Quartering
The practice of placing or marshalling two or more coats of arms on one shield to form one bearing, thereby to denote the several matches and alliances of one family with the heiress of others. This is used, for instance, when a man inherits from both father and mother the right to bear Arms or when an alliance is formed by a member of one family marrying the heiress of another. The simplest form is impalement, when the shield to is divided into two palewise by a vertical line.
To enable the compounding of several Arms, the shield may be divided or partitioned into squares, compartments or quarters, as many as may be required, displayed sequentially from dexter to sinister commencing from the top row, to include all the inherited Arms. When only two coats are quartered, rather than impaled, on one shield, as in the case of marriage, the first and fourth quarters display the Arms of the husband; the second and third, those of the wife. See Counter-quartered.
The first coat (that of the bearer) may be repeated or not to make up an even number. When divided into more than four sections, the number is to be specified and is emblazoned as Quarterly of six, Quarterly of eight, etc. There is no restriction to the number of quarterings, apart from the interest of clarity, but shields of 32, 40 and 64 are fairly commonly found, and there are known examples of several hundreds on one shield of arms.
