[antir-heralds] can you charge a quarter?

[chrisact at qwickconnect.net]

Ursula Whitcher wrote:
> Britt wrote:
>   
>> On Nov 11, 2007 10:02 PM, Ursula Whitcher <ursula at math.washington.edu> wrote:
>>     
>>> The SCA's Glossary of Terms lists the charged canton as reserved to
>>> people with augmentations of arms.  What about the quarter (a peripheral
>>> charge like a canton, occupying 1/4 of the field)?  Is there any reason
>>> that a quarter can't be charged?
>>>       
>> Quarter is to canton as chevron is to chevronel.  Different size of
>> the same basic thing.  Of the quarter, Parker says, "As already
>> pointed out, it seems in ancient to have ben practically synonymous
>> with the Cauntel or Canton." then also, "It may be observed, perhaps,
>> that in modern English arms the quarter is comparatively rare, the
>> canton having superseded it. In the French arms, however, the term
>> franc-quartier is frequently used, which appears to be neither so
>> large as a quarter nor so small as a canton, but like the latter has
>> its definite position in the dexter chief. The name franc-canton is
>> synonymous with it. The term quartier by itself is seldom, if ever,
>> employed except in connection with quarterly(fr. ecartelé)."
>>     
>
> Would historical practice make any difference?  I'm not really up on the 
> history of augmentations of arms, but I can imagine a situation in which 
> augmentations were invented relatively late (at a time when the canton 
> had more or less superseded the quarter), so that the use of charged 
> quarters and the use of charged cantons as augmentations weren't at all 
> contemporary.  (Of course, that assumes that the early quarters *were* 
> sometimes charged.)
>   

According to Julian Franklyn, in /Shield and Crest/, "The exact date of 
the emergence of the idea of augmentation is as nebulous as is the exact 
date of the rise of heraldry itself.... John Philipot, a 
seventeenth-century heraldist and author, invented the story of the 
origin of augmentation as an act of Edward III, who granted to Sir John 
Pelham two round buckles with thongs,.... The...service for which Sir 
John was thus rewarded was the capture of the French King at the Battle 
of Poictiers (Poitiers) on September 19th, 1356." Later, Franklyn points 
out that the augmentation was in the form of a quartering of the Pelham 
arms; formerly it had been "Azure, three pelicans vulning themselves"; 
after the augmentation the arms became "Quarterly: I and IV azure, three 
pelicans vulning themselves; II and III gules, two pieces of belts with 
buckles, erect in pale the buckles upward, argent". Not quite the same 
thing, but I find it indicitive.

More to the point: at the Battle of Naseby, Edward Lake was wounded some 
16 times, and had to fight on holding the reins in his teeth. This 
heroism received a *quarter* of augmentation ("gules, a dexter arm 
embowed in armour holding in the hand a sword erect all proper, thereto 
affixed a banner argent charged with a cross between 16 escucheons of 
the field [i.e., gules], on the cross a lion of England"). The Battle of 
Naseby was in 1645, so this is at the end of the "gray period"; however, 
that makes the assumption that quarters weren't used for augmentation 
untenable.

Thus, IMO a charged quarter would be presumptuous.


~~Basil Dragonstrike

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