A family coat of arms in wood: finding, designing and making your arms

A coat of arms, or arms, is a coloured emblem belonging to a person, a family or a community. Blazon is the set of figures, colours and rules used to compose and describe it, a grammar of sorts; heraldry is the discipline that studies it. In everyday English, 'family crest' is often used for the whole coat of arms, although, strictly speaking, the crest is only the device set on top of the helm; in French, blason can likewise mean the arms themselves.

Coats of arms appeared in western Europe in the twelfth century, on shields and banners, and most medieval ones have come down to us through seals. To describe them without a drawing, a coded language, the blazon, first states the colour of the field, then the partitions, the main charge and the secondary charges. A regional example: 'Gules, a cross clechée, voided and pommetty Or' is enough to describe the Cross of Toulouse.

No, and it is the most persistent misconception. In the Middle Ages, coats of arms quickly spread through the whole of society: women adopted them from the 1180s, burghers around 1220, tradesmen around 1280, and in some regions peasants bore them too. Of the medieval arms known in the West, only one in two is thought to have been noble. The Pas-de-Calais archives put it plainly: coats of arms were never reserved for the nobility.

In France today, the principle is free adoption and free use. Abolished in 1790 and restored in 1808 for the imperial nobility alone, coats of arms have been subject to no specific law since 1872, as the historian Michel Pastoureau points out. Anyone can therefore create their own. One limit remains: you must not take arms already borne by another family, which may be treated as usurpation or an infringement of their name, and is then a matter for the civil courts. The United Kingdom is different: arms are granted there by the College of Arms, for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, or by the Court of the Lord Lyon, for Scotland, which has criminal jurisdiction in heraldic matters.

First rule: arms belong to a family, not to a surname. The same surname may correspond to several coats of arms, since each branch may have borne its own, and the French Genealogy Federation advises checking that any arms you find really belong to your branch and not to an unrelated family with the same name. Arms found from the surname alone are a lead to check, not proof.

For French families, the reference source is the Armorial général de France, born of an edict of Louis XIV in November 1696 that made the registration of arms compulsory. It contains more than 115,000 family coats of arms and some 3,000 arms of towns and communities, arranged by province and généralité. Held by the Bibliothèque nationale de France, it can be consulted in full on Gallica. Knowing which region the family came from saves a great deal of time.

Keep a critical eye: the edict was aimed mainly at raising revenue, registration had to be paid for, and some arms were assigned automatically by the administration, sometimes in batches, to families who had asked for nothing. So cross-check with other traces: notarial deeds, seals, carved stones, silverware or engraved objects kept in the family.

In France, if no trace exists, nothing prevents you from composing new arms. They will not have the historical value of ancient arms, but they will be yours. Everything starts with the tinctures: two metals, or (gold) and argent (silver), and the colours, gules for red, azure for blue, vert for green, sable for black and, more rarely, purpure. Then there are the furs, such as ermine or vair.

One rule is not up for debate: never metal on metal, nor colour on colour. A gold lion on a silver field is hard to read; gold on azure, it can be seen from afar. For the rest, restraint pays: a field and one or two clearly legible charges. Canting arms, whose charges echo the family name, offer an entertaining route: Colbert's snake echoes the Latin coluber.

To make your family coat of arms in wood, we need a starting point: the text of the blazon, a copy taken from an armorial, a photo of a seal or a carved stone, or simply your sketch. We work out the drawing with you (shield, charges, any motto), then the piece is designed in 3D before being made in our workshop in Cornebarrieu. Finishing and detail work are done by hand.

Then the colours have to be rendered. They can be painted, or suggested in the wood by the hatching used in heraldic engraving: vertical lines for gules, horizontal for azure, diagonal for vert, crossed for sable. Oak and walnut suit a coat of arms left as bare wood, poplar a painted version.

Each personalised coat of arms is studied and priced on quotation. Browse our coats of arms and portraits and the bespoke portrait or family coat of arms offer, then send us your documents: we will tell you what can be made and in what form. For a gift with a fixed date, mention it in your first message; the timetable is confirmed with the quotation.