Order of the Pelican
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Companionship in the Order of the Pelican is granted to those who have excelled in service. Members of this order are often referred to as "Pelicans".
Titles
- Master/Mistress
- Alternate Titles are available for substitution.
Token/Regalia
- (Tinctureless) A pelican in its piety.
- (Tinctureless) A pelican vulning itself.
- (Tinctureless) A chapeau.
- Pelicans may display a full achievement including silver or white helm, torse and mantling, crest and supporters. Pelicans may use a pelican in its piety as either crest or supporter, or may display a cap of maintenance upon the helm, in place of torse and crest.
- Order regalia includes:
- Pelican badge of the order dependant from a chain
- A blue cloak with the pelican badge on left breast
- A red chapeau turned up plumetty goutty de sang
- any other article of clothing, jewelry, equipment or flag featuring any badge of the order.
More Information
From a portion of an interview by Eadwynne of Runedun with Siegfried von Hőflichskeit, Aug AS XXI (1987):
Siegfried: "The Order of the Pelican was invented by the Board of Directors in the early 1970s. And there were a lot of us who were very much opposed to it. And the reason was that originally we felt that the Laurel really should cover that because what the Laurel was supposed to cover was excellence in something in the service to the SCA. This particular period though had a lot of strain between the then Kingdom of the West and the Board of Directors. The SCA was eventually incorporated in October of 1968. And the people who did the incorporation became the first members of the Board of Directors. By the early seventies, they were calling themselves the Imperial Electors and inventing awards. And that essentially forced the issue of whether the Board was essentially a medieval function or a modern business function. The Board gave three Pelicans, three Board Level Pelicans, and of those, one person refused it, one person is totally inactive, and the third person was immediately given a multi-kingdom Laurel by the monarchs of all the existing kingdoms on the grounds that if the person was going to be a Peer, they were going to be a Peer as if it were an “honest peerage.” The Board never gave any more Pelicans, but they invented the Pelican award for service. Pelicans weren’t given out in the Kingdom of the West for a while after that, then about a year and a half later, one of our very respected Peers requested that he might be allowed to give up his Laurel in exchange for a Pelican because he felt that he gotten his Laurel for service, and the Pelican was what that was for. It would be only fair. There was a lot of debate about that, and they finally decided to do it. And that sort of legitimized the Pelican in this Kingdom and subsequently there have been Pelicans."
https://history.westkingdom.org/ahp/attachments/20/InterviewWithSiegfried.pdf
