Brewer's: Gird

To gird with the sword. To raise to a peerage. It was the Saxon method of investiture to an earldom, continued after the Conquest. Thus, Richard I. “girded with the sword” Hugh de Pudsey, the aged Bishop of Durham, making (as he said) “a young earl of an old prelate.”

Source: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer, 1894
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