Clarenceux King of Arms
Officer of the College of Arms
Clarenceux King of Arms, historically often spelled Clarencieux (both pronounced KLARR-ən-soo), is an officer of arms at the College of Arms in London. Clarenceux is the senior of the two provincial kings of arms and his jurisdiction is that part of England south of the River Trent. The office almost certainly existed in 1420, and there is a fair degree of probability that there was a Claroncell rex heraldus armorum in 1334. There are also some early references to the southern part of England being termed Surroy, but there is not firm evidence that there was ever a king of arms so called. The title of Clarenceux is supposedly derived from either the Honour (or estates of dominion) of the Clare earls of Gloucester, or from the Dukedom of Clarence (1362). With minor variations, the arms of Clarenceux have, from the late fifteenth century, been blazoned as Argent a Cross on a Chief Gules a Lion passant guardant crowned with an open Crown Or.
The current Clarenceux King of Arms is Robert Noel who was appointed to the office on 28 October 2024.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 7, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1095534. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1420, 1334, 1362 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clarenceux King of Arms” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.