At what time the form of standard which we call a flag was first used is not known. It was certainly not the earliest but the ultimate form which the standard assumed. The original form was some fixed object such as we have seen on the Egyptian and Roman examples, and the vexillum and labarum were transitional forms. The waving flag is said to have been first used by the Saracens. Another account is that the flag first acquired its present form in the sixth century, in Spain. The banners which Bede mentions as being carried by St. Augustine and his monks, when they entered Canterbury in procession, in the latter part of the sixth century, were probably in the form of the Roman labarum. He calls them little banners on which were depicted crosses. Of our own national flags the earliest forms were those which bore the cognizance of the ruler for the time being. The well-known ensign of the Danes at the time of their dominion in Britain was the raven. The dragon, as we have seen, was in the eighth century the cognizance of Wessex, and the Saxons had also on their standards a white horse. Of our later royal standards and those of other nations I shall speak afterwards. The forms of flags in our own country have varied very much. It was not till the time of the Crusades, when heraldry began to assume a definite form, that they became subject to established rules. Up to that period flags were, as a rule, small in size, and they usually terminated in points, like the more modern pennon. Such were the standards of the Normans. At the Battle of the Standard in 1138 the staff of the English standard was in the form of the mast of a ship, having a silver pyx at the top, containing the host, and bearing three sacred banners dedicated respectively to St. Peter, St. John of Beverley, and St. Wilfrid of Ripon, the whole being fastened--like the standards of the Persians and Assyrians--to a wheeled vehicle. From an early period the practice has prevailed of blessing standards, and this has continued to our own day in the British army when new colours are presented to a regiment--there being a special form of service at the consecration. The banner of William the Conqueror was one blessed and sent to him by the pope. Indeed, it has been the practice of the popes in every age to give consecrated banners where they wished success to an enterprise. DIFFERENT KINDS OF FLAGS--GONFANON--PENNON--PENONCEL. In the middle ages almost every flag was a military one. A very early form, borne near the person of the commander-in-chief, was the Gonfanon. It was fixed in a frame made to turn like a modern ship's vane. That of the Conqueror, as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry, had three tails, and was charged with a golden cross on a white ground within a blue border. Of other forms of flags the principal varieties were the penoncel, the pennon or guidon, the banner, and the standard.