Introduction
You have a shield in front of you — a gravestone, a signet ring, a bookplate, a stained-glass window — and you want to know whose it is. Enquerre identifies it from what you can see: describe the shield, even partially, even with doubts, and the engine checks it against some 270,000 blazons — French, English, German and Italian, reduced to one common structure — gathered from the classic armorials — Rietstap, Burke, d’Hozier, Siebmacher, Crollalanza, Mailhol, Rolland —, from regional armorials (Steyert, Gras, Soultrait, Rivoire de La Bâtie, Benoît d’Entrevaux, de Cauna, Esquieu, Tardieu, Colonna, Ribier, Gouget), from the published registers of the 1696 Armorial général (Alsace, Châlons, Marseille, Bourgogne, Sens, Rouen, Limoges), and the French and Dutch Wikipedias. A computational armorial, leafed through by description rather than by name.
The name comes from the arms à enquerre: those that deliberately break the rule of tinctures, inviting the viewer to enquire into their history.
How it works
Describe the shield
On the Identify page, build the description field by field — field tincture, ordinaries, charges — or type a blazon directly in French. No need to be complete or perfect: every detail is a clue, not a constraint.
Mark your doubts
The “Uncertainties” panel tells the engine what is fragile: “No tinctures” for an engraving or a seal, counts that are hard to read, forgotten positions, a charge perhaps misidentified — a lion taken for a dog. Those traits are relaxed; the others stay firm.
Read the shortlist
Candidates arrive grouped by match quality, with chips justifying each placement: whole shield, field by field, Renesse attestation, region. Open a record to weigh the original blazon against your memory.
Three real examples
An engraved bookplate, so no colours: a chevron, two stars above it, a hunting horn below.
- 1. Describe — a chevron (ordinary), two stars “en chef”, a huchet (the hunting horn) “en pointe”. Positions matter.
- 2. Doubt — no tinctures known: leave them all on “Any / unknown”; the search will compare structure only.
- 3. Read — the arms of Ciel (Saône-et-Loire) appear in the shortlist.
A shield you know to be Breton: on a blue field, a black anchor and a silver building — tower or castle?
- 1. Describe — field azure; an anchor sable; a tower argent.
- 2. Doubt — add “château” as another possible reading (“+ or another charge”) and filter on Brittany: the filter lifts Breton arms without discarding those whose region is unknown.
- 3. Read — Damgan (Morbihan) appears in the shortlist, region chip attached.
A per-bend shield seen on a Silesian stone: a wolf carrying off a lamb. The original blazon is in German — you do not need to read it.
- 1. Describe — partition “tranché” (per bend); a wolf argent in the first field, a lamb in the second. French vocabulary throughout.
- 2. Search — nothing else to do: Siebmacher’s German blazons and Burke’s English ones are reduced to the same structure as the French.
- 3. Read — Wolff (Siebmacher) appears in the shortlist, with its original German text.
These three examples belong to our test suite: any change to the engine must keep passing them before it ships.
