How old is the Stodart system?

[DrumMayer]

A question for all historians of heraldry here:

How old is the Stodart system? RR Stodart wrote Scottish Arms in 1881; is the system of difference attributed to him his own creation, or is it something medieval Scots would have recognized?

Many thanks!

[Joseph McMillan]

The use of bordures and variations of line for differencing is something medieval Scots would have recognized--medieval Englishman, Frenchmen, and Germans, too. It's the systematized element that Stoddart introduced--bordures in a fixed sequence of gold, silver, red, blue, black; then line variations of the bordure in a fixed sequence of engrailed, invected, indented; and so on. Medieval Scots, Englishmen, Frenchman, and Germans would have found such hyper-bureaucratic systemization incomprehensible and pointless.

[Sir Didymous]

It is my understanding that in the middle ages the rules for heraldry were still being written. And honestly, the English system of cadency would have been a bit odd. I mean the arms kept the cadency (if my understanding is correct), from generation to generation. This would have the result of stacked charges. One could only imagine how messy that would have became it were adhered to rigidly since say; 1300. Back in the day differencing was anything from a subtle change of lines up to drastically changing colors and charges, or even the composition of the arms. Regulation didn't come about until much later.

[James Hood]

Any standardization of arms across national and especially, linguistic barriers before modern communication would have been the far distant exception, rather than the rule.

In the case of international orders of chivalry such as the Order Of St John of Jerusalem, Knights Hospitalers, there was a central organization which dealt with incoming knights-to-be from (Roman Catholic) France, Italy, Germany and Britain. Their literate and knowledgeable "bureaucracy" was the exception, however.