Canting arms

Canting arms are heraldic bearings that represent the bearer's name (or, less often, some attribute or function) in a visual pun or rebus. The term was derived from the Anglo-Norman cant, meaning song or singing.

A common simple example of canting arms: the castle representing the Kingdom of Castile and the lion representing the Kingdom of León.[1]

French heralds used the term armes parlantes (English: "talking arms"), as they would sound out the name of the armiger. Many armorial allusions require research for elucidation because of changes in language and dialect that have occurred over the past millennium.

Canting arms – some in the form of rebuses – are quite common in German civic heraldry. They have also been increasingly used in the 20th century among the British royal family. When the visual representation is not straightforward but as complex as a rebus, this is sometimes called a rebus coat of arms. An in-joke among the Society for Creative Anachronism heralds is the pun, "Heralds don't pun; they cant."[2] That lends itself to the perhaps more vulgar jibe that heraldic arms are sometimes taken up in fun, though to bear them is not always a mark of cant. A few families have genuinely had armorial crests for centuries traceable back through numerous generations to feudal social relations of the European Middle Ages. Others, however, began to sport them many long years after the first establishment of the College of Arms, and may be regarded, at least by some socially superior snobs, as parvenus. For such indicia are sometimes taken to convey, or at least to imply a claim to, social distinction. However, all such arms were once newly created.

Examples of canting arms

Personal coat of arms

A famous example of canting arms is those of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (consort of King George VI of the United Kingdom). Her arms (pictured below) contain in sinister (i.e. on the bearer's left, viewer's right) the bows and blue lions that make up the arms of the Bowes and Lyon families.

Municipal coat of arms

Municipal coats of arms which interpret the town's name in rebus form are also called canting. Here are a few examples.

Ecclesiastical coats of arms

Notes

  1. "Tinctures".
  2. Neznanich, Modar. "Heraldry for Those Who Cant" (PDF). Retrieved 2 July 2012. Cites 72 historical examples of canting arms, as well as SCA usage.
  3. Englefield, Eric (1979). Flags. Ward Lock. p. 104.
  4. Room, Adrian (1988). Dictionary Of Place Names In The British Isles. Bloomsbury. p. 128.
  5. Schneider, Klaus-Michael. "Municipality of Manacor". Flags of the World. CRW Flags. Retrieved 16 October 2013.
  6. "Bishop Boyea arms". Diocese of Lansing. Roman Catholic Diocese of Lansing. Retrieved 9 May 2017.
  7. "Bishop Barres arms". Diocese of Rockville Centre. Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre. Retrieved 26 July 2018.

References

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