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 about 1305 with a bridle at her mouth and a sword bound into its scabbard. Cesare Ripa codified the iconography in his Iconologia of 1593, setting the bridle in Temperance's hand. Every educated medieval and Renaissance viewer would have read a bridle on a shield as Temperantia on sight. The vocabulary was that settled.
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.
