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 fought across Italy from the 1360s until his death in Florentine service in 1394, kept three words burned into the inside of his shield where only he could see them: fides, durare, modus — faith, endure, measure. Trust, hold, govern. The order finds its way to the men who need it.
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
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.
