Live Your Best Knight — №108: Temperantia · Fiducia · Perseverantia
What's with the three words on the knight's banner? Temperantia, Fiducia, Perseverantia — Temperance, Trust, Perseverance. Three Latin nouns that did not begin together but ended together, carried into the late medieval period by bestiaries, monastic rules, and the hard practice of men who had to keep faith on long roads. A quick cue is the order: read the bottom banner left to right, then up to the top, and you have the medieval blueprint of how a soul is built. Trust is the seed. Perseverance is the holding. Temperance is the hand on the rein. Eight centuries on, the order still works.
Wear the VirtueThe 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.
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 the Cistercians 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. A century later, Christine de Pizan put the same argument more plainly in her Burgundian court treatises: temperance is the bridle on every other good. The metaphor would last another four hundred years.
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.
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.
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.
The order of the three words on the banner tells its own story. Read from the bottom up — Fiducia, Perseverantia, Temperantia — and you have the order of moral development as the late scholastics understood it. You begin in trust, in God or in lord or in the fellowship of arms. Trust held against time becomes perseverance. Perseverance refined by judgment becomes temperance, the governing virtue that keeps the other two from curdling into credulity and obstinacy. The crowning word sits on top because it is, in the medieval mind, the word that crowns the soul. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that the English mercenary captain Sir John Hawkwood, who served Florence between roughly 1364 and his death in 1394, kept three words burned into the inside of his shield where only he could see them. The chronicler Filippo Villani recorded them around 1395 as fides, durare, modus — faith, endure, measure. Trust, hold, govern. The order finds its way to the men who need it.
The Shield
How to Read a Medieval Shield
Heraldic shields are arguments, not decoration. Each charge has a settled meaning in the period vocabulary, and the position of each charge on the shield carries weight of its own. The fess point — the geometric center — is the place of governance and honor.
The Three Charges on the Crest
For readers tracing the meaning of each emblem on the shield:
- 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.
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.
Wear the Story
This entry in the Live Your Best Knight series traces the lineage of Latin virtue language and its expression in medieval heraldry, the chivalric romance tradition, the bestiary corpus, and the visual vocabulary that runs from Insular Celtic illumination through high medieval coats of arms into the modern dark fantasy and sword and sorcery aesthetic. For deeper reading on the cardinal virtues and the medieval moral tradition it may be useful to consult (1) Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Secunda Secundae, Questions 47 through 170, on prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, (2) Augustine of Hippo, De dono perseverantiae, on perseverance as continuing grace, (3) Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, Book XII, on the bestiary tradition and the symbolism of the faithful hound, (4) Cesare Ripa, Iconologia of 1593, on the codified imagery of personifications and emblems, (5) the Aberdeen Bestiary, MS 24, University of Aberdeen Library, on medieval animal symbolism and Christian allegory, (6) Geoffrey de Charny, Livre de chevalerie of about 1352, on the chivalric code as practiced rather than theorized, (7) Christine de Pizan, Le Livre du corps de policie of 1407, on virtue ethics in the late medieval Burgundian court, and (8) Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages of 1919, on the late medieval imagination and its enduring imaginative legacy in romanticism, the gothic revival, and the modern fantasy tradition. For heraldic and historical context it may be useful to contact (1) the College of Arms in London, (2) the Society of Antiquaries of London, (3) the Heraldry Society, (4) the British Library Manuscripts Reading Room, and (5) the Bibliothèque nationale de France for the Burgundian and French heraldic record. Readers interested in the broader cultural reception of medieval and chivalric imagery — its expression in epic fantasy literature from Tolkien through the modern grimdark tradition, in the visual language of Frank Frazetta and the seventies and eighties fantasy illustration tradition that shaped heavy metal and progressive rock album art, in the world of tabletop role-playing games and paladin character archetypes, in the renaissance fair and reenactor communities, and in the broader medievalcore aesthetic that has surfaced in recent fashion — will find that the heraldic vocabulary studied here, particularly the hound, the bridle, and the triquetra, recurs across all of these traditions as a shared visual grammar of trust, temperance, and perseverance.