The Diocese of Guildford's Heraldic Shield

In its current form the heraldic shield, strictly the Bishop's Coat of Arms, is used in the diocese in three distinctive ways:

The colour form is used by the Diocesan Office and it appears on letter headings, church and school noticeboards, publications and so on. The Bishop of Guildford alone uses the lineart format and the Education Team use the halftone on their publications. All, though, are the same design introduced in 2006.

The intention was to rationalise the five or six different formats of heraldic crest that were being used by various bodies and personnel around the diocese, some of which, while within the bounds of the heraldic description, were very complicated and not easily reproduced. Some were quite spectacularly embellished and a few of these anomalies are still in use and can be found on old noticeboards or rarely-seen publications. Some were heraldically suspect.

The 2006 redesign was prompted by the arrival of Bishop Christopher who wanted something rather more contemporary and distinctive than was available hitherto. A further impetus was ongoing website development. Website design necessitates that all organisations have a distinctive ‘look’ or ‘logotype’ (in marketing terms something that ‘brands’ them) so we sought one definitive root ‘logotype’ – which includes the words ‘Diocese of Guildford’ (in Gill Sans). The resulting form was evolved for us by Chapel Studios and was intended to be clean, accurate and reasonably timeless.

Background
In 1965 the College of Arms defined the Guildford diocesan arms in fine classical Martian and painted it for us too, in the form below:

“The arms of the diocese are blazoned as follows: Gules,
two keys conjoined wards outwards in bend the uppermost
or, the other argent, a sword of the third pomelled and
hilted of the second interposed between them in bend
sinister, all within a border azure charged with 10 wool
packs also argent.”

If you know about heraldry that will make perfect sense. Our diocese was formed when the hugely unwieldy Winchester Diocese split off Portsmouth and Guildford in 1927 so the Guildford arms reflect Winchester’s in a number of respects.

It is clear from an ancient file at Diocesan House that down the years there have been several flurries of activity with regard to arms and crests. It is also clear that for many years, successive Bishops of Guildford used a version that was heraldically at variance with forms used by everyone else.

It seems that the first bishop to adopt his own personalised arms, duly patented, was +Henry Colville Montgomery-Campbell, KCVO, MC, DD. The correct term for someone with their own heraldic crest is ‘armigerous’ and +Henry was therefore Guildford’s first armigerous prelate. His intricate coat of arms raised a trumpet to its heraldic lips to bear ornate witness to several areas of the Bishop’s distinguished life and history, blending it all in with the Diocesan crest as he understood it at the time.

Wrongly, as it turns out, because there was something funny about the keys.

From that colourful start it seems that subsequent Bishops of Guildford simply carried on the tradition of having a crest of their own – all gloriously untroubled by being heraldically anomalous.

Small variations are fine in heraldry. Guildford’s ten woolsacks can be orientated all round the azure of a crest like ours or presented all in the same horizontal plane; colours may vary very slightly, but take care not to mess with the interposition of the sword between those keys (or ‘keyes').

Keys are critical in heraldry, and the ones on the questionable 'Bishop's crest' were depicted, in relation to the sword, as 'under and over' (from bottom left) whereas the College of Arms was in no doubt that the sword should pass 'over and under'. There is in existence an old embossed seal, which dates from 1927 when Guildford became a diocese in its own right and this feature appears correctly on that.

There was a media flurry about all this (evidently at a slow news time) in 1965 resulting in the form of crest as painted by the College of Arms, but for reasons of his own, +George Reindorp evidently decided to make no changes to the form he used for his own purposes. It is tempting to imagine that he had just had large amounts of headed notepaper printed…

Whatever the reason, as far as his own use of the crest was concerned there was no change. And so things remained until 2006, by which time, some five or six distinctively different forms of heraldic shield appeared, as some still do (left) on diocesan letters and other publications.

It has to be said, though, that different eras bring different approaches to design and in a few years’ time it will be necessary to rethink the logotype for a new generation of Anglican Christians bound together under the heading of ‘The Diocese of Guildford’.

At that time the heraldic conventions will still be upheld, with the keys, sword and woolsacks all appearing where they should, as they are today.
 

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