John Guillim's Display of Heraldry "home page"

The transcription

I have approached this task with two conflicting objectives, and I hope that I have reached a satisfactory compromise.

Part of the pleasure derived from reading this book is due to the unfamiliar use of the English language and the rather unexpected spellings that are often encountered. I have attempted to preserve this aspect by faithfully copying every word and spelling, only altering the most obvious typographic errors. What is surprising is the lack of consistency in spellings, a word sometimes appearing twice in the same sentence, but spelt differently! However, before the days of printed dictionaries, there was no such thing as a "correct" spelling, and as long as it could be understood without ambiguity, that was good enough.

I have also tried to make this site as accessible as possible to the most number of readers. This might include people for whom English is not their first language, as well as those who use screen readers or other specialised access devices. For this reason I have ensured that the text "reads" effectively.

If you are familiar with books printed before 1800 you will know about the letter s which sometimes appears to be an f without the horizontal bar. I have had to transcribe all of these as s.

The letter j never appears and an i is used. I have inserted j where modern spelling would expect it.

A more unusual oddity is the transposing of the letters u and v, so that u never occurs as the first letter of a word and v only occurs as such; so that universe would appear as vniuerse. I have changed these around to produce words that are more recognisable.

I have reproduced the layout of the printed page by placing the illustrations to the left and the marginal notes on the right. In the book, of course, the margin is to the left on even numbered pages. I have not attempted to reproduce actual page numbering, and when reference is made to this in the text I have provided hyperlinks to the appropriate place on the web page.

Guillim is very fond of Latin quotations and clearly expects his readers to need no translations. Sadly, this is not true in my case! I hope, at some point, to be able to include translations, but this is for the future.