The probable structural origin of these Ordinaries is sufficiently apparent to render any further comment on that interesting circumstance superfluous.
_The Subordinaries:-- The Canton or Quarter: The Inescutcheon: The Orle: The Tressure: The Bordure: Flanches: The Lozenge, Mascle, and Rustre: The Fusil: The Billet: The Gyron: The Frette-- The Roundles._
"The second in a line of stars." --IDYLLS OF THE KING.
THE SUBORDINARIES. This title has been assigned, but without any decisive authority, to another group of devices, second in rank to the Ordinaries. Very few writers agree as to which are ordinaries and which subordinaries; nor does there seem any reason why any distinction between them should exist. Nor, indeed, save that all are exclusively heraldic, why some of them should be regarded as anything more than ordinary charges. These Subordinaries are the _Canton_, the _Quarter_, the _Inescutcheon_, the _Orle_, the _Tressure_, the _Bordure_, _Flanches_, the _Lozenge_, _Mascle_ and _Rustre_, the _Fusil_, the _Billet_, the _Gyron_, and the _Frette_. The Canton, by the early Heralds commonly styled the "Quarter," sometimes has been grouped with the Ordinaries. And it must here be observed that the Lozenge, Fusil, Billet, Gyron, and Frette were not used as single charges by the early Heralds; but by them the fields of Shields were divided _lozengy_ and _gyronny_, or they were _semée of Billets_, or covered over with _Frette_-work, from which the single charges evidently were afterwards obtained.
The CANTON (H. 3), sometimes blazoned as a QUARTER, cut off by two lines, the one drawn in pale and the other bar-wise, or in fesse, is either the first quarter of the field of a Shield, or about three-fourths of that quarter, but smaller if not charged. The confusion between the canton and the quarter is due to the fact that ancient arms in which the charge is now, and has been for centuries past, stereotyped as a canton and drawn to occupy one-ninth of the Shield, were uniformly drawn and blazoned in early times with the charge as a quarter. But there is a marked distinction now made between the canton and the quarter. A _Canton ermine_ is of frequent occurrence, as in No. 128; but it is generally borne charged, and it always overlies the charges of the field of the Shield, as No. 129, for DE KYRKEBY (R. 2)--_Arg., two bars gu.; on a canton of the last a cross moline or_; and, for BLUNDELL (H. 3)--_Az., billettée, on a canton or a raven ppr._, No. 130.