Eastern Crown Herald

This is the official web page of Eastern Crown Herald. The office of Eastern Crown is responsible for handling all heraldic submissions from East Kingdom residents.

The Contents of this page:

• The Eastern Submission Forms
• How to Submit
• The Submission Process
• Contacting ECH
• Resources for Submissions Heralds
• The Eastern Letters of Intent

The Eastern Submission Forms

Please make sure you use the current forms. They should be labeled "Laurel v. 2.0; East v1.0 (Laurel Approved 06 OCT 2006)" at the bottom right-hand corner. Submissions on old forms are subject to administrative return.

Important Technical Note: While many systems default to opening files with a .doc extension using Wordpad, this and other rich text editors are not actually capable of interpreting this file type correctly. If you do not have Word or OpenOffice, please use the PDF version of the submission form.

How to Submit

Please contact a herald to assist you in the submissions process. He or she should have valuable experience that can help you avoid potential problems with your submission. If you can't find a herald locally, please contact Eastern Crown Herald for a referral.

Your submission must obey the Rules for Submission in order to be accepted. A herald should be familiar enough with the Rules for Submission to help you obey them. Your submission must also be submitted in a way consistent with Laurel Policy and Brigantia Policy. This means that, among other requirements, the official forms must be completed, all necessary documentation must be included, and an adequate number of copies of both the form and the documentation must be made. The only sources for documentation that do not require photocopies are listed in Appendix H of the Administrative Handbook. Failure to meet Laurel's or Brigantia's standards is valid cause for return.

The ideal tools to color in an armory submission are Crayola Classic Markers. They are true to the heraldic tinctures and hold their colors well while being subjected to the heat, time, and humidity that comes with postal travel. Colored pencils and crayons will melt and the dyes from color printers will change color significantly over the course of days or weeks. It is also best not to color in the black portions of the black-and-white copy, but leave it as an outline drawing. Use at least a medium-nib pen, so that the image can be scanned and scaled down without loss of visibility.

Once your submission forms and documentation are assembled, include a check made payable to "SCA Inc. - East Kingdom College of Heralds" in an amount totaling $9.00 per each submitted item (a name, a device, a badge, etc.).

Those in the Southern, Central, and Northern Pines regions (i.e., the U.S.) should mail submissions to:

Julia P. Szent-Györgyi
Eastern Crown Herald
1120 New Hampshire Ln
Downingtown, PA 19335-3803

Those in the Northern Shores region (Canada) should mail submissions to:

Elizabeth Crux
Badger Herald
12 Nabob Court
Dartmouth, NS
B2W 0B5

The Submission Process

Heraldic submissions are processed in batches called Letters of Intent. These come in two versions: kingdom-level Internal Letters of Intent (ILoIs) and Society-level External Letters of Intent (xLoIs). LoIs have a set commentary period, when other heralds can check each submission for rules violations, help find adequate documentation, and search for possible conflicts with already registered items. After this commentary period, all the comments that have been received are taken into consideration and a decision is made about each submission.

In the East Kingdom, Eastern Crown Herald issues both the ILoI and the kingdom-level decisions for it, in the form of a Letter of Decisions (LoD). (Previous officeholders have sometimes called them Letters of Response [LoR].) Based on this LoD, Blue Tyger Herald then issues the xLoI. This xLoI goes out to the Society-wide College of Arms for commentary, using the Online System for Commentary and Response (OSCAR).

Laurel Sovereign of Arms and her deputies Wreath (armory) and Pelican (names) hold monthly decision meetings. The results of each month's meetings are published as a Letter of Acceptances and Returns (LoAR). For convenience, LoARs are dated by the month of the meeting, but it is important to keep in mind that it takes time to write, proofread, and triple-check the letter.

Official notification of the result of each step of the process (that is, the decision on the LoD and LoAR) is sent out to each Eastern submitter by Mural Herald. Please notify Mural if your address changes while you have a submission in process.

Schedule; or How Long Will This Take?

When a submission arrives, Eastern Crown Herald emails the person who mailed it, letting him or her know which ILoI the submission should be on.

• You can expect a kingdom-level result six to seven weeks from the date of this ILoI.
• If your submission is forwarded to Laurel, expect a final result about nine months from the date of the ILoI.

