Orle

William St John Hope writes: “Sometimes a shield was charged with one of smaller size called a scutcheon, and the middle of this was occasionally cut out to form a voided scutcheon or orle.” Here it is an orle vert on a field of argent. Hope gives no rule for drawing it, so the construction here is our own, and it is exact. It takes the construction of the border one step further. The shield is laid out from the two squares, and its outline is set in twice: by a quarter of half the width, as for the border, and by a half. For the half, the line through the centres of the squares is the top edge, the lines down from the half way points of the top edge through the centres are the sides, and the flanks are swung from the shield’s own feet with the opening shortened by the same half, from where those sides cross the level line. The band between the two is the orle. It stands an eighth of the width in from the edge and is an eighth broad, and the inner corners of its top edge are the centres of the two squares.