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.
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.
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.
