Shropshire's Punning Heraldry - Willaston

Willaston

Arms: Or, three mullets* two and one Sable (visitations).

Crest: Crest: A demi-lion issuing out of a ducal coronet holding in his paw a mullet (Sable) (Seal 1663)

* Burke's has the mullets pierced.

The arms of Willaston.

There is a traditional heraldic pun (known as a canting coat or armes parlantes) in this coat of arms, but it relies on an archaic spelling and meaning of the surname. While the "mullet" (a star-like charge representing a spur-rowel) might initially seem to have no relationship to the name Willaston, the pun operates on two clever linguistic levels. 

The first is the complex cant upon  "Well-A-Star". In early English and Anglo-Norman heraldry, puns on names were frequently phonetic rather than literal. Surnames ending in "-aston" or "-iston" were often treated by period heralds as a play on "a star" or "east star". The name Willaston (or its variants like Wollaston) was phonetically parsed in heraldic wit as "Well-A-Star" or "Will-A-Star". Because a mullet is the heraldic term for a five, or six-pointed star, placing three prominent stars on the shield directly answered to this verbal joke. 

The second is the aquatic Double-Pun: The "Mullet" Fish. There is a second, overlapping historical joke that applies to this specific family name. Early heraldic lexicographers, most notably Randle Holme III, in his 1688 masterpiece The Academy of Armory, explicitly recorded that the mullet was uniquely used by families like Willaston as a multi-layered pun. In the aquatic world, a mullet is a well-known type of fish. The surname Willaston shares strong historical roots and a nearly identical phonetic origin with the surname Williamson. In the playful, "cheap-shot" logic of medieval heraldry, the family name Williamson/Willaston sounds like "Will's son" or "Will's town". The mullet (fish) was used as a rebus because a young or small mullet fish was historically referred to in various regional English dialects as a "will" or a "willy-fish". Because drawing fish on a shield was sometimes seen as aesthetically less prestigious than geometric shapes, the heraldic designers swapped the literal fish for the geometric star while retaining the exact same phonetic name: a mullet.

By having the lion actively look at and hold a fourth mullet in its paw above the helmet, the heralds were quite literally doubling down on the pun, pointing the viewer's eye directly to the visual clue of the bearer's surname.