What is inside
Twenty-six corpora, merged into one searchable database:
| Source | Contents | Coats of arms |
|---|---|---|
| Rietstap | Armorial général (1884–1887) — families from all over Europe | ≈ 84,000 |
| Burke | The General Armory (1884) — families of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales; blazons in English | ≈ 50,300 |
| Siebmacher | J. Siebmachers grosses Wappenbuch — families and towns of Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Croatia and Romania; blazons in German | ≈ 48,300 |
| Wikipedia (fr) | Municipal and family arms, with sourced blazons | ≈ 34,000 |
| Crollalanza | Dizionario storico-blasonico delle famiglie nobili e notabili italiane (1886–1890) — blazons in Italian | ≈ 17,800 |
| Rolland | Supplément à l’Armorial général, vols. 1–2 | ≈ 8,400 |
| Barthélemy (Alsace) | Armorial général de la généralité d’Alsace (1861) — 1696 registry | ≈ 3,979 |
| Prévost (Rouen) | Armorial général de la généralité de Rouen, vol. 1 (Prévost, 1910) — 1696 registry | ≈ 3,262 |
| Mailhol | Dictionnaire historique et héraldique de la noblesse française | ≈ 2,900 |
| Bouchot (Bourgogne) | Armorial général de la généralité de Bourgogne, vol. 1: Dijon (1875) — 1696 registry | ≈ 2,757 |
| Wikipedia (nl) | Dutch municipalities, provinces and water boards | ≈ 1,800 |
| Gras (Forez) | Répertoire héraldique / Armorial général du Forez (1874) | ≈ 1,563 |
| Montgrand (Marseille) | Armorial de la ville de Marseille (1864) — 1696 registry | ≈ 1,519 |
| D’Hozier | Armorial général de France (1696) | ≈ 1,500 |
| Rivoire de La Bâtie (Dauphiné) | L’armorial de Dauphiné (1867) | ≈ 1,450 |
| Tardieu (Auvergne) | Dictionnaire des anciennes familles de l’Auvergne (1884) — OCR’d in-house | ≈ 1,266 |
| Benoît d’Entrevaux (Vivarais) | Armorial du Vivarais (1908) | ≈ 1,120 |
| Gouget (Poitou) | Armorial of Poitou (Gouget, 1866) — nobility reserved by élection, and a map of the noble houses of Niort | ≈ 959 |
| de Cauna (Landes) | Armorial des Landes (1863-69) | ≈ 931 |
| Barthélemy (Châlons) | Armorial général de la généralité de Châlons-sur-Marne (1868) — 1696 registry | ≈ 866 |
| Pravieux (Limousin) | Armorial général de la généralité de Limoges (Moreau de Pravieux, 1895) — 1696 registry | ≈ 581 |
| Esquieu (Quercy) | Essai d’un armorial quercynois (1907) — OCR’d in-house | ≈ 570 |
| Soultrait (Nivernais) | Armorial historique et archéologique du Nivernais (1879) | ≈ 460 |
| Steyert (Lyonnais) | Armorial général du Lyonnais, Forez et Beaujolais (1860) | ≈ 444 |
| Ribier (Auvergne) | Recherche générale de la noblesse d’Auvergne (1909) — 1666 maintenues | ≈ 264 |
| Bugnot (Sens) | The 1696 armorial of Sens (Bugnot, 1911) — registers of Sens and Villeneuve-le-Roi | ≈ 247 |
| Colonna (Corse) | Armorial corse (1892) | ≈ 145 |
Coverage is densest for France, the British Isles, the Benelux and the German lands, and now extends into central Europe (Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, Croatia); it thins out beyond them. Rounded figures — exact state of the corpus →
Known limitations
- The description is entered in French. The arms themselves may be English or German: Burke’s and Siebmacher’s blazons are translated into French structure on ingestion, so they answer to French vocabulary. But pasting a blazon written in English or German into the search does not work yet — describe the shield with the builder, whose menus feed the engine directly, rather than copying the foreign text.
- Parsing is not always complete. Nearly three quarters of the Wikipedia blazons are fully parsed; Rietstap’s abridged entries are mostly parsed partially — tinctures and charges spotted, structure incomplete — and surface less precisely.
- Some OCR noise remains. The Rietstap entries come from optical character recognition: typos survive in some texts.
- The drawings are interpretations. The shields shown are generated automatically from the blazon — diagrams, not authoritative reproductions. Only the text is binding; compare with the Wikimedia image where one exists.
- A shortlist of candidates, not a certificate. Unrelated families sometimes bear identical arms. A result is a serious lead, to be checked in the cited source — not a guaranteed attribution.
The right arms are missing?
Tell us by email: what you were looking for, what you entered. Every report becomes a permanent test case — the query, mistakes included, joins the regression suite, and any change to the ranking must pass it before it ships.
Write to: contact@enquerre.app