Great heraldry military shield set

dry is the science and art of describing coats-of-arms, also referred to as armorial bearings or simply as "arms". Its origins lie in the need to distinguish participants in battles or jousts and to describe the various devices they carried or painted on their shields.In the late middle ages and renaissance, heraldry became a highly developed discipline, regulated by professional heralds, who used the language of heraldry to "blazon" a coat of arms. (Since arms are formally described by words, the painter, engraver, or stonecarver using a coat of arms in his work has considerable stylistic license.) As its use in jousts became obsolete, arms remained popular for visually identifying a person in other ways — impressed in sealing wax on official documents, engraved on a family tomb, and so forth. The descent of arms was and remains strictly regulated by inheritence; only certain actual descendents of a particular armigerous (arm-bearing) person are entitled to his arms or a differenced version of them — hence popular associations of a coat of arms with all bearers of a surname are based on a misconception. Heraldry is mostly a hobby today; but in some countries it remains regulated by heralds and the assumption of another's arms is illegal. See more at Wikipedia.org...