Ordinary of arms

Alternatively, it may have arisen by analogy with a liturgical ordinary, an authoritative book containing the order of divine service.

[13] Versions of Glover's Ordinary, much augmented, were published in Joseph Edmondson's Complete Body of Heraldry (1780) and in William Berry's Encyclopedia Heraldica (1828).

Papworth began work in 1847, making extensive use of Burke's General Armory (first published 1842; third edition with supplement 1847), copying its entries – which were arranged alphabetically by surname – onto slips of paper and rearranging them.

[18][19] Its weakness was its dependence for its contents on Burke's General Armory and other secondary sources, which meant that it inherited many of their errors and omissions.

One of the idiosyncrasies of the book (and therefore of some of its successors), which resulted in part from Papworth's decision to classify animal charges of all kinds under the primary heading "Beast", and birds of all kinds under "Bird", is that the alphabetical distribution of entries is highly unbalanced: the headings A–F account for roughly 80% of the whole, a point on which the editor had to reassure subscribers while the work was still in progress.

[20] In 1926 Lt Col George Babington Croft Lyons left a substantial bequest to the Society of Antiquaries to prepare a revised and improved edition of Papworth.

A number of volunteers were recruited (some of them, during the war years, working in inactive periods of firewatching duties) to assemble material on index cards.

[21] However, the task was a large one and progress slow, in part because of Wagner's insistence on high scholarly standards and use of primary sources, and in part because of over-ambitious plans to include in the final work a series of essays on medieval armorial families.

It was eventually decided to limit the project to England, to the medieval period (pre-1530), and to publish a simple ordinary, including a name-index but without the additional essays.

[23] A second volume, covering arms entered in the Register from 1902 to 1973 (a further 6,040 entries), was published in 1977: this was edited by David Reid of Robertland, Carrick Pursuivant, and Vivien Wilson.