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Heraldic Dictionary: 1.a Tinctures: Furs

See also:

Heraldry IA: Tincture addendum - FURS

I didn't intend to go into subjects not normally encountered in flags in this series, and to keep it fairly simple, but since a couple of you have extended what I wrote about tincture furs, here is a bit more information about them. This series of articles, remember, is only intended as a simple primer on heraldry - for more detailed information there are a wide variety of books that can be consulted!

Furs:

There are many forms of fur in Heraldry (click for an image [73KB]), of which I have only really dealt with Ermine, the one most frequently found on flags (in fact, the only one I can recall ever having seen on a flag!). The following is a list of the different varieties:

a) Varieties of Ermine:

ERMINE white fur with black ermine-tails, usually represented as vertical arrowheaded lines (similar to those used for trees on some maps) surmounted by three spots, thus:

Different varieties of Ermine are found in different colours:

ERMINES (Black fur, white tails),
ERMINOIS (Gold fur, white tails),
PEAN (Black fur, gold tails),
ERMINITES (White fur, black tails with red spots) - this last is extremely rare.

b) Varieties of Vair:

VAIR is an arrangement of bell-like shapes, derived from the sewing of squirrel skins onto a shield. Because of the colour of squirrel fur, this is always represented as a blue and white pattern. There are numerous varieties of Vair, most of which are rarely seen. These include three sized,

BEFFROI (large),
VAIR and
MENU-VAIR (small).

The white and blue bell-shapes of vair usually form the equivalent of a chequerboard pattern, but occasionally the colours are alternated in adjacent rows so that upright and inverted "bells" of the same colour abut (COUNTER-VAIR),

or so vertical lines of bells of the same colour occur (VAIR IN PALE).