Wales — Coat of Arms and Flag

Country	Wales (Welsh: Cymru)
Status	Country of the United Kingdom; a Celtic nation
Flag	Y Ddraig Goch (“the Red Dragon”) — red dragon passant on white over green
Flag adopted	Officially recognised 1959
Coat of arms	Quarterly Or and Gules, four lions passant guardant counterchanged
Arms of	Llywelyn ab Iorwerth (Llywelyn the Great) & the House of Aberffraw, Gwynedd, 13th c.
Royal Badge	Granted 2008 (Peter Gwynne-Jones, Garter King of Arms); motto Pleidiol wyf i’m gwlad
Patron saint	Dewi Sant (Saint David); St David’s Day, 1 March
Other emblems	The leek (cenhinen) and the daffodil (cenhinen Bedr)
Celtic nation	One of six, with Cornwall, Brittany, Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man

Blazon

Quarterly Or and Gules, four lions passant guardant counterchanged, armed and langued Azure.

The shield is divided into four quarters, gold and red set diagonally against each other. On each quarter walks a lion, and the lions take the opposite colour to their field — red lions on the gold quarters, gold lions on the red — the heraldic device called counterchanging. The result is one of the most elegant and instantly Welsh designs in medieval heraldry.

Tincture Table & Symbolism

Colour	Heraldic name	Element	Traditional symbolism
Gold	Or	Two quarters; two lions	Generosity, sovereignty of the princes of Gwynedd
Red	Gules	Two quarters; two lions	Martial courage; the red long associated with Wales
Blue	Azure	Claws and tongues (armed and langued)	Detailing of the lions’ teeth and claws

The Four Lions of Llywelyn

These are the arms of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth — Llywelyn Fawr, “Llywelyn the Great” (c. 1173–1240) — and of the House of Aberffraw, the senior line of the princes of Gwynedd who came nearest to uniting native Wales into a single principality. They were borne after him by his grandson Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (Llywelyn Ein Llyw Olaf, “our last leader”), the last sovereign prince of Wales, killed in 1282 as Edward I of England completed his conquest.

Owain Glyndŵr’s Version

A century later the four lions rose again in revolt. Owain Glyndŵr, proclaimed Prince of Wales in 1400, took up the same quartered shield — but with his lions rampant (rearing on their hind legs) rather than passant, marking his claim as a reigning prince. His arms remain a potent symbol of Welsh independence.

From Gwynedd to the Royal Badge (2008)

The medieval shield had no official standing in modern Wales until, in May 2008, it was placed at the centre of a new Royal Badge of Wales, designed by Peter Gwynne-Jones, Garter King of Arms. The four-lions shield is crowned and ringed by a scroll and a wreath bearing the plant emblems of the four UK nations — leek, thistle, clover and rose — with the motto Pleidiol wyf i’m gwlad (“I am true to my country”), a line from the Welsh anthem Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau. It now appears on Welsh legislation in place of the older royal arms.

Design

The flag shows a red dragon (y ddraig goch), striding with one forefoot raised (passant), on a field split horizontally: white above, green below. Uniquely among national flags, its central charge is a living, snarling beast rather than a geometric device — and no two manufacturers draw the dragon exactly alike, since the law fixes the colours but not the precise form of the creature.

The Red Dragon: Vortigern, Cadwaladr, the Tudors

The dragon is far older than the flag. In the Historia Brittonum (9th century), the British king Vortigern cannot build his fortress at Dinas Emrys until two dragons are freed from beneath it: a red dragon and a white, which fight until the red at last drives out the white. The boy prophet (later identified with Myrddin, Merlin) reads them as the Britons and the invading Saxons. The red dragon of Cadwaladr, King of Gwynedd in the 7th century, carried the emblem into Welsh royal tradition; Owain Glyndŵr flew it in his rising; and Harri Tudur (Henry VII), of Welsh descent, raised the Red Dragon at Bosworth in 1485 before enshrining it at St Paul’s.

Green and White: the Tudor Livery

The green-and-white field beneath the dragon is not ancient but Tudor: white and green were the livery colours of the House of Tudor, and it is under the Tudors that the dragon settled onto this ground. The pairing was retained when the flag was standardised.

