A carved stone plaque bearing a city's coat of arms and a defiant Latin motto is not, on the surface, an unusual thing to find in a medieval museum. What makes this particular piece quietly remarkable is the story compressed into that motto, and the long distance it has travelled to reach its current home above a vaulted undercroft in Waterford city.

The plaque dates to 1593 and displays the arms of Waterford alongside the phrase 'Intacta manet scutii Waterfordiae', meaning 'The shield of Waterford remains intact'. The motto was not self-appointed bravado. It was granted by King Henry VII nearly a century earlier, in recognition of the city's refusal to yield to Perkin Warbeck during his siege of 1495. Warbeck was one of the more persistent pretenders to the English throne in the late fifteenth century, claiming to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the two princes widely believed to have been murdered in the Tower of London. His failure to take Waterford was a significant moment, and Henry VII marked it with the unusual gift of a motto that effectively declared the city unbroken. The plaque itself, carrying that motto and the date 1593, originally stood in the Shambles Market on High Street, the kind of public commercial space where a civic statement would have been seen by as many people as possible. It is now displayed in Waterford's Medieval Museum, and was regilded and repainted in 2012.