rule was observed long before it was written down.³ The heraldic historian François Velde notes that the earliest treatise he lists to state it is the Argentaye tract of about 1410.³ He reports that the French historian Michel Pastoureau examined about 10,000 arms from thirteenth to fifteenth century armorials and found violation rates above 2 per cent only for Castile and Granada.³ The best-known exception is the arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, gold crosses on silver, which later writers justified by the kingdom's special status.³

In Scotland the palette is still administered.⁴ A petitioner applies to the Lord Lyon, who designs the arms with them and writes the blazon, the formal description in heraldic terms.⁴ Herald painters then produce the grant on vellum and enter the arms in the Public Register, a process that generally takes 30 to 36 months.⁴ Once recorded, the arms are protected under Scots law, and suspected misuse can be reported to the Procurator Fiscal of the court.⁴ The Fiscal is appointed by the Scottish Ministers and decides whether to bring a case before the Lord Lyon for judgement.¹

England's equivalent is the High Court of Chivalry.⁵ On 21 December 1954 it sat for the first time in over two hundred years, when the City of Manchester sued the Manchester Palace of Varieties.⁵ The theatre had displayed the city's arms inside the building for over twenty years and on its company seal for over sixty.⁵ Lord Goddard, the Lord Chief Justice, sat as the Earl Marshal's Surrogate, held that the court had jurisdiction, and gave judgment for agreed costs of £300.⁵

A coat of arms is a set of colours tied to a name and written into a register, and in Scotland that tie remains a matter of law.