Family Crest vs Coat of Arms: What They Actually Mean

A crest is not a coat of arms. The crest is one component of a coat of arms — the ornament fixed to the top of the helmet — and the coat of arms is the whole design, shield included, of which the crest is a small part sitting at the very top.

Almost everybody uses the two terms interchangeably, and the phrase "family crest" has become the standard way to talk about inherited heraldry in English. That usage is recent, it is loose, and it hides something more useful: heraldry is a functioning visual system with rules, a grammar and living authorities who still administer it. It is also, in most European traditions, personal property rather than family property — which is why the "your family coat of arms" plaque sold by surname is not what it claims to be.

What a coat of arms actually is

The formal term for the complete design is an achievement of arms. Most achievements are assembled from the same set of parts, and only the first is compulsory.

The shield (escutcheon). The arms proper. Everything else is decoration hung around it. When a herald says somebody "bears arms", this is what they mean: a specific arrangement of colours and figures on a shield, unique to one person. On a shield belonging to a woman, the same design is often shown on a lozenge (a diamond shape) or an oval instead.

The helm. The helmet drawn above the shield. In British practice its style signals rank — a barred gold helm for a peer, a steel helm with the visor closed for an ordinary armiger, and so on.

The crest. The three-dimensional ornament modelled on top of the helm. Originally a real object made of boiled leather, wood or parchment, worn in tournaments to make a rider identifiable from a distance and from behind. Crests came later than shields and were never universal: plenty of arms have no crest at all.

The wreath or torse. The twisted band of cloth, drawn as six alternating twists in the two principal colours of the arms, that covers the join between crest and helm.

The mantling. The stylised cloth streaming from the helm, usually shown slashed into ribbons. The conventional explanation is that it represents a cloak cut to pieces in battle; it more likely began as practical sun protection on crusade and became an artistic convention.

The motto. A short phrase, usually on a scroll beneath the shield in England and above the crest in Scotland. In England mottoes are not normally part of the formal grant and can be changed at will.

Supporters. The figures standing either side of the shield holding it up — the lion and unicorn of the Royal Arms being the best-known pair. They are restricted: in the UK they go to peers, certain knights and corporate bodies, not to ordinary armigers. Whatever they stand on is the compartment.

Family crest vs coat of arms

So the precise position is this. The coat of arms is the shield design and, by extension, the whole achievement. The crest is the bit on the helmet. One is the sentence; the other is a single word inside it.

The loose usage has an obvious explanation. A crest is compact, detaches cleanly from the rest of the achievement, and survives being shrunk. It became the badge stamped on silverware, pressed into sealing wax, embroidered on livery and engraved on signet rings — precisely because it worked at the size of a thumbnail when a full achievement did not. Nineteenth-century engravers and stationers sold "crests" by the sheet. Within a couple of generations the word had drifted from the object on the helmet to whatever emblem a family put on its notepaper.

Heralds still hold the line on the distinction, and it matters when you are reading old documents or commissioning anything. But "family crest" as a loose synonym for inherited arms is now too entrenched to be wrong in ordinary speech. It is worth correcting mainly where the difference does real work — in what you can and cannot claim.

Where heraldry came from

Heraldry appears in north-western Europe in the middle of the twelfth century, and the reason is armour. As mail gave way to fully enclosed helmets, a mounted man became anonymous. Painting a bold, simple, high-contrast device on his shield solved the problem at a distance, in poor light, at speed.

The earliest well-documented example is the blue shield strewn with gold lions associated with Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, who died in 1151 — it survives on an enamel funerary plaque made after his death. A later chronicler claimed the shield was given to him by Henry I in 1127, though that account was written decades afterwards and is not firm evidence.

The crucial development was hereditary use. A battlefield device is only heraldry once a son inherits his father's design and it becomes an identity rather than a season's paintwork. That shift happens across the second half of the twelfth century, and it is what made arms into something a lawyer could argue about.

Tournaments then industrialised the whole thing. Tournament culture created a professional class — heralds — whose job was to recognise and announce participants, and who consequently became the recordkeepers. From the mid-thirteenth century they compiled rolls of arms: catalogues listing who bore what. Glover's Roll, recording English magnates from around 1253, is among the earliest English examples, and the Dering Roll of the 1270s survives with well over three hundred shields.

How to read a coat of arms

Arms are not described in pictures. They are described in blazon, a compressed technical language derived from Norman French, which specifies a design precisely enough that two artists working from the same blazon will produce recognisably the same arms while differing completely in style.

Tinctures. The palette is fixed and named. The two metals are or (gold or yellow) and argent (silver or white). The principal colours are gules (red), azure (blue), sable (black), vert (green) and purpure (purple). There are also furs, chiefly ermine and vair, which are patterns rather than flat colours.

The rule of tincture. Do not put colour on colour, or metal on metal. Red on blue is bad heraldry; red on gold is good. This is not fussiness — it is a contrast rule, and it exists because the whole point was legibility at distance. It is occasionally broken deliberately, most famously by the arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where gold crosses sit on silver. Such arms were known as armes à enquérir, because the breach was meant to prompt the question.

Ordinaries. The basic geometric shapes laid across the shield: the fess (a horizontal band across the middle), the pale (a vertical band), the bend (a diagonal), the chevron (an inverted V), the cross and the saltire (a diagonal cross). These are the oldest and simplest designs, and often the highest-status ones, because the earliest arms had first pick.

