[antir-heralds] can you charge a quarter?

[Britt]

> 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 had more or less superseded the quarter), so that the use of charged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.)

With the difference between the canton and the quarter practically
requiring a ruler or calipers to determine, honestly the 'square in
the upper corner' being charged is really the point rather than the
specifics of which it is.

> > And finally, it's appearance rather than dimensions which cause trouble.
> >
> > RfS XI.4. Arms of Pretense and Augmentations of Honor -Armory that
> > uses charges in such a way as to appear to be arms of pretense or an
> > unearned augmentation of honor is considered presumptuous.
>
> But it would only appear to be an unearned augmentation if you were
> enough of a herald to interpret charged cantons as augmentations, but
> neither distinguished the quarter from the diminutive version nor were
> able to recognize augmentations from particular regimes.

And how many times per year are quartered devices returned for
presumption?  The general public really doesn't know what period
armory looked like (many people don't seem to care), but we still
enforce that quartered arms are unregisterable. It doesn't matter that
thanks to popular use of bad heraldry quartered stuff seems 'normal'
to most people (constant war on my end - trying to keep schoolteachers
from giving children pre-quartered shields to design their 'arms' on!)
the quartering is 'normal'.  But the SCA knows better.  I'd say the
same goes for augmentations. The heraldic authority of the SCA is here
to educate. We're in competition with some pretty heinous real-world,
non-heraldic sources of misinformation, but we persist.  And a charged
canton or quarter is reserved for an augmentation because of historic
practice.  It comes right back to 'the square in the upper corner'.
Charge it, it's an augmentation.

I honestly think that short of proving a pattern of charged quarters
not meaning augmentations and getting by using RfS VIII.6. you're not
going to get it registered.

- Teceangl