Dispatches

Look closely at the dial of our newest 20mm button compass and you will find something that does not belong to the vocabulary of modern instrument design. Where a conventional dial carries a printed triangle, a diamond, or a plain letter N, this one carries a stylized arrowhead. Two barbs converging on a single point above a narrow shaft. It is a shape with roughly seven centuries of paperwork behind it.

The symbol is called the broad arrow. In heraldic language it is a close relative of the pheon. Collectors and old soldiers sometimes call it the crow's foot. For most of its documented life it has meant one thing: this object belongs to the Crown.

What the Broad Arrow Actually Is

The broad arrow is a stylized metal arrowhead rendered as a graphic device: a tang with two barbs meeting at a point. Heraldry draws it pointing downward. Almost every other application points it up.

The pheon is its close cousin. Nineteenth century heraldic writers separated the two by a single detail. Woodward's Treatise on Heraldry (1892) held that a broad arrow and a pheon are drawn the same way, except that the pheon has jagged or engrailed inner edges on the barbs. Parker's Glossary of Terms Used in Heraldry (1894) said much the same. By 1909, Arthur Charles Fox-Davies noted in A Complete Guide to Heraldry that the distinction was not one anyone observed with much discipline. The two terms have been used interchangeably ever since, and British Ministry of Defence documentation has used both.

Earliest Documented Use

The origin of the mark is not settled, and anyone who tells you otherwise is compressing a genuinely open question. What is documented is this:

• 1330. The earliest known official appearance is on the seal used by Richard de la Pole, butler to King Edward III.
• 1383. A record notes that a member of the butlery staff, having selected a pipe of wine for the King's use, marked it with the royal sign resembling an arrowhead.
• 1386. Thomas Stokes was sentenced to the pillory by London's Court of Aldermen for impersonating an officer of the royal household. His method was to commandeer barrels of ale from brewers and mark them with an "arewehead." Counterfeiting the mark was already a crime worth prosecuting.
• 15th and 16th centuries. The device saw service as an assay mark for pewter and tin.
• 1545. Objects recovered from the wreck of the Tudor warship Mary Rose carry the mark, including bronze rigging sheaves, gun carriage wheels, bowls, and wooden tankards.

The popular story credits the Sidney family of Penshurst, whose arms feature a pheon. Sir Philip Sidney served as Joint Master-General of the Ordnance in 1585 and 1586. His great-nephew Henry Sydney, 1st Earl of Romney, held the post from 1693 to 1702. The tidy version says one of them stamped his personal badge on government stores and the habit stuck. The Oxford English Dictionary is blunt about this: the evidence does not support it, because the mark was in use well before either Sidney came near the Board of Ordnance.

A second theory holds that the naval version began as a simplified anchor. Instructions issued in 1609 for marking timber for the Navy directed commissioners to mark selected trees with the King's letters and an anchor. Over generations of hurried axe work and stencils, an anchor can lose its ring and its flukes and become something that looks a great deal like an arrowhead.

The Board of Ordnance and the Force of Law

Whatever its origin, the mark became inseparable from the Board of Ordnance, the body responsible for supplying guns, ammunition, stores, and equipment to the King's forces. From the sixteenth century forward, the broad arrow moved from custom into statute.

In 1554, Thomas Gresham wrote to the Privy Council about a shipment of fifty cases of Spanish reals moving from Seville to England, noting that each case was marked with the broad arrow and numbered. A proclamation of Charles I in 1627 required tobacco imported from non-English plantations to be sealed with a broad arrow and a portcullis. A proclamation of Charles II in 1661 ordered the mark applied to nails, spikes, and similar naval stores by stamp, brand, or any other practical method. An Order in Council of 1664 authorized the Commissioners of the Navy to put the broad arrow on any merchant ship in the river they intended to hire for sea service. Marking a hull was the act of requisition itself.

The Embezzlement of Public Stores Act 1697 made it an offence for anyone other than official contractors to apply the mark to stores. Section 4 of the Public Stores Act 1875 carried that principle into modern law, and it remains on the books. Applying the broad arrow to goods without lawful authority is a criminal offence in the United Kingdom, treated much like counterfeiting a hallmark. A mark that guarantees ownership only works if forging it costs you something.

The King's Broad Arrow in North America

For American readers, the broad arrow has a second life worth knowing. The Royal Navy ran on tall, straight, knot-free timber for masts, and English supply had long depended on the Baltic trade, which was expensive and politically exposed. The Admiralty turned to the colonies.

The Massachusetts Charter of 1691 contained a Mast Preservation Clause reserving to the Crown all trees measuring twenty-four inches in diameter or more at twelve inches above the ground, on any land not already granted to a private person. Eastern white pine was the prize. Surveyors marked reserved trees with three strikes of an axe forming an arrowhead over a shaft. A Surveyor-General of His Majesty's Woods was appointed to select, mark, record, and police them.

