[6] The 13th century witnessed the trend of monarchs, beginning with Emperor Frederick II (as King of Sicily) in 1231,[7] retaining the right of fons honorum as a royal prerogative, gradually abrogating the right of knights to elevate their esquires to knighthood.
"[11] By the early thirteenth century, when an unknown author composed L'Histoire de Guillaume le Marechal,[12] (a verse biography of William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, often regarded as the greatest medieval English knight[13]) Richard W. Kaeuper notes that "the author bemoans the fact that, in his day, the spirit of chivalry has been imprisoned; the life of the knight errant, he charges, has been reduced to that of the litigant in courts.
Ultimately, it is the authority of the state, whether exercised by a reigning monarch or the president of a republic, that distinguishes orders of chivalry from private organizations.
[15][16] In Canada, for example, other persons – whether commoners, knights or nobles – no longer have the right to confer titles of nobility, knighthoods or orders of chivalry on others.
[24][25] These two dispositions are meant to protect the ensemble of authentic national and foreign distinctions by attempting to prevent the attire of fake decorations.