Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Heraldry and vexillology

Question of correct naming and spelling in English, translating Polish

Greetings to all! I copy discussion from talk page of --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here}and also from article Heraldic family. I invite You to discuss this matter to reach consensus.

Response from the Lyon Court

Many in this project have been frustrated by the lack of information about the arms of certain members of the British royal family in the past two years. I tested out the option of asking the heraldic authorities directly. I have had indirect contact with officers of arms on quite a few occasions (such as at society meetings) but I decided to use the WhatDoTheyKnow platform so that any response would be publicly cite-able.

Two days ago I submitted this question:

Dear Court of the Lord Lyon,

Two years into the New Carolean period there remains some ambiguity about the armorial bearings of His Majesty's wife and sons. I request some clarification on the following points: 1. Her Majesty Queen Camilla was appointed a Lady of the Thistle last year. Her escutcheon and banner have since been put on display at the High Kirk of Edinburgh in the usual manner. Has she also been granted the use of supporters? 2. His Royal Highness Prince William, Earl of Strathearn, was granted a differenced version of the royal arms during the previous reign (also displayed at the High Kirk). Upon his father's accession he became heir apparent to the throne, Duke of Rothesay, etc. Has he acquired the use of arms, badges, banners etc. associated with that status? 3. Has the Earl of Dumbarton ever been granted a differenced version of the royal arms for use within the Lord Lyon's jurisdiction? 4. Are the Duchess of Rothesay and the Countess of Dumbarton armigerous within said jurisdiction? Yours faithfully,

Robin S. Taylor

Today I received this response:

Dear Mr Taylor, The Lyon Office is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, we are a public register, as such, we facilitate access for researchers and genealogists to search our archives, we do not research these records for third parties. The information we hold is also available through the Scotland's People website under their Legal search option. If you wish to research British Royal heraldry, this information is held in the College of Arms in London, we hold one Royal arms, that of the Monarch's Royal Arms as used in Scotland.

Kind regards

Kevin

— Kevin Greig Lyon Office Manager, Court of the Lord Lyon

This is broadly in line with what I was expecting (i.e. that they're not required to answer these requests so the information is reserved for paying customers) though the use of "research" struck me as a little strange given one would expect these details of living royals to be in present use and not to need any digging (though they may simply have refused on principle to avoid opening the door to more onerous requests). That final sentence is the most intriguing - the Lyon Court only holds the monarch's undifferenced arms, and anything else is found at the College of Arms, even though I explicitly asked about the Lord Lyon's jurisdiction.

I will note that another user, L R Jones has spent the past few weeks emailing multiple local councils in England to ask for clarification on their armorial bearings and has been successful in most of them. Of course, these requests are rather different in scope to mine.

Robin S. Taylor (talk) 21:45, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for Flag of convenience

Flag of convenience has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 16:55, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

New UK government coat of arms

The official rendering of the royal arms of Charles III in right of the United Kingdom as used by His Majesty's Government has changed. See this article from the Cabinet Office.

The Tudor crown is now used in place of St Edward's and the shield is no longer fully encircled by the Garter. Robin S. Taylor (talk) 21:17, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Good article reassessment for History of the flags of Romania

History of the flags of Romania has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Z1720 (talk) 21:20, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Dimensions of Flag of Haiti's coat of arms

Is there any source for the dimensions of the coat of arms on Haiti's flag? Wikipedia's one seems much smaller than (for example) the one shown at the bottom of https://www.haiti.org/flag-and-coat-of-arms/ by Haiti's US embassy. It also is clearly much smaller than those used by Haiti's government: https://www.foreignlobby.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Apres-4-jours-dinstabilite-Jovenel-Moise-sadresse-enfin-a-la-nation-640x405-1.jpg My understanding is they reverted to the pre-1964 flag, so shouldn't it be the same as that?

pre-1964 flag: current flag as shown by wikipedia: The Adept

(talk) 23:42, 2 November 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Flag of Kannada#Requested move 18 November 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Flag of Kannada#Requested move 18 November 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Reading Beans, Duke of Rivia 02:06, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Symbols of the Novgorod Republic

