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Welcome to the The General Armory WikiEdit

Burke's General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales

A wiki to present the heraldry of the United Kingdom, with statistical analysis, visual representations, and an ordinary (arms-finder), drawn from Burke's General Armory (edition of 1884)

BackgroundEdit

In the 19th century, Sir Bernard Burke attempted to draw together all the extant information on heraldic arms granted in the United Kingdom (and its precedessor states, England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales) into a single document: the General Armory.

Running to over 1300 pages, and around (my estimate) 80,000 entries, this is a significant work of reference for heraldists. Although there are many errors, as would be expected in a work of this size and complexity, it is still a useful starting point.

Aims of this wikiEdit

To make the information in the General Armory widely available and searchable online
To implement a consistent, clear and uniform style for presenting the blazons
To present statistical analysis: which tinctures are the most commonly used? Which charges are the most popular? What terms in the generally used glossaries and dictionaries of heraldry are actually used?
To present as many of the blazons as possible in graphic form
To reverse engineer the information, which in the General Armory is only presented indexed by the family name of the grantee, in order to create an ordinary by which arms can be identified from the blazon or an image

Note that my interest is primarily in the escutcheon - the blazoning of the shield - so (at least initially) this will be the only part of the complete blazon that wll be clarified, made consistent, and represented graphically.