In either case, official notification letters may take a bit longer, depending on Mural's schedule and the vagaries of the post office. It'll take even longer for registered items to show up in the Ordinary and Armorial (O&A), since this is updated only a few times each year.

Details

ILoIs are issued around mid-month, and have a one-month commentary period. Kingdom-level decisions are issued at the begininning of the following month. For example, a submission which arrives by about January 1st will be on an ILoI dated on or around Jan. 15th. The commentary deadline will be around Feb. 15th, and the decisions will be issued at the beginning of March.

External letters of intent are up for commentary for three months, and are considered at the Laurel meetings in the month following the end of this commentary period. For example, an xLoI issued in March will normally be scheduled for the July meetings. It typically takes at least two months for the LoAR to be published.

Contacting ECH

The current Eastern Crown Herald is known in the SCA as Kolosvari Arpadne Julia. This is 16th century Hungarian for "Julia, wife of Árpád from Kolozsvár." She can be contacted by email at eastern dot crown at eastkingdom dot org, by mail at the address given above, or by phone at 610 518 1799. Please, no calls before 10 a.m., and if you call before noon, be forewarned that bootup procedures may not have completed yet. :-)

Resources for Submissions Heralds

East Kingdom College of Heralds:

• Official Policies of the Brigantia Principal Herald
• The East Kingdom Herald's Handbook (Please note: this is WAY out of date, is being revised, and was never official anyway. Please disregard the instructions about the number and type of forms to submit, in particular.)
• A guide to the EK submission process (Note that the submissions instructions in this article are out of date; please disregard the specifics of the number and type of forms to submit.)

SCA College of Arms & Laurel Sovereign of Arms:

• SCA CoA Admin Handbook
• Rules for Submissions
• CoA Glossary
• CoA Laurel Precedents

Conflict Tables:

• Lingual Weirdness Table: as compiled by Pelican Queen of Arms, or as updated by Aryanhwy merch Catmael
• Aryanhwy merch Catmael's Posture Conflict Table
• Athenais Bryennissa's Cross Conflict Table
• Robert mac Cormaic's Line of Division Conflict Table
• Tanczos Istvan's Flower Conflict Table

Miscellaneous Sources:

• Search Engines for the SCA Ordinary and Armorial
• Istvan's Heraldry tools, including Word macros to convert to and from Da'ud notation.
• Letters of Intent & Submission status pages from other Kingdoms
• Lady Alia Marie de Blois' "Chevrons (inverted), Chaussés, Piles, and Chiefs Triangular, Oh My!"
• THL Pendar the Bard's Creative Armory class notes
• THL Pendar the Bard's Problem Charges to update your Pic Dic

The Eastern Letters of Intent

The table below includes the bulk of published letters immediately relating to heraldic submissions in the East Kingdom. The columns are as follows: Eastern Internal Letter of Intent (ILoI), Eastern Letter of Decision (LoD), Eastern External Letter of Intent (xLoI), and Laurel Letter of Acceptance and Return (LoAR) by date of the meeting (each LoAR is published approximately two months after this meeting date).

LoIs previous to those below can be found on the Historic LoIs page.

A date in the xLoI or ILoI column with a question mark indicates a tentative future date. A date in the LoAR column that is not a link is the date of the Pelican/Wreath meeting; as noted above, letters typically take at least two months to produce afterward.

There is an email list to comment on these letters. If you wish to participate, send email to 'loc-subscribe@eastkingdom.org' and reply to the confirmation email it sends back.

* Some internal letters may be split across two or more external letters.

** These Laurel LoAR's have been released to the Laurel mailing list, but are not on the website yet. Hardcopy mailed notifications should be appearing shortly.

*** As of the Cover Letter to the October 2006 LoAR, which was printed and distributed in January 2007, External Letters of Intent can now be produced entirely on OSCAR. The East chose to take advantage of this. The Cover Letter to the December 2006 LoAR, printed and distributed in March 2007, required that as of May 2007, all LoIs be produced on OSCAR, not on paper.

LoIs previous to those above can be found on the Historic LoIs page.

Here's a bit of fun we had one spring: April 1 ILoI. The saga continues with the April 1 LoD.