EXCAMBION (a word connected with a large class of Low Latin and Romance forms, such as _cambium_, _concambium_, _scambium_, from Lat. _cambire_, Gr. [Greek: kambein] or [Greek: kamptein], to bend, turn or fold), in Scots law, the exchange (q.v.) of one heritable subject for another. The modern Scottish excambion may consist in the exchange of any heritable subjects whatever, e.g. a patronage or, what often occurs, a portion of a glebe for servitude. Writing is not, by the law of Scotland, essential to an excambion. Chiefly in favour of the class of cottars and small feuars, and for convenience in straightening marches, the law will consider the most informal memoranda, and even a verbal agreement, if supported by the subsequent possession. The power to excamb was gradually conferred on entailed proprietors. The Montgomery Act, which was passed in 1770, to facilitate agricultural improvements, permitted 50 acres arable and 100 acres not fit for the plough to be excambed. This was enlarged by the Rosebery Act in 1836, under which one-fourth of an entailed estate, not including the mansion-house, home farm and policies, might be excambed, provided the heirs took no higher grassum (O.E. _gersum_, fine) than £200. The power was applied to the whole estate by the Rutherford Act of 1848, and the necessary consents of substitute heirs are now regulated by the Entail (Scotland) Act 1882.
EXCELLENCY (Lat. _excellentia_, excellence), a title or predicate of honour. The earliest records of its use are associated with the Frank and Lombard kings; e.g. Anastasius Bibliothecarius (d. c. 886) in his life of Pope Honorius refers to Charlemagne as "his excellency" (_ejus excellentia_); and during the middle ages it was freely applied to or assumed by emperors, kings and sovereign princes generally, though rather as a rhetorical flourish than as a part of their formal style. Its use is well illustrated in the various charters in the Red Book of the exchequer, where the addresses to the king vary between "your excellency," "your dignity" (_vestra dignitas_), "your sublimity" (_vestra sublimitas_) and the like, according to the taste and inventiveness of the writers. Du Cange also gives examples of the style _excellentia_ being applied to the pope and even to a bishop (in a charter of 1182). With the gradual stereotyping of titles of honour that of "excellency" was definitively superseded in the case of sovereigns of the highest rank, about the beginning of the 15th century, by those of "highness" and "grace," and later by "majesty," first assumed in England by King Henry VIII. Dukes and counts of the Empire and the Italian reigning princes continued, however, to be "excellencies" for a while longer. In 1593 the bestowal of the title of _excellence_ by Henry IV. of France on the duc de Nevers, his ambassador at Rome, set a precedent that was universally followed from the time of the treaty of Westphalia (1648). This, together with the reservation in 1640 of the title "eminence" (q.v.) to the cardinals, led the Italian princes to adopt the style of "highness" (_altezza_) instead of "excellency." In France, from 1654 onwards, the title of _excellence_ was given to all high civil and military officials, and this example was followed in Germany in the 18th century.