The triquetra at the foot of the shield is older than the other two emblems by several centuries. It appears in the marginalia of the Book of Kells around 800, in the carved stone crosses of Iona and Lindisfarne, and on the eleventh-century Funbo Runestones in Sweden. Originally a Celtic and Norse design motif from roughly 400 to 700, it was absorbed by Insular Christian art as a symbol of the Trinity — three persons, one substance, one unbroken loop. The geometry made the argument for perseverance: an endless line, three arcs returning to themselves with no beginning or end. Renaissance emblem books captioned interlaced devices of this kind nunquam frangitur, meaning never broken. When the heraldic tradition needed a symbol for the active form of constancy, the triquetra was already waiting, eight centuries old, ready for the work.
By the high medieval period the three words had been put to work on shields, walls, and the inside flaps of psalters. Bernard of Clairvaux, abbot of Clairvaux from 1115 to 1153, preached on perseverance for forty years and on trust for nearly as long. Thomas Aquinas, writing the Secunda Secundae of the Summa Theologiae between 1271 and 1272, argued that temperance was the virtue that kept the others from collapsing into their own excess. Without it, fortitude becomes recklessness, justice becomes cruelty, and prudence becomes mere cunning. More than a century later, Christine de Pizan put the same argument more plainly in her court treatises: temperance is the bridle on every other good. The metaphor would last another four hundred years.
Why the Three Together
Two virtues can be balanced; three must be ordered. The order tells you what the bearer believes about how a soul is built. This shield believes the soul is built from the ground up — trust first because nothing is built without it, perseverance second because trust without persistence is a flicker, and temperance last because the other two need a governor or they consume themselves. It is not the order of the schoolroom. It is the order of the road, the order a man arrives at after he has been knocked off a horse a few times and chosen to remount.
