The banner belongs to a long tradition of Latin mottoes worn on the body and the wall. The most famous of them, memento mori — remember that you must die — hung in Roman triumphs and medieval cloisters alike as a check on pride; its gentler companion amor fati, the love of one's fate, ran from the Stoics into the same stream. The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius returned to the theme throughout his Meditations, as Seneca and Epictetus had before him, and the tradition kept a companion phrase of its own — memento vivere, remember to live. Renaissance emblem books captioned interlaced knots nunquam frangitur — never broken. Other mottoes of the same family still travel: per aspera ad astra, through hardships to the stars; audentes fortuna iuvat, fortune favors the bold; dum spiro spero, while I breathe, I hope; and carpe diem, seize the day. Temperantia, Fiducia, Perseverantia stands in that company: not a warning and not a resignation, but a working instruction — three words for how to hold a line.
Each of the three words carries its own heraldic emblem, and each emblem has its own deep history. The talbot hound at the top of the shield is the symbol of fiducia, drawn from Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae of about 625, which described the dog as the most faithful creature alive — knowing its master after long absence, dying on its master's grave, refusing to be bought by any meat. The Aberdeen Bestiary repeated the claim around 1200, and by the reign of Edward III between 1327 and 1377, knights' funeral effigies often placed a hound at the feet as a heraldic statement of fidelity kept. John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, the English commander called "the English Achilles," bore the hound so prominently that it appears beside him in the presentation miniature of the Talbot Shrewsbury Book, given to Margaret of Anjou in 1445.
Why the Three Together
- Hound passant at the head — fiducia, the faithful watcher, drawn from Isidore and the bestiaries.
- Bridle and bit at the fess point — temperantia, the governing hand, codified by Ripa in 1593.
- Triquetra at the base — perseverantia, the unbroken loop, descended from Insular and Norse craft.
- The motto banners — read bottom-left to bottom-right to top, the order of moral development.
- The cape and the rearing horse — context, the unbridled power that the shield's emblem governs.
