The town crest
The crest is a white shield with an eight-pointed star in black and white, over three wavy black bars for the River Pontar. It comes from the seal of the old borough.
The star
The star has eight points, each divided down its length, one half black and one half white, so that black always meets white. Heralds call this counterchanged. In the town it is called the obsidian star, after the black stone of the legend, and the star of the Lilac Sorceress.
The star appears on the borough seal, which is the oldest form of the town’s emblem. The seal matrix in the museum, lent by the town council, is of the seventeenth century, and the earliest impression of it that survives is on a lease of 1694. Its legend reads SIGILLVM BVRGI DE WENGEBERGE, “the seal of the borough of Wengeberge”.
The clerk of the market used the star as a stamp on the weights and measures he had checked, and it appears on boundary stones of the borough, on the Town Hall of 1823 and on the drinking fountain in the Market Square.
The river
The three wavy bars in the base of the shield were added in the 1890s, when the borough council had the seal redrawn as a shield for its notepaper and for the statue committee’s programme. They stand for the Pontar.
Arms and crests
Strictly, the emblem is not a crest, which in heraldry is the figure above a helmet, and it is not a grant of arms: the borough never applied to the heralds for one. “The town crest” is simply what Vengerberg has always called it.
Using the crest
The crest belongs to the town council, which inherited it from the borough in 1974. By agreement with the council, the Trust looks after the reference drawing of it and advises on its use. The crest may be used by local clubs, schools and charities and on the town’s signs without asking. Commercial use, on goods for sale or in advertising, needs the council’s permission; please write to the Trust first, at info@vengerberg.org, and we will pass your request on.
The Trust uses the crest as its own logo with the council’s agreement.