In English, "bachelor" could refer both to an academic degree and to the lowest rank of knight. Unlike the sword-girding ceremony used to confer knighthood, the ceremony for awarding a bachelor's degree was called the tassel-turning ceremony: the tassel on a student's mortarboard was moved from right to left, signifying that the grain had ripened and the graduate could spread their wings and soar.
The origins of the sword-girding ceremony were rather complicated. In Tacitus's Germania, it was a man's coming-of-age rite, granting an adult male the right to defend himself and showing that the young man was capable of independent thought and action. By the feudal era, this custom from the Germanic forests had become a lord lightly tapping the shoulders, on one or both sides, of a kneeling recipient with the back of a ceremonial sword. In England, this authority belonged to the king and queen; ordinary dukes and marquises did not possess it. It was also one means by which the royal family restrained Parliament.
The dukes of France had no authority to confer any title, not even that of count or knight. Yet among the nobility of France, rank was not determined by title but by lineage. A count whose line had continued for more than three generations held a higher status than a newly created duke, while ducal titles had become somewhat overabundant in France. But if one was the duke of a duchy—like the Duchess of Savoy, Margarita of Austria—then she was equivalent to a monarch and could confer every title below duke.
Once a title had been conferred, there would be a family crest, which could decorate swords, reins, belts, spurs, banners, and weather vanes. In other words, it restored the symbols of noble identity that had been stripped from nobles during the