Tincture (heraldry) as the field upon which they rest, with the colours reversed. In the municipal arms of Behnsdorf, Saxony-Anhalt, seen at right, the field is divided with the left half white (argent) and the right half green (vert), and the counterchanged tree is green where it lies on the white part of the field, and white where it lies on the green part. The flag of Maryland is another example of counterchanging. The only U.S. state flag to be directly based on English heraldry, it is the arms of George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, who founded the colony of Maryland in
Vert (heraldry) (r. 1253-1278), described by chronist Ottokar aus der Gaal (c. 1315) as: A curious example occurs in an early armorial of the Burgundian Order of the Knights of the Golden Fleece (Toison d'Or) where the arms of the Lannoy family are recorded as "argent, three lions rampant sinople, etc." Despite the fact that sinople signified a shade of red in early heraldry, the lions in this 15th century manuscript are clearly green, although rather faded. The fugitive nature of the green pigments of that day may have had some influence on the low use of that color in early heraldry.