PRECEDENCE, one of the artificial distinctions among men living in a state of political society. In all countries the great mass of mankind will be of ono level, no individual possessing political privi leges which do not belong to the rest, except as pertaining to some particular employment in the various ordinary businesses of life in which each individual is engaged. But these give no precedence of one before another ; all move on abreast. But above these are certain persons, such as the members of the liberal professions, persons who hold or have held offices in the state, peers, who take precedence of the rest, and who are allowed to do so, if not by any law absolutely promulgated, yet by the constant usages of society. And again, the individuals, who may form perhaps the thousandth part of the whole community, who possess this privilege of precedence, have the prece dence amongst each other regulated according to usage, or, in other words, by the precedents established in records of former arrange ments. The subject is one to which a good deal of attention has been paid, and it is new only as in incident to the creation of new courts or officers, or in singular positions of the royal family, that difficulties arise. The members of the College of Arms, who are the council of
the earl-marshal of England, are usually referred to in questions of precedency ; and to them is assigned the arrangement of public pro cessions, as at royal marriages, funerals, coronations, and the like, when it is that questions of this kind come to be considered.
Tables of precedency may be seen in many books, and especially in those called Peerages.
Sometimes the question arises among ambassadors who shall enter a room or depart before another, and great tenacity has at times been manifested in supporting the claims to rank of the state or kingdom represented. In the Philoxenis' of Sir John Finet there are some almost ridiculous instances of the struggles made for precedence by ambassadors of the state of Venice in the reign of James I.