01 Intellectual seriousness
Sources before stories.
Claims about descent, jurisdiction, historical use and authorisation need evidence. A surname is useful for finding records; the records must establish the relationship.
✦ Why this project exists
Why build this?
Heraldry becomes easier to understand when you can change a drawing, read its description, and follow a claim back to the document that supports it.
✦ The premise
Give the reader
something to work with.
Start with a shield on an old building. We can describe the drawing, but that leaves several questions: who displayed it, when it was made, whether it changed, and what the people using it meant to claim. Answering those questions takes us from art into history, genealogy, language, and the institutions that regulate arms. Occasionally it also requires an argument about a bird that doesn't have feet. The subjects belong together because the object makes us use them together.
The Heraldry Project gives you a place to work through those connections. The readings establish the terms and methods; the drawing tools make changes visible; the object studies put the method to work on surviving evidence. The teaching shields are original examples, so you can experiment with them without confusing an exercise with somebody else's documented arms.
The useful result is a reader who can explain what a shield shows and why a particular historical claim is justified. You should be able to identify the source, recognize the limits of what it establishes, and say what further evidence would help. Knowing the vocabulary makes that work easier; memorizing the vocabulary alone does not finish it.
✦ The operating principles
How the teaching works.
Think of this as the project charter: the things that should still be true when we have a hundred more lessons and an absurd number of toys.
02 Learning by doing
Manipulate the rules.
A student should be able to turn a fess into a pale, change its tincture and see the blazon respond. That change makes a relationship visible which a definition alone may leave unclear.
03 Access by design
Ready wherever you are.
Reading and practice should work well on a phone, with a keyboard, and with assistive technologies.
04 Honest limitations
A tool is not an authority.
Our drawings are teaching studies. Automated blazons are limited. Legal recognition and armorial ownership need their own processes.
05 Respect for history
Identify the place and period.
Traditions differ across regions and centuries. We make those distinctions explicit and preserve uncertainty when the record requires it.
06 A living classroom
Keep improving.
Lessons, interactions, diagrams, sources and the artistic engine should develop together, with correction rather than false certainty.
✦ The person responsible
James P. Howard, II
The Heraldry Project is part of a broader independent effort to make research, teaching, and serious scholarship more usable to the public. It is not sponsored, certified, or endorsed by any heraldic authority.
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Who can answer an entitlement question.
This is an educational site, not a grant-issuing body, accredited university, genealogical certification agency or source of legal advice. The College of Arms, the Court of the Lord Lyon, and the Canadian Heraldic Authority speak for themselves, not for us.
✦ Begin with an example
Now, go make
something.
Begin with a simple shield and learn which changes alter its identity. Quarterings will give us plenty to argue about once we can read the field.
Begin with lesson one ↗