The questionable Banner of the Novgorod Republic (c. 1385).svg

Hi folks, I was thinking about what symbols we could use to represent the Novgorod Republic in articles like List of wars involving the Novgorod Republic (that I'm currently updating), in infoboxes on military conflicts, diplomacy, administrative divisions etc. Mellk recently removed File:Banner of the Novgorod Republic (c. 1385).svg (based on the Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms c. 1385) from the main article because it was questionable, which is probably a good move. When I wrote this list of wars back in April 2024, I didn't yet know that the historicity of that banner from c. 1385 was questionable. Then in June 2024, this discussion happened: Talk:Kievan Rus'/Archive 9#Adding the historical, triangular red banner of Kievan Rus according to frescoes from the chronicles to the article. The problem is that File:Banner of the Novgorod Republic (c. 1385).svg is still widely used as representation of the Novgorod Republic in many other articles. I'd like to use something else, but what would be historically accurate? Let me ping the other editors involved @Ermenrich, Alaexis, Altenmann, and Srnec: as you all seem to be a lot more knowledgeable about medieval manuscripts than I am.

On Commons, what I see time and time again, especially at c:Category:Symbols of the Novgorod Republic and c:Category:Novegorode (coat of arms) (not sure why these categories are not merged), is this coat of arms with a white cross on a red field. These seem to be based on several actual historical roll of arms (armorial) depictions, including most frequently:

• the Armorial Lyncenich (ru:Гербовник Линцених, c:Category:Armorial Lyncenich), dated 1442, where it is called nowengrote (probably "Novgorod"?); and
• the Codex Bergshammar or Bergshammarsamlingen (sv:Bergshammarvapenboken, ru:Кодекс Бергшамара, c:Category:Codex Bergshammar), dated 1440s, where, however, there is some confusion over what it is.
  • File:Volhynian CoA.jpg claims it represents Volhynia, or the Volhynian Voivodeship (1569–1795).
  • File:Codex-Bergshammar Новогрудское воеводство.png and File:Codex-Bergshammar Новогрудское воеводство.svg claim it represents Novogrudok, or the Nowogródek Voivodeship (1507–1795).

Nevertheless, many of these files have warnings in their file descriptions saying that these voivodeships didn't yet exist in the 1440s when these rolls of arms were written, so they cannot be representative of either the Volhynian or Nowogródek voivodeships.

• 
  Armorial Lyncenich p. 243.
• 
  Armorial Lyncenich nowengrote
• 
  Codex Bergshammar p. 112 & 113
• 
  Codex Bergshammar
• 
  Codex Bergshammar
• 
  Codex Bergshammar

Recently, I used that last one to provisionally represent the Novgorod Republic in Tott's Russian wars instead of File:Banner of the Novgorod Republic (c. 1385).svg, but now I'm not so sure anymore. At ru:Герб Новогрудского воеводства#Геральдический крест and uk:Герб Новогрудського воєводства#Геральдичний хрест, there is essentially the same discussion between researchers, saying that it is unclear what country or region this coat of arms refers to: Veliky Novgorod / the Novgorod Republic; Novogrudok, or the Nowogródek Voivodeship (1507–1795); Novhorod-Siverskyi / the Principality of Novgorod-Seversk; the Principality of Volhynia, or the Volhynian Voivodeship (1569–1795) (see also Coat of arms of Volyn Oblast); etc.

What do we do in this type of situation?

1. Should remove coats of arms from all articles if we cannot be c. 99% sure that they historically represented the country or region we think they represented?
2. Should we pick one of these anyway just so that we can represent the Novgorod Republic?
3. Or should we dig deeper into the literature to find an answer, and not change anything until we know more?

I don't know what is common practice surrounding heraldry on enwiki, so that's why I'm posing this question here, so that heraldry experts that I have not pinged could also weigh in. Curious if anyone has a good idea. Good day, NLeeuw (talk) 11:10, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

PS: I notice that the coats of arms in the Armorial Lyncenich and Codex Bergshammar are following the same order. That may simply be because the creator of the Codex Bergshammar used the Armorial Lyncenich as a source, as ruwiki claims in ru:Кодекс Бергшамара and ru:Гербовник Линцених. So the creators did not necessarily independently conclude that this order represented a specific set of regions in a certain hierarchy or something, which might have made it easier to identify them as a set that politically or dynastically belonged together in some way. But it does seem that most of these regions are to be found in historical Lithuania (e.g. the Columns of Gediminas are everywhere), present-day Belarus (smoltenghe = probably Smolensk), and sometimes Poland (grootpolen = Greater Poland). I'm not seeing a connection with Veliky Novgorod, or Volhynia/Volyn', or Novhorod-Siverskyi just yet. The only thing I can think of is that nowengrote could have been a contraction of Nowgorod de Grote ("Novgorod the Great" in Middle Dutch?) to nowengrote, but that it is an adaptation from Polish Nowogrodek to nowengrote seems more plausible to me now. NLeeuw (talk) 11:46, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

As much as I like nice medieval emblems, I think that in this case we should remove the purported coat of arms of Novgorod.

