Talk:Diocese of Durham

Wikipedia inconsistent on coronet in coat of arms

The Wikipedia articles on the Diocese of Durham and the Bishop of Durham do not use the same image for the coat of arms. The coronet differs between the two. Each has its problems. According to one source, the coronet is supposed to be "a ducal coronet" (which, NATURALLY, Heralds being the creatures that they are, is TOTALLY DIFFERENT from "the coronet of a duke"). In Googling and also reviewing other British coats of arms in Wikipedia, I find good reason to believe that the "ducal coronet" has upon its rim four strawberry-leaves which I'll call "baubles" or "leaves". (The coronet of a duke has eight strawberry-leaves.) In the standard way of rendering a three-dimensional coronet into two dimensions, this means that one strawberry-leaf would be placed front-and-center, and that at each of the left and right extremities of the circlet one-half of a strawberry-leaf will show in profile. In the coronet shown at the article on the Bishop of Durham, the number is right but they don't really look like what we think of as "strawberry-leaves". In the coronet shown at the article on the Diocese of Durham, the baubles DO look like strawberry-leaves, but the number is wrong. It shows that there are eight, but showing five (one front-and-center (opposite one in back that we can't see), two on the extremities in profile (halves) as in the "ducal coronet"), but two more (opposite two in the rear that we can't see) on each side of the front-and-center strawberry-leaf, in-between it and the half-in-profile leaf on that side. This is not a "ducal coronet" but, rather, the "coronet of a duke".

I think someone should start with the image at the Diocese of Durham, and erase two leaves from the coronet's rim to make it into a ducal coronet. This graphic also has the advantage of being a lot larger. It would be easier to simply erase two strawberry-leaves than to change the baubles at the Bishop of Durham into strawberry-leaves.

Why this nitpick actually matters is because of confusion in a conversation, in which was mentioned the actions of the 1st Earl of Durham, occurring at a time when I would have thought that the Bishop of Durham was STILL the Earl of Durham. There is no resolution to the confusion, because the 1st Earl was so created in 1833, while the Bishop's Earldom wasn't abolished until 1836. As with the Earldom of Mar, and the Earldoms of "Oxford" and of "Oxford and Asquith", this does sometimes happen, even though it's not supposed to. But supposing I had looked at the image with the coronet of a duke and thought "Well, that explains it, I just erred in thinking that the Bishop's secular peerage was an Earldom, and now I see it's a Dukedom". I would have ended up with misinformation that I believed to be true, which is contrary to Wikipedia's spirit. (Fortunately I dug further and found out that the Bishop's secular peerage was an Earldom.)2600:1700:6759:B000:E894:BFCC:705D:880 (talk) 21:57, 4 September 2024 (UTC)Christopher Lawrence Simpson

Please beef up the disambiguation for Durham peerage-titles

Please make sure that the disambiguation-links for "Bishop of Durham", "Dicocese of Durham", "County Palatine of Durham", and "Earl of Durham" (peerage of 19th-century creation, and including its more-famous individual Earls) are as robust as they should be, with each Article providing a path to any of the others with which it is apt to be confused.2600:1700:6759:B000:E894:BFCC:705D:880 (talk) 22:06, 4 September 2024 (UTC)Christopher Lawrence Simpson