An order is a visible honour awarded by a sovereign state, monarch, dynastic house or organisation to a person, typically in recognition of individual merit, that often comes with distinctive insignia such as collars, medals, badges, and sashes worn by recipients.
Modern honour systems of state orders and dynastic orders emerged from the culture of orders of chivalry of the Middle Ages, which in turn emerged from the Catholic religious orders.
___Orders_of_chivalry_q.jpg)
The Most Honourable Order of the Bath is a British order of chivalry founded by King George I on 18 May 1725. Recipients of the Order are usually senior military officers or senior civil servants, and the monarch awards it on the advice of His Majesty's Government. The name derives from an elaborate medieval ceremony for preparing a candidate to receive his knighthood, of which ritual bathing (as a symbol of purification) was an element. While not all knights went through such an elaborate ceremony, knights so created were known as "knights of the Bath".
George I constituted the Knights of the Bath as a regular military order. He did not revive the order, which did not previously exist, in the sense of a body of knights governed by a set of statutes and whose numbers were replenished when vacancies occurred.
An ecclesiastical decoration is an order or a decoration conferred by a head of a church.
Grand Master (Latin: Magister Magnus; German: Großmeister or German: Hochmeister (literally 'High Master'); French: Grand Maître; Spanish: Gran Maestre; Portuguese: Grão-Mestre; Swedish: Stormästare) is a title of the supreme head of various orders, including chivalric orders such as military orders and dynastic orders of knighthood.
The title also occurs in modern civil fraternal orders such as the Freemasons, the Odd Fellows, and various other fraternities. Additionally, numerous modern self-styled orders attempt to imitate habits of the former bodies.