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Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel!
You asked for our opinion of a couple designs for your arms using a "wren proper" as a charge. Here are our thoughts.
A wren is a perfectly fine charge for medieval arms. One of our members was present at the meeting of the An Tir College of Heralds when you submission was reviewed. She tells us that they chose to use the word "bird" to describe your wrens only because the wrens were drawn as very generic-looking birds, without the distinctive features of wrens.
Medieval heraldic art was not realistic; it was representative. Birds and beasts were identified by certain characteristic features, which artists would display to maximum advantage even if they had no idea what the animal actually looked like. For example, a 14th century German roll of arms shows arms containing an elephant. The elephant looks like an antelope-legged pig, but it has a trunk, tusks, and a large rounded body and so it was identifiable as an elephant. To make your wrens identifiable, we suggest that they be "close" (standing with their wings folded next to the body) rather than "rising", and that you draw each tail sticking up at a right angle to the line of the back.
Birds and beasts are occasionally found "proper" in medieval arms, but it is not a common practice. We have found examples of brown birds proper in late period arms, but it is more common for charges to appear in a heraldic tincture. You used "sable" in your first submission; that's a good choice.
We recognize that you wanted a "brown wren" to pun on your name "Branuenn". That's a clever joke, but it isn't the sort of joke that medieval heralds worked into arms. Your pun is a "rebus", in which the names of visual elements of your design construct a multi-word pun. Rebuses were sometimes used as the basis of medieval maker's marks, but we have not seen them used in arms.
Medieval heraldry used "canting", a specific kind of punning in which the name of one of the main charges in the arms sounds like the _surname_ of the owner. Canting almost never involved the colors of charges and almost never involved more than one word. Most important, medieval arms did not cant on the owner's given name, but only on the surname. Remember that medieval arms were designed to be passed down through many generations, so a reference to a given name would have been counter-productive.
Before we turn to specific design ideas, we'd like to point out that your persona in 11th century Wales would not have used arms. Arms were not invented until the late 12th century. If you are interested in some thoughts about how to deal with heraldry and a pre-heraldic persona, you may want to read the article we've posted at
http://www.itd.umich.edu/~ximenez/s.gabriel/faq/nonheraldic.html
In the mean time, let's move on to your ideas.
Your original arms design for your was quite good. With the minor changes we suggested above to make your wrens more recognizable, that design would be "Sable, on a bend argent three wrens sable". Of course, this design still conflicts with the arms of Marieke van de Dal and Siegfried von Hoflichskeit. It is possible to obtain permission to register conflicting arms, and I happen to know that both these gentles are still active in the Society and might well be willing to grant you permission to register your original design. If you're interested in that possibility, I can put you in touch with the two gentles.
You also asked us about some new designs:
Argent, in chief a wren proper.
Vert, in chief a wren proper.
As we discussed above, we recommend that you change the bird to one of the standard heraldic tinctures, rather than proper. If you do decide to use proper, then you should be aware that a brown charge is considered dark (color) for purposes of contrast; it could not be placed on a green field.
Placing a single roundish charge in chief is not a design found in period armory. Instead, we suggest either of two similar designs:
Argent, in chief three wrens sable.
Argent, in canton a wren vert.
The three wrens would be lined up in a row across the upper part of the field. The wren "in canton" would be in the upper left quarter of the field. Either of these designs would be a fine choice.
I hope this letter has been helpful. Tangwystyl ferch Morgant Glasfryn, Elsbeth Anne Roth, and Zenobia Naphtali contributed to this letter.
For the Academy,
Arval Benicoeur