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administration of finance and justice and gradually, as the business of government grew more complex, created a group of professional civil servants and ministers of the crown. Called
noblesse de la robe
when elevated, as distinguished from nobility of the sword, they were scorned as parvenus by the ancestral nobles, who resented the usurping of their right of counsel, lost more or less by default.
    In consequence, the heraldic coat-of-arms—outward sign of ancestry signifying the right to bear arms, which, once granted to a family, could be worn by no other—came to be an object almost of cult worship. At tournaments its display was required as evidence of noble ancestry; at some tournaments four were required. As penetration by outsiders increased, so did snobbery until a day in the mid-15th century when a knight rode into the lists followed by a parade of pennants bearing no less than 32 coats-of-arms.
    Through disappearance by failure to produce a male heir or by sinking over the edge into the lower classes, and through inflow of the ennobled, the personnel of the nobility was in flux, even though the status was fixed as an order of society. Thedisappearance rate of noble families has been estimated at 50 percent a century, and the average duration of a dynasty at three to six generations over a period from 100 to 200 years. An example of the sinking process occurred in a family called Clusel with a small fief in the Loire valley. In 1276 it was headed by a knight evidently of too small resources to maintain himself in arms, who was reduced to the non-noble necessity of tilling his fields and operating his mill with his own hands. Of three grandsons appearing in local records, one was still a squire, one had become a parish priest, and the third a rent-collector for the lord of the county. After a passage of 85 years no member of the lineage was any longer referred to as a noble. In the case of another squire named Guichard Vert, who died as a young man in 1287, the family hovered on the edge. Guichard left two beds, three blankets, four bedsheets, two small rugs, one table, three benches, five coffers, two hams and a haunch of bacon in the larder, five empty barrels in the cellar, a chessboard, and a helmet and lance but no sword. Though without cash, he willed 200 livres to his wife to be paid in ten installments from his revenues of about 60 livres a year, and other income to found a chantry for his soul. He bequeathed gifts of cloth to friends and to the poor, and remitted two years’ tax to his tenants, most of whom were already inarrears. Such a family,in physical conditions hardly distinguishable from a commoner’s, would strain to keep its ties to the nobility, sending sons to take service as squires so that they might have access to gifts and pensions, or to enter the clergy in the hope of taking one of its many paths to riches.
    A knight on the way down might pass an enterprising peasant on his way up. Having bought or inherited his freedom, a rent-paying peasant who prospered would add fields and tenants of his own, gradually leave manual labor to servants, acquire a fief from lord or Church, learn the practice of arms, marry the daughter of a needy squire, and slowly assimilate upward until he appeared in the records as
domicellus
, or squire, himself. The bailiff in the lord’s service had greater opportunities to make himself rich and, if he had also made himself useful, was often rewarded by a fief with vassals and rents, perhaps also a fortified manor. He would begin to dress like a noble, wear a sword, keep hunting dogs and falcons, and ride a war-horse carrying shield and lance. Nothing was more resented by the hereditary nobles than the imitation of their clothes and manners by the upstarts, thus obscuring the lines between the eternal orders of society. Magnificence in clothes was considered a prerogative of the nobles, who should be identifiable by modes of dress forbidden to others. In the effort