There are no mentions of these symbols (castle and white cross) in local primary sources, as far as I can tell.

Some scholars go so far as to say that the Novgorod Republic did not have *the* state emblem (Прошлое нашей родины в памятниках нумизматики, 1977, p. 32 [1]). This article argues with the viewpoint that the image found on novgorodka coins can be considered the state emblem.

The strongest claim I did find was that the image of the "fierce animal" was "almost the coat of arms of Novgorod" (Каменцева Е.И., Устюгов Н.В. Глава IV. Русские печати периода феодальной раздробленности, 1974). The animal looks like this [2] and it was one of the images used on the seals of Novgorod.

None of these two hypothetical emblems look remotely similar to the images we've been using, unfortunately. I wouldn't use them either since both of them appeared in the 15th century and using it for earlier periods would be an anachronism. Alaexis_¿question? 21:51, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

I have only seen seals, but not anything akin to a "flag" or "coat of arms". Per MOS:COA and MOS:INFOBOXFLAG, we should not be including such symbols (like CoA) in the infobox anyway, only flags are allowed in certain places. Mellk (talk) 23:02, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

My reading of those guidelines does not prohibit the use of coats of arms in infoboxes of military conflicts.

• Situations where flag icons may be used in infoboxes include: Summarizing military conflicts...
• The bulk of these recommendations are also applicable to official seals, coats of arms, and other representations which serve similar purposes to flag images. (emphasis by me)
• Do not use the coat of arms of a person as a stand-in for a national, military, or other flag. (emphasis by me).

That would mean that we can't use e.g. the File:Seal of Alexander Nevsky 1236 Avers.svg to represent Novgorod or Vladimir-Suzdal. (That's a pity). But if it's a coat of arms or flag connected to a city, region, state/country, or other polity, not a specific person, then it is allowed. So File:Biskupstwo Dorpatu COA.svg can be used to represent the Bishopric of Dorpat. File:LivonianOrder.svg can be used for the Livonian Order. And so on. NLeeuw (talk) 23:16, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

For example it is not present in Battle of Grunwald. @Ealdgyth: probably understand this better. Mellk (talk) 23:18, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Well, it certainly looks a lot cleaner if none of the participants has a symbol, even if some like the GDL, Poland and the Teutonic Order could easily be represented by historically accurate flags in 1410. But for Novgorod, I tend to agree with Alaexis: we've got no good unambiguous representations of Veliky Novgorod / the Novgorod Republic, at least not before the 15th century. I appreciate the other suggestions you did, but you're right; for the conflicts in the 12th and 13th centuries I've been writing about recently, we shouldn't use anything to visually represent Novgorod in infoboxes until we find something historically responsible.

Thank you both for your responses! Feel free to add some more comments that may be helpful for similar situations in the future. The links to MOS:COA and MOS:INFOBOXFLAG are certainly helpful in making these decisions going forward. NLeeuw (talk) 00:01, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

The "fierce animal": symbol of Novgorod in 15th century?

Animal of Pskov; symbol of Pskov? When?

PS: I just saw that File:Nowogród.svg is indeed used for symbolising the Novgorod Republic for the 1456 Battle of Shelon in the List of wars involving the Principality of Moscow. Would that be historically accurate enough? I think so, but no earlier than 1400, then. Would you agree?

The same question may be asked for File:Символ господарства Псковского.png, which I recently added to 1240 Izborsk and Pskov campaign. It's almost a mirror of the fierce animal of Novgorod. It is used in Pskov Republic, but tbh I haven't checked its validity and application. 1240 may also be too early for the Pskovian animal. NLeeuw (talk) 00:28, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

I guess that using the fierce animal to represent Novgorod in the 15th century would be fine. Alaexis_¿question? 07:37, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

File:Coat of Arms of Obispo Maximo Ephraim Fajutagana.png

Wondering whether someone might want to take a crack at creating a free version of File:Coat of Arms of Obispo Maximo Ephraim Fajutagana.png. Even though that file has been uploaded to Commons, it looks like it was taken from Facebook and doesn't have an acceptable free license. -- Marchjuly (talk) 02:12, 4 December 2024 (UTC)