Griffin in heraldry
In heraldry, a monster with an eagle’s head, wings and forelegs on a lion’s body, hind legs and tail, and with ears. Rearing on its hind legs it is called segreant. Fox-Davies thought it the most popular heraldic beast after the lion.
Meaning
Fox-Davies defines the heraldic griffin exactly: the body, hind legs and tail of a lion joined to the head and claws of an eagle, the claws serving as forelegs, with an eagle’s wings, never shown folded. It also has ears, which are the only way to tell a griffin’s head from an eagle’s when the head is shown alone; Oswald Barron adds the long tuft under the beak. Rearing on its hind legs, where a lion would be rampant, the griffin is “segreant”, a word Barron put down to the pedantry of heralds. In Fox-Davies’ time it was, he thought, next in popularity to the lion, and the demi-griffin (its upper half) a very common crest.
Origin and history
The griffin is far older than heraldry. Britannica traces it to the Levant in the second millennium BCE, from where it spread through western Asia and reached Greece by the fourteenth century BCE. Some heraldry writers believed the heraldic griffin was born when a coat with an eagle and a coat with a lion were halved and joined on a marriage. Fox-Davies rejected the idea: the griffin existed as a creature in its own right long before armory began, around the end of the eleventh century.
Griffins appear in some of the earliest rolls of arms, though Fox-Davies thought they came into general use rather later. Barron names the house of Montagu, which bore a griffin rampant as a quartering at an early date, and a family called Griffin, whose griffin was a pun on the name. An early griffin on a town seal is that of Schweidnitz, near Breslau, of 1315; when the town was granted arms in 1452 the griffin was red on silver.
The male griffin
English heraldry has a creature of its own, the male griffin, which has no wings and instead carries clusters of spikes on its body. Fox-Davies found it very seldom and could only guess at its origin; he suggested it was a British form of the heraldic panther of the Continent.
Griffin or dragon?
In popular speech, Fox-Davies complained, any heraldic monster is a griffin. His example was the “griffin” opposite the Law Courts in London’s Strand, which is a dragon; heraldry’s dragon has its own page, the Red dragon of Wales of Wales. The griffin of Greek and Near Eastern art, before heraldry, is on the griffin page among the mythical creatures.
Read next
- Next in HeraldryRed dragon of WalesThe red dragon of Wales, Y Ddraig Goch: a red, winged, four-legged dragon on the Welsh flag of white and green. It was a badge and supporter of the Tudor kings and became the official flag of Wales in 1959.
- The griffin before heraldry, in the art of the ancient Near East and Greece.GriffinA creature with the head, wings and fore-claws of an eagle and the body of a lion: in Greek writers the guardian of gold in the far north, and in heraldry one of the commonest beasts, standing for strength and vigilance.
See also
Lion rampant, Coat of arms, Family crest, Tinctures (heraldic colours), Ordinaries, Marks of cadency.
Sources
- A Complete Guide to Heraldry, Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, 1909 (Project Gutenberg ebook 41617), T. C. & E. C. Jack, via Project Gutenberg, Chapter XIII, Monsters: The Griffin or Gryphon, pp. 222–224
- Heraldry (1911 Encyclopædia Britannica), Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), vol. 13, article by Oswald Barron, Encyclopædia Britannica, via Wikisource, Beasts and Birds: Griffin
- Griffin, Britannica (Internet Archive copy, 6 April 2026), Encyclopaedia Britannica, article text
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from curves and waves.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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