The Handbook to English Heraldry

How it begins

This text uses utf-8 (unicode) file encoding. If the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, you may have an incompatible browser or unavailable fonts. First, make sure that the browser’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change your browser’s default font. In the printed book, all illustrations were line drawings using the conventional color representations explained in Chapter V. For this e-text, some illustrations are also shown in “colorized” form. All colors were chosen to be “web-safe” for reliable display in all browsers; they are not intented to reproduce the exact shades of standard heraldry.