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.
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.
