The phrase came together slowly. Fiducia entered Latin in the first century B.C. as a Roman legal term — a trust in property held by one party for the benefit of another. By the time Augustine of Hippo wrote in the early fifth century, the word had migrated from contract law to the disposition of the soul, meaning the trust a man places in God, in his lord, and in the bonds he has sworn. Perseverantia took longer. Augustine rehabilitated it as a virtue in his last works, arguing it was a continuing grace rather than mere stubbornness. Temperantia was the oldest as a named virtue, descending from Plato and Aristotle through Cicero into the Christian moral vocabulary, where Aquinas placed it among the four cardinal pillars of a just life.
The bridle and bit at the heart of the shield is the canonical emblem of temperance. The image came from Aristotle's metaphor of reason as charioteer governing the horse of appetite, descended through Cicero's De Officiis of 44 B.C. and adopted into Christian moral theology by Aquinas. Giotto painted Temperantia on the wall of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua in 1305 with a sheathed and bound sword, her bridle implied by the binding. Cesare Ripa codified the iconography in his Iconologia of 1593, ruling that Temperance must hold a bridle in her right hand. Every educated medieval and Renaissance viewer would have read a bridle on a shield as Temperantia on sight. The vocabulary was that settled.
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.
