Order of the Bath
British order of chivalry established 1725
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 bestows 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.
The Order consists of the Sovereign of the United Kingdom (currently King Charles III), the Great Master (currently William, Prince of Wales), and three Classes of members:
Knight Grand Cross (GCB) or Dame Grand Cross (GCB);
Knight Commander (KCB) or Dame Commander (DCB); and
Companion (CB).
Members belong to either the Civil Division or the Military Division. Knight Companion (KB), the order's only class prior to 1815, is no longer an option. Commonwealth citizens who are not subjects of the British monarch and foreign nationals may be made honorary members.
The public source identifies “Order of the Bath” as british order of chivalry established 1725. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Order, Bath and British.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q506369. VIAF identifies the subject as 128793507. The Library of Congress control number is n85355590. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1725 and 1815.
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This entry incorporates text from “Order of the Bath” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.