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Armorial Pedigree of Garter Ancestors

There are a few over one thousand Knights of the Garter, KG for short, from its inception around 1348 to the present day. By 2008 I had found 246 knights and 47 ladies of the garter who were related. About that time I had come across St John Hope's superb set of coloured photographs of those stall plates made in plantagenet times. But I could do no more to the immediate thought that some sort of armorial pedigree might be nice as many of the stall plates were missing and, worse, for quite a few of the early knights, their arms were apparently not known.

2015 has resolved the problem for me. First Andrew Gray published, on behalf of the Heraldry Society, six sets of painted or drawn arms for many or all knights, from William Bruges' Garter Book of around 1430 to Jiri Louda's modern rendering of all knights of the late 20th Century. Second the Dean and Chapter of St George's Windsor published a set of photographs of all the garter stall plates in St George's Chapel.

A third major resource has been the long awaited publication at the end of 2014 of the fourth and last volume of The Dictionary of British Heraldry - Medieval Ordinary. I have been able to use this to resolve the few remaining conundrums after study of the above first and second publications.

Here's the web pages that summarise my findings:

  1. The methodologies of determining the genealogy and the heraldry
  2. The Blazons of arms for the 66 ancestral KGs
  3. The Armorial Pedigree for the 66 ancestral KGs
  4. Please read this before viewing the next item
  5. High definition vector drawings of all ancestral KGs' arms
  6. A note on the different Powys-Lybbe ancestries shown in the garter tree
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