A popular hobby these days is genealogy: tracing your family back generations in order to find your roots. With the help of technology it is comparatively easy for most to go back several centuries just by typing names into websites which hold online databases of census records, births, deaths, and marriages.
Those who can trace their family histories back to Europe will probably find their family was at some time granted a coat of arms and it is increasingly popular to use this as the front page of your family history document, on letterheads, and shields or framed pictures.
So what is a coat of arms? In medieval times when knights and noblemen took their own small armies into battle, the leaders would be protected with suits of armour. Once attired with armour which included a helmet and visor it was nigh on impossible for the troops to recognise their leader, especially during a fight when maybe hundreds of men were milling around. So, to help the men fight with their leader, he would decorate his shield with his ‘arms’ as well as a cloth garment worn over the top half of his armour. The latter was known as a ‘surcoat’, a term which in time was corrupted into a ‘coat of arms’.
Although coats of arms, also known as family crests, were common first among noblemen, others quickly adopted the habit and it wasn’t long before most family names acquired their own arms.
