The triquetra at the foot of the shield is older than the other two emblems by several centuries. It appears on the Funbo Runestone in Sweden, in the marginalia of the Book of Kells around 800, and in the carved stone crosses of Iona and Lindisfarne. 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.
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 almost universally placed a hound at the feet as a heraldic statement of fidelity kept. John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, the English commander whose French enemies called him "the English Achilles," bore the hound on his livery so prominently that it appears in five surviving manuscript portraits and on the Talbot Shrewsbury Book presented to Margaret of Anjou in 1445.
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.