The policy was resented from the start. It applied to trees standing on town-owned and privately owned land. Colonists could sell mast timber only to the British, at prices well below what the French and Spanish were quietly willing to pay. Acts of Parliament in 1711, 1722, and 1772 pushed protection down to trees of twelve inches in diameter, which took in a great deal of ordinary woodlot. The 1772 act helped provoke the Pine Tree Riot in New Hampshire that same year, one of the early open acts of colonial resistance.

Three axe cuts on a tree trunk, and a continent's worth of argument about who owns what.

The Mark on Maps and Walls

Topped with a horizontal line, the broad arrow became the standard Ordnance Survey benchmark. The horizontal bar records a surveyed height above the Newlyn datum; the arrow below it identifies the mark and its ownership. Tens of thousands were chiselled into churches, bridges, and walls across Britain from the 1840s onward, and many are still legible. Anyone who has ever worked from a British map has been working from a network of these arrows without necessarily knowing it.

The Mark on Uniforms

The broad arrow's least admirable chapter is its use on prison clothing. Admiralty prisons of the French Revolutionary Wars issued mattresses and other stores bearing the mark, which proved its worth at Norman Cross when a local tradesman was caught with marked goods and sentenced to the pillory and two years in a house of correction. British prison uniforms carried the arrow routinely from about the 1830s. Sir Edmund Du Cane expanded the practice in the 1870s, viewing the mark as both an obstacle to escape and a deliberate humiliation. One prisoner recorded that boot nails were driven in an arrow pattern so that every footstep printed government property into the ground. The practice ended in 1922.

In the Australian colonies the mark was applied to convict clothing after the Board of Ordnance took over supply in the 1820s, including the black and yellow "magpie" outfits. Writing in 1827, Peter Miller Cunningham described convicts in frocks and jackets daubed over with broad arrows, letters, and numerals in black, white, and red. Caroline Leakey's 1859 novel of transportation took The Broad Arrow as its title.

Sold Out of Service

One detail rewards collectors. Equipment judged no longer serviceable but still worth money was struck a second time with an opposing arrow, nose to nose with the first. That double mark meant the item had been legally released, and it is the reason surplus rifles, tools, and instruments can carry the Crown's mark without being stolen property.

The Board of Ordnance was absorbed into the War Department in 1855. The War Office carried the mark from 1857 to 1964, and the Ministry of Defence from 1964 until it was phased out during the 1980s. Australia still uses the broad arrow on Department of Defence property and, under state forestry regulation, to brand trees reserved from felling. India's military vehicle plates still lead with an upward arrow, though the shape has drifted toward a plain typographic one.

The Broad Arrow as a Design Element

The broad arrow survived as a graphic form because it was built to work under bad conditions. Two barbs and a shaft, no interior detail, no dependence on fine line weight. It could be cut with three axe strikes, chiselled into stone, stamped into brass, or stencilled through a plate, and read the same every time. That is a design brief most modern marks would fail.

It is also a statement about accountability. It says an object was bought with public money, inspected, accepted into service, and expected to be returned. It presumes that gear moves through hands, that it will be tested, and that someone will answer for its condition.

Those are the ideas we wanted at the top of the dial. North is the one direction on a magnetic card that is not negotiable. Everything else on a map, a bearing, a route plan, and a decision about whether to keep going or turn back is measured from it. A reference point is only worth anything if you trust it without renegotiating it every time you look down.

A Note on the Mark We Used

The dial carries a variation on the broad arrow, not a reproduction of the British Ministry of Defence mark. The distinction matters. The official mark remains legally protected in the United Kingdom, and copying it would be both unlawful and beside the point. What we drew is our own interpretation: an arrowhead form with the proportions and posture of the original, executed in our own line weight and rendered in luminous material so it reads in the dark.

Patrick Ma chose the broad arrow for this edition of PDW's Grade-AA 20mm button compass as an act of respect and as a homage. He has spent close to three decades building a design language out of marks that carry weight, symbols that were used by people who needed them to mean something under pressure. The broad arrow qualifies. It survived seven centuries of proclamations, statutes, wars, and surplus auctions because it did an honest job: it told you what a thing was and who stood behind it.

Same Grade-AA movement, same construction, same jeweled bearing quality found in the compass supplied with our Expedition Watch Band Compass Kit. It is a direct swap for users who want to change the face of their kit without changing its performance. The only difference is the mark at north, and what that mark has been through to get there.

Sources and Further Reading

• E. H. Fairbrother, "'The Broad Arrow': the King's mark," Notes and Queries, 11th ser. 9 (1914), 481 to 483.
• O. H. G. Hogg, "The Broad Arrow: origin and use of the ordnance mark of serviceability," Army Ordnance 14, no. 81 (1933).
• H. Stanford London, "Official badges," The Coat of Arms 4 (1956 to 1958).
• Joseph J. Malone, Pine Trees and Politics (1979).
• Margaret Maynard, Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
• Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, A Complete Guide to Heraldry (1909).
• Public Stores Act 1875, section 4 (United Kingdom).

Image credits: Ordnance Survey cut benchmark photograph via Geograph, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0. Product photography and dial artwork by Prometheus Design Werx.