When the Crown visits a town, the mayor should give up his staff of office to the king, or queen, and himself bear the mace before his sovereign. At Coventry, when William III. visited that city, the mayor carried the mace and an alderman the sword. To a royal personage other than his sovereign, the staff should not be given up, unless that personage be there to represent the sovereign, but the mayor should carry the mace. In 1503 the Lord Mayor of York himself carried the mace before the Princess Margaret. On the occasion of royal visits to the City of London, the Lord Mayor tenders to the sovereign his jewelled sceptre. Sometimes the mace itself is given up to the sovereign, as at Stafford, where the mayor kissed the mace and handed it to James I., who admired it greatly, and then returned it. At Cambridge the mayor delivered his mace to Queen Anne, who did the like. Many corporations, in addition to their maces, possess swords of state or honour. According to the best authorities, the oldest symbols of municipal powers were the sword and the dragon, both of Roman origin, the one being the cohortal ensign of the Romans, the other the insignia of Supreme Justice. “At Amiens (says Dr. Thompson in his Eng. Mun. Hist.), the insignia of Supreme Justice consisted of two swords of antique shape, carried in the hands of two officials, and a similar custom prevailed among almost all the great Corporations of France, which undoubtedly had a continuity from Roman time.” The sword, then, is the symbol of criminal jurisdiction, as the mace is of civil. The County Palatinate of Chester had a state sword, which is figured in the Visitation of that county in 1580, published by the Harleian Society; while the Bishop of Durham, so long as he was a temporal power and had criminal jurisdiction, was presented with a sword on taking possession of his see. The right to have a sword borne before a mayor was originally conferred either by charter, which may often have merely confirmed a previous practice, or by a royal present of a sword. Thus James I. gave the City of Canterbury a sword to be borne before the mayor. Hull has two swords, one given by Henry VIII., the other by Charles I. The authorities of Carlisle purchased a “Sword of Honour” in 1635-6 for £4 13s. The blade at least was second-hand, for it bears the date of 1509, and was made at Milan. The authority to bear it was given by royal charter in 1637, but it was probably purchased in London by a deputation who went there to arrange about procuring the charter. On the locket of the sheath is cut the letter S in great size, and I have never found a satisfactory account of what it means, unless it stands for sword. Our governing charter at Carlisle gives us the right to have a sword by authorising us to have an official “qui erit et vocabitur Portator Gladii nostri coram Mayore Civitatis prædictæ.”