Latest Updates

Somewhat surprisingly for a historical society, the SCA doesn’t always do a great job of documenting its own internal history.

One example of this is the rotating team of volunteers assigned to various staff positions within the College of Arms. While some of these appointments are announced in the monthly Cover Letters issued by the Laurel Sovereign, the practice isn’t universal, and without a directory it can be challenging to figure out who held a particular office on a given date.

The new College Staff Titles page attempts to rectify this issue by listing the staff titles and the people who have held that position. There are likely a few gaps remaining, and some of the dates are only approximate, but hopefully this will help future historians of the College piece together a timeline of participants.

Decades ago the College of Arms ran on paper letters and reference books, but nowadays websites and databases are critical to our operations. 

The new Catalog Of Heraldic IT Systems is an attempt at itemizing the many websites, databases, and other electronic data resources our College and practitioners depend on.

I’ve put these pages together for presentation at the January 2025 VKWHSS, but I hope to continue updating and expanding this collection so that it can serve as a shared reference for folks working in this space during the years ahead.

The Dove-Cote is intended to be a collaborative space where members of the SCA’s College of Arms can contribute to shared information resources.

Its name is an allusion to an architectural feature found in many places from classical antiquity through the early modern period: a building like a round house or small tower, with open windows and an interior full of nooks that provided nesting spaces for a large number of domesticated doves, or pigeons, which served as a food source for thousands of years. By extension, a set of open-fronted compartments used to sort messages and documents are also called pigeonholes, and it is this sense I had in mind when naming the site, which I hope to eventually support a variety of different collections of information relevant to Society heralds.