Definition
Heraldry has two distinct legal meanings, one ancient and respectable, one ancient and discreditable.
(1) The art, office, and science of heralds: the formal system governing coats of arms and armorial bearings, the tracing of genealogies, the regulation of matters of precedence and rank, and the ceremonial duties of heralds at royal coronations, funerals, and state occasions. In this sense, heraldry describes both a body of specialized knowledge and the institutional apparatus—colleges of heralds, kings of arms, pursuivants—through which that knowledge was officially administered and enforced under royal authority.
(2) A historical abuse of court procedure: the corrupt practice of buying and selling priority of placement on the paper of causes scheduled for hearing. A litigant or attorney with a matter lower on the court's docket would pay for the privilege of being moved up the list, displacing others who had waited their proper turn. All sources label this meaning obsolete and universally condemn it.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The profession or art of devising, granting, and blazoning coats of arms; tracing genealogies; ruling on questions of protocol or rank. Also, an armorial ensign itself, or, more loosely, pageantry.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The art or office of a herald; the art, practice, or science of recording genealogies and blazoning arms or ensigns armorial; also of marshaling cavalcades, processions, and public ceremonies.
Editorial note: Common and legal usage converge almost entirely on meaning (1). The gap lies entirely in meaning (2): no ordinary dictionary records the procedural abuse of docket manipulation that legal dictionaries unanimously attach to this term. A researcher encountering "heraldry" in a historical legal or judicial context must pause to determine which meaning is operative — the science of arms or the corruption of court scheduling.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Meaning (1) — Heraldry as science and office — encompasses several recognized institutional forms in the English tradition: the College of Arms (England and Wales), the Court of the Lord Lyon (Scotland), and the Office of the Chief Herald (Ireland). Each exercises distinct authority over armorial grants within its jurisdiction. These are not mere ceremonial bodies; grants of arms from these institutions carry legal recognition, and disputes over armorial bearings have historically been adjudicated in specialized courts.
Meaning (2) — Heraldry as procedural abuse — does not appear to have recognized subtypes. It is treated in legal sources as a single discreditable practice, reported and condemned rather than categorized.
Why It Matters in Research
The double meaning is a genuine research trap. A legal historian reading eighteenth- or nineteenth-century sources on court administration may encounter "heraldry" in contexts having nothing to do with coats of arms. The procedural abuse documented in North's Life of Lord Keeper Guildford was real and attracted enough notice to earn entries across multiple standard legal dictionaries — but the term looks, on its face, like a reference to armorial science.
Conversely, researchers working on property law, inheritance disputes, or questions of title and nobility will find heraldry in its first sense deeply relevant. Armorial bearings could be property; their grant, inheritance, and transfer generated legal disputes. The jurisdiction of the English Court of Chivalry over armorial matters — dormant since 1737 but not abolished — is a standing curiosity in legal history worth knowing.
For corpus researchers: heraldry entries across the Law Mind dictionaries are thin, treated as a brief definitional note rather than a substantive legal subject. The real substance of heraldry as law lives in encyclopedia-style treatments of offices of arms, the Court of Chivalry, and the law of precedence — not in the dictionary entries themselves. Use dictionary entries as a pointer, not a destination.
Historical Dictionary Support
All four sources — Black's (1st and 2nd editions), Rapalje & Lawrence, and Bouvier — are in complete agreement on both meanings and treat them with nearly identical language. The procedural-abuse meaning is flagged as obsolete in every source, suggesting the practice had died out well before any of these dictionaries were compiled but was preserved in the literature because of its mention in North's account of Lord Keeper Guildford.
Bouvier and Rapalje & Lawrence both cite that source explicitly, pointing researchers to the same documentary foundation. Black's adopts the same content without the citation. No source expands meaningfully on either meaning; heraldry is treated as a side note in all four dictionaries, not a subject demanding sustained analysis.
What historical sources miss: none of these dictionaries addresses heraldry as a live system of property and privilege with jurisdictional dimensions. They do not mention the College of Arms, the Court of Chivalry, or the Scottish Court of the Lord Lyon. For those dimensions, the legal dictionary shelf provides no useful guidance.
Jurisdictional Note
Heraldry as an institutional legal system varies sharply by jurisdiction within the British Isles. England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland each maintain separate heraldic authorities with distinct rules on grants, cadency, and enforcement. American law has no comparable institution; coats of arms enjoy no formal legal protection in the United States beyond trademark and unfair competition doctrines in specific commercial contexts.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Heralds and Officers of Arms; Court Procedure, Historical; Court of Chivalry