Heraldry Reference Material

There is an enormous amount of heraldry and blazonry reference material on the web. In this section I am attempting the near impossible task of bringing order and coherence to at least a part of this vast resource. The effort is two parts:

• To provide a curated, annotated set of links to existing resources
• To provide existing resources in a more accessible form

To provide a flavour of what I am proposing, here are examples of each type:

Annotated Links

I have searched the Internet Archive for useful, out of copyright resources that refer specifically to British Heraldry. I intend to use this model to provide similar annotated and organised links to other types of resource.

Accessible Resources

Although PDF files are useful, they are not always particularly accessible; there may be OCR errors (if the images have been converted at all), searching is difficult; text in columns can be hard to select and so on. As an example of what can be achieved with native HTML formatted documents I present Parker's Dictionary of Heraldry.. For an alternative definition, I have also provided a second dictionary, Elvin's Dictionary of Heraldry. which has many more entries, but each is less detailed.

I also have available another work, The Book of Public Arms. This is the result of a learning exercise to understand the process of converting scanned PDF documents into more easily accessible web resources. There is also a brief discussion of the process to convert this work from the scanned sources to web page format available.

And finally, for now, there is a work-in-progress, an annotated French to English translation of J.B Rietstap's Armorial Général. The bulk of the front matter has been translated, and is presented in a side-by-side comparison with the original French, and work is underway on the Glossary, the page for the letter 'A' showing the final intention. Clicking on the image links will bring up a lightbox of the appropriate item. If you would like to help with this translation (or correct anything that I have done so far!) please get in touch.