Paly

William St John Hope tells how the partings of a shield multiplied: “An even series of pales yielded a vertical striping called paly.” Of the early rolls of arms he writes that “Paly of six pieces is also a normal number”, and that the number “must always be even, or the alternate pieces will become bars or pales”: an odd number would read as pales laid on a field, not as a parted field. Here it is paly of six, argent and azure. Hope gives no rule for drawing it, so the construction here is our own, and it is exact; it is the first half of the construction of checky. A chain of circles of one opening steps along the top edge. Each pair of neighbouring circles crosses twice, once above the edge and once below it, and the line through the two crossings falls straight down: seven such lines, the outer two the sides of the shield. A swing of two openings about each top corner marks the foot of its side, and the flanks are swung at the width, each from the foot of the other side. Every pale is one opening wide.