In order to distinguish the various members of a family among themselves certain additions to the shield called marks of cadency are employed; and in the earliest days of the heraldic system a son charged the arms that he derived from his father with such a mark of difference as he thought fit and effectual, but by the middle of the fourteenth century some amount of regularity was arrived at, and by the end of the sixteenth century the present method had become usual. In this system the eldest son is distinguished by a file or label of three points, which consists of a horizontal part from which depend the lambeaux (Fig. 286 _et seq._). Its origin is extremely obscure, and whether it represents the points of garments, or tongues or labels threaded on a cord, no one can say with certainty. It seems probable that it may have originally been a favour or distinction whose history and original significance have been lost. The effigy at Artois of Charles Count d’Eu has a label which passes round the shoulders, exactly as other collars did, and consists of large labels charged with castles and suspended from what appears to be a narrow cord (Fig. 288). [Illustration: FIG. 288.] [Illustration: FIG. 289.] [Illustration: FIG. 290.] On a shield the label is borne in chief and passes over any charges that may be in that part of the arms. In early examples the pendant parts are wider than the rest, in some cases much wider, as in the Garter Plate of Gaston de Foix, Comte de Longueville and Captal de Buch, whose label is charged with a complete coat of arms repeated on each point, a cross charged with five escallop shells, which are the arms of John de Grielly, a previous Captal de Buch who married Blanche de Foix. In later times the points of labels were widened at the ends as in Fig. 289, a form which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had become as squat and ugly as the still common type (Fig. 290). In ordinary cadency the label which extends from side to side of the shield is no longer used, being reserved for members of the Blood Royal, and a shortened form takes its place in ordinary coats of arms. Distinctions of cadency are provided to the number of nine, and no regular provision is made beyond the ninth son; not because others are to go undifferenced, but because in old heraldic treatises great importance is ascribed to that mystic figure 9. There were nine tinctures (including the rare colours tenné and sanguine), nine ordinaries, nine partitions, or methods of displaying charges with ordinaries, and so forth. The differences are as follows:-- The eldest son a label. second ” a crescent. third ” a mullet. fourth ” a martlet. fifth ” an amulet. sixth ” a fleur-de-lis. seventh ” a rose. eighth ” a cross moline. ninth ” a double quatrefoil. [Illustration: FIGS. 291-299.]