Charges. Everything else placed on the shield. The lion is the most common animal by a wide margin, and its posture is specified: rampant means rearing on one hind leg, passant walking, guardant looking out at the viewer. The eagle is usually displayed, wings spread. The fleur-de-lis, the martlet (a small bird conventionally drawn without feet) and the escallop shell are all standard.

A word of caution about meanings. You will find charts online assigning fixed significance to every colour and animal — azure for loyalty, gules for military fortitude, the lion for courage. Attributed symbolism of this kind does appear in late medieval and early modern writers on heraldry, so it is not a pure invention of the Victorians, but the Victorian heraldic trade popularised it enormously and hardened it into a lookup table. There is very little evidence that medieval armigers chose their tinctures for those reasons. Treat the charts as folklore about heraldry rather than as fact about any particular coat of arms.

One pattern is genuinely well attested: canting arms, which pun on the bearer's name. The Lucy family bore luces (pike). The Bowes family bore bows. Trumpington bore trumpets. Heraldry's real sense of humour is visual wordplay, not colour symbolism.

Who can actually have a coat of arms

This is where the commercial version falls apart.

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, arms are granted by the College of Arms in London, a royal corporation founded in 1484 and operating under the authority of the Earl Marshal. In Scotland, jurisdiction belongs to the Court of the Lord Lyon, which is a court of law with a public register of arms maintained since 1672. In the Republic of Ireland, grants are made by the Chief Herald of Ireland, an office established in 1943 and attached to the National Library.

Arms are granted to a person, not to a surname. They then descend to that person's legitimate descendants, and in England the male-line descendants bear them with small marks of difference — a label for the eldest son during his father's lifetime, a crescent for the second, a mullet for the third — so that two living relatives are never bearing exactly the same arms. In Scotland the system is stricter still: only the head of the family bears the undifferenced arms, and every other descendant must apply to matriculate a personally differenced version in their own name.

Which means there is no such thing as a coat of arms belonging to everyone called Smith, or Murphy, or Shephard. Shared surname is not shared descent. The businesses that sell "the Robertson family crest" on a scroll are matching your surname against some armiger who once had it, printing his arms, and selling them to you. The arms are usually real; your connection to them is not established, and displaying them is a claim to someone else's identity.

Scotland takes this considerably more seriously than most people expect. Bearing arms in Scotland without a matriculation is an offence under statute, and the Lord Lyon's court retains jurisdiction to prosecute — actions are rare and usually aimed at commercial misuse, but the legal position is real. England has the High Court of Chivalry for armorial disputes, which sat in 1954 for the first time since 1737 to hear a case brought by Manchester Corporation against a theatre using the city's arms.

Elsewhere the picture varies. Many countries, including the United States, have no granting authority at all, so arms there are simply assumed — free to use, with no legal protection.

Heraldry you already recognise

Once you know the grammar, it turns up constantly.

The Royal Arms of the United Kingdom is quartered: the three gold lions of England in the first and fourth quarters, the red lion rampant of Scotland in the second, the gold harp of Ireland in the third, with the lion and unicorn as supporters and the Garter motto Honi soit qui mal y pense encircling the shield.

University arms are everywhere on graduation certificates. Oxford's open book carries the words Dominus illuminatio mea. Harvard's three books bear the single word Veritas.

Football badges are heraldry-shaped, though most are logos rather than granted arms. A number of English clubs took their emblems from the civic arms of their city, which is why so many badges carry ships, roses or charges that pre-date the club by centuries.

And two charges have escaped heraldry entirely. The fleur-de-lis, the emblem of the French monarchy, now marks the flag of Quebec and the badge of the Scout movement. The double-headed eagle, inherited from Byzantium through the Holy Roman Empire, still stands on the arms of Russia, Serbia and Albania.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a family crest and a coat of arms?

The crest is one part of a coat of arms — the ornament drawn on top of the helmet — while the coat of arms is the entire design, including the shield. Using "family crest" for the whole thing is a modern habit that grew out of the crest being the part small enough to stamp on rings, seals and cutlery. In everyday speech it is understood; in a formal or legal context it is wrong.

Does my family have a coat of arms?

Possibly, but not because of your surname. Arms belong to an individual and pass to their descendants, so the only way to know is to trace a documented line of descent from a specific person to whom arms were granted or recorded. The granting authorities — the College of Arms, the Court of the Lord Lyon, the Chief Herald of Ireland — hold the registers and will search them.

What do the colours on a coat of arms mean?

In most cases, nothing fixed. The charts assigning loyalty to blue or courage to red come from later writers on heraldry and were popularised heavily in the nineteenth century, and there is little evidence that medieval bearers chose their tinctures that way. The one constraint that genuinely governed colour choice was the rule of tincture, which is about contrast and legibility rather than symbolism.

Can I create my own coat of arms?

In the UK and Ireland you can petition the relevant authority for a grant, which involves an application, fees and a design worked out with a herald; the result is legally yours and heritable. In countries with no heraldic authority you can simply assume arms and use them, though they carry no legal protection. Designing something for yourself is entirely legitimate — assuming arms that already belong to someone else is not.

Where to go next

Heraldry rewards this kind of attention because it is a system that still works: a set of rules built for a practical problem in the twelfth century, carried forward almost unbroken, and still visible on passports, shirts and letterheads. Most history is like that once you look closely — stranger and more specific than the summary version.

If you want more of it, our 10 fascinating history stories collection is a good place to start, and the best history books for beginners covers where to go if you would rather read at length.

Chunks publishes one free five-minute story every day — written by people, narrated properly, on iOS and Android.