Three piles

Among the ordinaries William St John Hope names “the pile, which was often threefold with lines converging towards the base”. His example is the stall plate of Ralph lord Basset at Windsor, which he calls the earliest surviving plate there. Here three piles azure issue from the top of a field of argent and meet in its point. Hope gives no rule for drawing them, so the construction here is our own, and it is exact. A chain of circles of one opening steps along the top edge. Each pair of neighbouring circles crosses twice, above the edge and below it, and the line through the two crossings marks the edge: six such marks part it into five equal openings. The outer two lines run down as the sides of the shield, two openings long, measured by a swing about each top corner, and the flanks are swung at the width, each from the foot of the other side, to meet in the point. From each mark a line runs to the point; the first, the third and the fifth parts are the piles.