Achievement (heraldry)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Achievement, in the world of heraldry, names the full display of everything a coat of arms bearer is entitled to show. Most people picture a simple shield when they think of a coat of arms. But the actual armorial achievement can be a layered and elaborate construction, assembling a dozen or more distinct components around that central shield. What are all those pieces? Where did the word itself come from? And why does modern English now use two different words for what was once a single idea?

• 2. The Architecture of an Achievement

  ›

  The escutcheon sits at the heart of every armorial achievement, the shield on which the arms themselves are painted or embroidered. Everything else is arranged around it, reading from the top of the composition downward. Above the shield, a helm of the variety appropriate to the bearer's rank carries a torse, or in special cases a cap of maintenance. Atop that sits the crest, and flowing down from the helm is the mantling. If the bearer holds rank above that of a baronet, a coronet or crown of the appropriate variety issues from the helm. Some achievements also include a console, described in heraldic sources as decorative in purpose and not officially part of the armorial grant. Supporters, figures standing to either side of the shield, belong only to bearers entitled to them; in modern usage, baronets are generally not among that group, and supporters may stand upon a compartment at the base of the achievement. Below the shield, a motto appears if the bearer possesses one, followed by any order, then any badge. A war-cry or slogan, if the bearer holds one, appears at the very top of the whole composition. No single bearer will necessarily display every component, since each depends on what the bearer is actually entitled to claim.

• 3. A Word Rooted in Latin

  ›

  The older English term for armorial achievement was hatchment, and tracing that word back through time reveals a linguistic chain stretching to classical Latin. The word arrived in English through a series of historical spellings, among them atcheament, achement, and hathement, all of which descended from the French achèvement. That French noun came from the verb achever, itself a contraction of the phrase à chef venir, meaning to come to a head. Behind that French phrase stood the Latin ad caput venire, carrying the same sense: to reach a conclusion, to accomplish, to achieve. The English achievement and the older hatchment share not just meaning but the same etymological root, so the two words are in origin identical. That common ancestry matters for understanding how the language shifted.

• 4. Hatchment Then and Now

  ›

  King Henry VIII's statute governing the Order of the Garter preserves one of the clearest examples of hatchment used in its older, non-funerary sense. The statute required every knight, within a year of his installation, to have made a scauchon of his arms and hachementis in a plate of metal, set securely upon the back of his stall. That official directive treated hachementis as a synonym for what today would be called an achievement, not as anything connected with death or mourning. In modern English, however, the word hatchment has narrowed dramatically in meaning. It now refers almost exclusively to a funerary hatchment, the diamond-shaped memorial panel displayed to mark a death. The word achievement, which is now archaic in the sense the older writers used it, has taken over in non-funereal heraldic contexts. The two words thus swapped functions over the centuries, leaving a vocabulary split that still puzzles newcomers to the subject. The strict heraldic sense of coat of arms adds one more complication: technically, that phrase refers to a garment with the arms embroidered on it, not to the full armorial display, even though popular usage regularly conflates the two.