Update – 7PM May 18, 2026

The poll on choosing heraldic designs is on hold due to serious issues with registering them that have been recently discovered.

Greetings to the Tir Righ College!

For those who don’t know me, I am Lord Anthony Hawke, Black Lion and Silver Yale emeriti.  I am an Administrative and Protocol Herald, and am currently an “at-large” herald, and the head of the Heraldry subcommittee of the Road to Kingdom group. I was asked to write this summary of our work on the Committee to date, and our plan and tasks going forward.

So far, we have held one poll asking the populace three questions, my report to the Committee on the results is below.

Summary

According to the poll, the Populace wishes to:

• Keep the name “Tir Righ.”
• Modify our existing heraldry to reflect a future status as a Kingdom, i.e. add a crown and wreath.
• Incorporate our extant awards into our new award structure rather than start from scratch.

Methodology

Overall, we had 234 responses, broken down into 208 who hold current SCA membership, and 26 non-members.  Compared to the previous poll that gave us the mandate to continue with this project, this is a 60% response on a highly specialized subject, and will still indicate a majority of the original poll’s respondents when it reaches a threshold of 83.33% on each question.

Results

Question 1

87.6% of this poll’s responses indicate that the Populace wishes to keep the name Tir Righ.  As this exceeds the threshold of 83.33%, we can be confident that this reflects the will of the majority of the populace.

Question 2

91% of this poll’s responses indicate that the Populace wishes the Tir Righ College of Arms to modify our existing heraldry to reflect a future status as a Kingdom.  As this exceeds the threshold of 83.33%, we can be confident that this reflects the will of the majority of the populace.

Question 3

86.8% of this poll’s responses indicate that the Populace wishes the Tir Righ College of Arms to incorporate our extant awards into our new award structure, seeing some elevated to Grant level and some elevated to Armigerous level, backfilling any gaps in the structure with new awards.  As this exceeds the threshold of 83.33%, we can be confident that this reflects the will of the majority of the populace.

At this point, we moved to a bit of a brainstorming session, spitting out potential candidates for the Arms of a future Kingdom.  About 12 candidates were generated, and then presented to those in attendance at the Tir Righ Heraldic and Scribal Symposium in April.  There were a few eliminated outright for issues that would prevent registering with the College of Heralds, and we even had one created there at the event.  I asked the attendees to come and rank their top 4, the 4 with the most votes would later be submitted to the College to reduce the number to 2 for presentation in Heraldry poll #2, to be released to a populace-wide vote on the weekend of the 16^th of May, 2026.

The possible designs to be presented in the poll will include

Concurrently, I began looking at our awards structure, when I made a realization.  The populace may or may not wish a simple omnibus Award of Arms – like An Tir used to give out – or they may wish themed awards that bear an Award of Arms in precedence.  This is the topic of the second question on the upcoming poll.

Finally, we have had Lord James Irvine (a former Lynx Herald) working in the background on adapting or even re-writing an Order of Precedence database in the background.  Thank you to him for all of the hard work in the arcane database mysteries!

So what comes in the future?

The poll will run for about 4-6 weeks (depending on what our Committee Chair feels is appropriate), and the results will shape our next move.  The first question will determine which of the two remaining candidates will be placed on our Internal Letter of Intent and enter the registration process.  The second and third questions will determine what work we need to do to get our awards in order.

Concurrently to the poll, since the two Arms candidates are quite similar, we can begin brainstorming a Populace ensign, as there is no need at all to change our Populace badge, and the voided star is part of our heritage.  I’d like to have a set of designs ready by mid-June to cut down to 2 over a month or so to present on a 3^rd populace poll.