Heraldry has changed with the times - a coat of arms is for those who have distinguished themselves or contributed to society

Before the name of your tailor, the make and model of your car, or the size of your superyacht mattered, and before logo-laden handbags or even old school ties, the status symbol for the seriously superior European was the coat of arms. Nobility of birth is no longer required. Nobility of spirit is more important.

In the later Middle Ages, heraldic symbols identified knights in battle, their property, and the members of their private armies, eventually becoming part of a pan-European system of courtly ceremony. In the 15th century, Richard III incorporated the English heralds, who organised such matters, and installed them in the College of Arms. They ensured that heraldic symbols were unique, officially approved and registered, designed according to specific rules, and were only displayed by those properly entitled to them.

Modern applicants find these gatekeepers of gentility residing in the nearly 350-year-old College of Arms in the City of London, almost in the shadow of St Paul's Cathedral and just across the Thames from the modern reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. The heralds have actually been on this site since 1555, well before Shakespeare's time.

The atmosphere inside the weathered red-brick building of 1666 is instantly recognisable to anyone educated at a British public school. Sober portraits of previous heralds gaze down from wood-panelled walls, and creaking staircases with rooms to either side are reminiscent of older Oxford colleges.

The library is home to 7,000 bound volumes of manuscripts dating as far back as the 11th century, mostly genealogies and heraldic reference works called "ordinaries". Records of individual grants of arms date back over five centuries, and are still hand-painted and lettered. Records are still retrieved using index cards, with not a scanner or computer in sight.

Grantees still receive painted scrolls of calf-skin vellum depicting their arms in bright colours, also bedecked with the coats of sovereign and senior heralds, and hung with seals. Blazon, the language used on them to describe the arms granted, is derived from 11th-century French, at that time the language of the English elites.

There are few institutions more redolent of tradition, but Peter O'Donoghue, the York Herald, whose job title has existed since at least 1484, insists that the success of heraldry is due to its adaptability. "One of the reasons it has kept going for the last seven or eight hundred years is that it has proved to be a very simple and flexible system which can express different things to different people at different times."

In the days of knights and jousting tournaments, "having a coat of arms was a way of saying that you were a member of that high elite, and that gave coats of arms a great power as symbols of status", O'Donoghue says.

Modern brands still often adopt shields as logos in an attempt to convey exclusivity.