When a knight had performed on the field of battle some especially valiant or meritorious act, it was open to the Sovereign to {14} mark his sense of it by making him a knight-banneret. Thus, in the reign of Edward III., John de Copeland was made a banneret for his service in taking prisoner David Bruce, the King of Scotland, at the battle of Durham; Colonel John Smith, having rescued the royal banner from the Parliamentarians at Edgehill, was in like manner made a knight-banneret by Charles I. The title does not seem to have been in existence before the reign of Edward I., and after this bestowal by Charles I. we hear no more of it till 1743, when the title was conferred upon several English officers by the king, George II., upon the field of Dettingen. It was an essential condition that the rank should be bestowed by the Sovereign on the actual field of battle and beneath the royal banner. General Sir William Erskine was given this rank by George III. on his return from the Continent in 1764, after the battle of Emsdorff; but as the investiture took place beneath the standard of the 15th Light Dragoons and in Hyde Park, it was deemed hopelessly irregular, and, the royal will and action notwithstanding, his rank was not generally recognised. The ceremony of investiture was in the earlier days a very simple one. The flag of the ordinary knight was of the form known as the pennon--a small, swallow-tailed flag like that borne by our lancer regiments, of which Fig. 30 is an illustration. On being summoned to the royal presence, the king took from him his lance, and either cut or tore away the points of his flag, until he had reduced it roughly to banner form, and then returned it to him with such words of commendation as the occasion called for. What the ceremony employed at so late a period as Dettingen was we have not been able to trace. As the officers there honoured were lanceless and pennonless, it is evident that the formula which served in the Middle Ages was quite inapplicable, but it is equally evident that in the thronging duties and responsibilities of the field of battle the ceremony must always have been a very short and simple one.