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SCA Field Only Armoury Project: The Whole Thing

UPDATE: The most recent version of my Field Only Armoury Project is now the July 2023 version.

It’s finished! (at least for now…)

After doing the badges, I caught up on the five or so new devices that had been registered since early October 2017 when I’d done my data pull of devices and badges for this crazy project, as well as a couple of errors that awesome readers had found for me.

While sorting those into their proper places I decided to integrate the badges and then republish the entire PDF.

The sort is alphabetically by blazon starting with “Argent masoned azure” and ending 203 devices and badges later with “Vert scaly Or.”. This is every Field Only device and badge registered to an SCA member or territory as of the end of December 2017 (AS 52). It does not include the real-world devices that the SCA’s College of Heralds protects from conflict as being noteworthy.

The entire collection fits on 8 pages, sized to print at 11″ wide by 17″ long – ledger sized paper, by North American paper standards. It’ll also scale down legibly onto legal or even letter/A4 size paper.

Field Only Armoury – April 2018 Final – PDF – 8 pages – ~850KB)

As with my two primary sources (see below) I am releasing this document under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License.

Sources

I have been remiss in not mentioning the sources of most of the graphics I’ve used throughout this project.

Traceable Heraldic Art is Mathghamhain Ua Ruadháin’s spectacular and ever-expanding project, filled with heraldic art assets in a variety of formats including SVG.

The Viking Answer Lady SVG Graphics for Heralds collection is also incredibly useful, and due to the generous licensing on the collection, it’s increasingly being incorporated into the Traceable Heraldic Art collection as well.

The main text at the bottom of each page is from the IM Fell font family via Dafont, a modern re-creation of a 17th C English font family by Igino Marini.

Over on Facebook the Baby Heralds of the SCA group has been a huge help, and I have to thank Mathghamhain for taking a close and encouraging interest in this project right from the start. Some of the work I’ve done on this project might start appearing at his Traceable Heraldic Art pages to fill a few of the gaps in his collection.

My Source SVG

If you just want to look at or print this project’s emblazoned devices and badges, grab the PDF linked to above.

If you want to use my work for further heraldic projects, however, I’m finally making the source SVG available. It’s been developed entirely in Inkscape on both Windows and Ubuntu Linux PCs.

Field Only Armory Project – Everything – 11×17 Poster – April 2018 – SVG file inside a ZIP archive. The SVG is 2.9Mb when unzipped.

Send Me Feedback!

If you use anything of this project at a Herald’s Point or heraldic consulting table, or even just for some heraldic decoration on your walls, send me a photo.

Corrections, suggestions, and such also appreciated. The plan going forward, now that this project is “finished”, is to update it maybe once a year as new Field Only registrations appear in the SCA O&A, or as errors are discovered.

Yours in Service,
Vémundr Syvursson
An Tir
2 April A.S. 52/2018
mka Brian Burger

By Brian Burger

Started this site way, way back in November 1998, when the web was young. It's still here, and so am I.

10 replies on “SCA Field Only Armoury Project: The Whole Thing”

You might want to look into the field treatment “per lindenschaft” (whose spelling I am unsure of, I’m sorry). In SCA heraldry it tends to be blazoned as “Per bend Tincture1 and Tincture1, two linden leaves in bend sinister stems issuant from the line of division counterchanged”, but in the original it’s not charges. There’s an example 6 down on this page: https://oscar.sca.org/index.php?action=100&loi=4350

Whether or not things counterchanged along the line of division like this count as fieldless or charged armoury seems to be one of those perennial debates among heralds. I’ve included most such devices in this project if the O&A has them listed under “FO” (Field Only) but I know there are others out there that aren’t tagged with FO in the O&A – like Constance’s, which does not currently have the FO tag: http://oanda.sca.org/oanda_np.cgi?p=Makepais&b=broad&c=case-insensitive&l=500&s=name+only&d=modern&g=disabled&a=enabled

Thanks for your interest! – Vémundr/Brian

Minor correction: I checked with the archivist to confirm that the emblazon for Eustace FitzJames’s “Bendy sinister embattled Or and gules” features synchronized embattlements on every row, not just on the tops of the red bendlets.

Hi!
Not sure if I am missing this as I look through this amazing resource, or if you are planning adding this in the future, but I found this:
Sigurðr á Skala brekko
The following device associated with this name was registered in July of 2014 (via Drachenwald):
Azure scaly argent.
Please forgive me, if this is already added, and I am just not seeing it. Love this resource – thank you very much, for all your hard word.

You are quite correct, that device should be in my project – but for some reason it is not classified as Field Only (FO) in the SCA’s giant Ordinary & Armorial database. I’ll send an email to get that fixed! – Vémundr/Brian

Hi! Working on a submission that features a “hanging balance” and I came across this entry : Flora di Manfredo
The following device associated with this name was registered in March of 2003 (via Calontir):
Per pale sable and argent all semy of standing balances counterchanged.
Not sure if this meets the “field only” parameters, but I thought I would ask.
Again, thank you for this amazing resource! I do not work at any Herald’s Point, but I do use this informally, helping Newcomers understand what are some options for developing a device.

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