Coats of arms began as battle clothing and ended up as legal property
The phrase coat of arms once meant a literal garment: the decorated surcoat a knight wore over his mail, in Old French a cote a armer. By the mid-1300s English speakers had transferred the name to the design itself, which went on to mark families, towns, universities and trading companies.
Strictly, the arms are the design on the shield, the core of a fuller heraldic achievement that can add supporters, a crest and a motto. Each is meant to belong to one bearer, whether a person, a family, a state or an institution. European nobles took up heraldic designs widely in the 12th century. At first they were personal, and a knight might tweak his over time, but by the end of that century arms were being inherited; in England this had happened by the reign of Richard I, during the Third Crusade of 1189 to 1192.
Use spread steadily downward and outward. Burghers in northern Italy bore arms in the later 1300s, and in the late Middle Ages clergy, towns, universities and chartered trading companies acquired them too. Rolls of arms, great collections of designs, later became tools for tracing noble lineages. Every design is recorded in a formal written description, the blazon, whose specialised vocabulary lets any artist reproduce it consistently.
In the English and Scottish traditions, arms belong to an individual rather than a whole family and pass from father to son. Only one person at a time may carry the plain, undifferenced version; other descendants add a change of colour or an extra charge. A label, for example, now marks an heir apparent in British practice outside the royal family. England's College of Arms still grants arms today.
France shaped much of the vocabulary used across Western Europe, yet since the monarchy fell there has been no authority there to enforce heraldic law. Arms are treated as the intellectual property of a family or municipality, and self-assumed arms count as valid unless a court finds they copy an earlier holder's. Many European cities and universities now protect their arms as trademarks, and heraldry is often likened to a modern corporate logo.
Source: Coat of arms
