At New Year for the past four years, I have published a friendship book. My inspiration to do this came from a small book I picked up in a Bloomsbury secondhand bookshop.When I published the first edition of sinople I wrote about my reasons for choosing the title and what sinople means. As I now have many new readers and I often get asked, ‘what is sinople’ I felt it was worth repeating the explanation. First of all green is my favourite colour and sinople means green. Sinople is the French term for the colour green. In Britain where most heraldic language is derived from Norman French green is ‘vert’.
Why sinople should mean green is something of a mystery as the word originally meant red. Sinople comes from the Black Sea port of Sinope in Paphalgonia, now in modern Turkey. It is a deep red earth pigment found locally that became known as sinopia. The pigment is derived from ferruginous quartz and it was popular with medieval artists for under-drawing.
From the origins of heraldry, green was in France known as vert but at some point in the XIV century, sinople began to be used. It is unclear why this happened. I find this interesting and amusing.
