This page is about abatements and augmentations of honor. Abatements and augmentations of honor are certain special charges that were placed on someone's coat of arms to either reward or punish that person for that person's good or bad deeds. I'm interested in abatements and augmentations of honor because this part of the art of heraldry, more than any other, shows how heraldry was connected to other parts of mediaeval life, especially law, ethics, and the code of chivalry. I hope to share my interest and the things I've learned with you. I'm going to begin with the abatements, because, frankly, there's less to be said about them.
Abatements appear in both the theory and the practice of heraldry in the fourteenth century.
The first mention of abatements in a manual of heraldry was made by Iohannes de Bado Aureo, who wrote his Tractatus de Armis at the request of Anne, Richard II's queen. Iohannes wrote that if a person was to break his promise, showed cowardice, or acted in a grossly unworthy manner, he was to be brought on trial, and, if he was found guilty, his coat of arms were to be displayed upside down, or reversed. This is the first, and direst, abatement. There were many reported instances of the use of the first abatement. Nearly every account of the execution of a traitor describes his being led to the headsman's block in a tabard of his reversed coat of arms.