A Complete Guide to HeraldryFox-Davies, Arthur Charles
History
A Complete Guide to Heraldry
Fox-Davies, Arthur Charles
Heraldry -- Great Britain
The terms _indented_ and _dancetté_ need to be considered together, because
they differ very little, and only in the fact that whilst indented may be
drawn with any number of teeth, dancetté is drawn with a limited number,
which is usually three complete teeth in the width of the field. But it
should be observed that this rule is not so hard and fast that the
necessity of artistic depicting may not modify it slightly. An ordinary
which is indented would follow much the same rules as an ordinary which was
engrailed, except that the teeth are made by small straight lines for the
indentations instead of by small semicircles, and instances can doubtless
be found of all the ordinaries qualified by the term indented. Dancetté,
however, does not lend itself so readily to general application, and is
usually to be found applied to either a fess or chief, or occasionally a
bend. In the case of a fess dancetté the indentations on the top and bottom
lines are made to fit into each other, so that instead of having a straight
band with the edge merely toothed, one gets an up and down zig-zag band
with three complete teeth at the top and three complete teeth at the
bottom. Whilst a fess, a bar, a bend, and a chief can be found dancetté, I
do not see how it would be possible to draw a saltire or a cross dancetté.
At any rate the resulting figure would be most ugly, and would appear
ill-balanced. A pile and a chevron seem equally impossible, though there
does not {94} seem to be the like objection to a pale dancetté. An instance
of a bend dancetté is found in the arms of Cuffe (Lord Desart), which are:
Argent, on a bend dancetté sable, plain cotised azure, three fleurs-de-lis,
and on each cotise as many bezants.
_Wavy_ or _undy_, which is supposed to have been taken from water, and
_nebuly_, which is supposed to be derived from clouds, are of course lines
which are well known. They are equally applicable to any ordinary and to
any partition of the field; but in both cases it should be noticed by
artists that there is no one definite or accepted method of depicting these
lines, and one is quite at liberty, and might be recommended, to widen out
the indentations, or to increase them in height, as the artistic
requirements of the work in hand may seem to render advisable. It is only
by bearing this in mind and treating these lines with freedom that really
artistic work can sometimes be produced where they occur. There is no fixed
rule either as to the width which these lines may occupy or as to the
number of indentations as compared with the width of the shield, and it is
a pity to introduce or recognise any regulations of this character where
none exist. There are writers who think it not unlikely that vairé and
barry nebuly were one and the same thing. It is at any rate difficult in
some old representations to draw any noticeable distinctions between the
methods of depicting barry nebuly and vair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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