Has anybody else seen this episode? If so, what did you make of all the heraldic mistakes and other remarks? Those that occur to me are as follows:

1. I'm not sure that anybody could agree on the correct pronunciation of 'pursuivant'. I was always informed by somebody who had actually been a pursuivant that the correct pronunciation was something close to 'PURSE-er-vnt'. In this episode we got
something more like 'pur-SYOO-vnt' and possibly 'pur-SEE-vnt'. To be fair, perhaps they were accurately reflecting the fact that the word is so often mispronounced.

2. Speaking of pursuivants, there is a character who is said to have been Rouge Dragon from around 1945 until 1962. That sounds like an improbably long time for somebody to remain as a pursuivant without being promoted to herald. Unless, of course, we
are supposed to imagine that he was promoted and nobody bothers to mention this.

3. Furthermore, although we are told that a pursuivant is a junior officer of arms, the detectives later meet the fictional 'Cendree Wyvern Pursuivant', who seems to introduce himself as being the second most senior member of the College of Arms. He is
portrayed as being second in command to Sir Hilary Bray, the Ian Fleming character, but in the Ian Fleming story Bray is, I think, merely a genealogist, not Garter King of Arms. It wasn't clear why Rouge Dragon was used as a real position but the other
title was made up.

4. When DI Thursday and DC Morse meet Cendree Wyvern Pursuivant, the officer announces the blazon of the Morse family coat of arms plus Latin motto. Of course, an officer of arms would know that there is no such thing as the Morse family coat of arms and
that for Morse to bear a coat of arms he would need to be armigerous through a grant to himself or an ancestor. From what we know about Morse it seems unlikely that he is armigerous.

5. A retired officer of arms is said to undertake private work providing family crests and coats of arms. Would this actually happen in real life? The meaning, backed up by the plot, was clearly that he was designing new coats of arms, not that he was
tracing genealogies that could have the result of discovering arms that a client was unaware that he was entitled to bear. If he was going to continue a practice, why retire? In 1966, when the episode is set, there was no retirement age for the College
of Arms, so he would simply have stayed on at the College if he wanted to keep working.

6. (Possible spoiler alert? The plot is so complicated that you'd have to be very on the ball to get it!) The retired officer or arms was designing a new coat of arms. Morse gets dexter and sinister mixed up, but that doesn't particularly matter in the
context. What really bugged me was the way that the design was just quarterly with different charges put in each quarter, like a child would do, but with no understanding of how quartering works. Even more bizarre was the idea that the client would have
a baton sinister superimposed over his design to show that one of his ancestors had been illegitimate about 120 year earlier! If everybody granted a coat of arms who had at least one illegitimate ancestor somewhere in the family tree had a baton sinister
I imagine that most people would end up with a baton sinister. Out of curiosity, is the baton sinister *ever* used this way? I.e., is it ever used as a charge on a brand new grant because somebody wants to reflect a history of bastardy in the family, or
is it always used to identify the arms of somebody illegitimately descended from an armiger?

7. An officer of arms is given the name Adrian Weiss. That obviously sounds German. Could he be based on Anthony Wagner? (Same first initial too...)

What I wonder is why the makers of an otherwise pretty well researched and very well made series wouldn't just employ somebody from the College of Arms to spend a day looking over the heraldry to avoid glaring errors. Given how much each episode must
cost to make, I'm sure an officer of arms would gladly have provided one day's advice for, say, £500, even £1,000, which would be small change for a production like that. After all, dramas often employ experts to advise on law or medicine. But then I
have also spotted errors in academic dress, a fairly basic error for a series set in Oxford.

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