1959: Official Status

For a time the official Welsh flag was a badged design — the dragon on a green mount within a scroll bearing the motto Y Ddraig Goch Ddyry Cychwyn (“The Red Dragon Leads the Way”), added in 1953. Campaigners judged it fussy, and in 1959 the plain red dragon on white and green was recognised as the national flag — the form flown today.

Absent from the Union Jack

Wales is the one home nation with no representation on the Union Flag, which combines the crosses of England, Scotland and Ireland only: when the Union Flag took shape, Wales was legally treated as part of the Kingdom of England. The omission is regularly raised in debate, and the red dragon is the usual candidate for any future redesign.

• The leek (cenhinen) — the oldest national emblem, worn on St David’s Day; tradition ties it to a battle in which Welshmen wore leeks to tell friend from foe.
• The daffodil (cenhinen Bedr, “Peter’s leek”) — adopted more recently as a tidier alternative, helped by the similarity of the Welsh names.
• Dewi Sant (Saint David) — patron saint of Wales, whose feast on 1 March is the Welsh national day.
• The Prince of Wales’s feathers — three ostrich feathers with the motto Ich Dien: a badge of the English heir apparent, not an emblem of the Welsh nation, and often distinguished from the four lions for that reason.

Wales is one of the six Celtic nations, with Cornwall, Brittany, Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man. Its language, Welsh (Cymraeg), is a Brittonic tongue — the branch it shares with Cornish and Breton — and, unlike its cousins, it was never lost: around a fifth of the population speaks it, and it holds official status alongside English. Where Cornwall reads its identity into a saint’s cross and Scotland into a saltire, Wales reads its own into a dragon that has fought for the Britons since the age of legend.

What does the red dragon on the Welsh flag mean?

Y Ddraig Goch, the Red Dragon, is an emblem of the Britons, from whom the Welsh descend. In the legend of Vortigern in the Historia Brittonum, a red dragon (the Britons) fights and finally overcomes a white dragon (the Saxons). It was borne by Cadwaladr of Gwynedd and later by the Tudors, and became the official flag of Wales in 1959.

Why is the Welsh flag green and white?

Green and white are the livery colours of the House of Tudor. Henry VII, a Welshman, carried the red dragon on a green-and-white ground at Bosworth in 1485; when the flag was standardised, the Tudor colours were kept beneath the dragon.

When did Wales get its official flag?

The plain red dragon on green and white was formally recognised as the national flag of Wales in 1959, replacing a fussier badged version of 1953. Because the dragon itself is medieval, it is often called the oldest national flag still in use.

What is the coat of arms of Wales?

The historic arms are blazoned Quarterly Or and Gules, four lions passant guardant counterchanged — a shield quartered gold and red, with four lions of alternating colour. They were the arms of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth and the princes of Gwynedd; in 2008 the shield became the centre of the Royal Badge of Wales.

Why is Wales not on the Union Jack?

The Union Flag combines the crosses of St George (England), St Andrew (Scotland) and St Patrick (Ireland). Wales is absent because, when the flag was assembled, it was legally treated as part of the Kingdom of England and so had no separate cross.

Is Wales a Celtic nation?

Yes — Wales (Cymru) is one of the six Celtic nations, with Cornwall, Brittany, Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man. Welsh (Cymraeg) is a living Brittonic language, close to Cornish and Breton, spoken by around a fifth of the population.

• College of Arms — Royal Badge of Wales, granted May 2008
• Historia Brittonum (attrib. Nennius, 9th c.) — the dragons of Dinas Emrys
• Siddons, M. P., The Development of Welsh Heraldry, National Library of Wales — the four lions and Welsh arms
• Davies, J., A History of Wales, London, 2007 — Gwynedd, Glyndŵr and the Tudors
• The Flag Institute, UK Flag Registry — Wales (Y Ddraig Goch)
• Siddons, M. P., The Welsh Flag — the dragon’s path to official status in 1959

Last reviewed by the Emblema Mundi editorial team on 12 July 2026.