Kings were Kings in those days; they managed England as a nobleman managed his estates.
Edward I., during the year 1299, changed his abode on an average three times a fortnight, visiting in one year seventy-five towns and castles.
Edward II. increased his travelling retinue until, in the fourth year of the reign of Edward III., the crowd who accompanied that King had grown to such proportions that he was forced to introduce a law forbidding knights and soldiers to bring their wives and families with them.
Edward III., with his gay company, would not be stopped as he rode out of one of the gates of London to pay toll of a penny a cart and a farthing a horse, nor would any of his train.
This toll, which included threepence a week on gravel and sand carts going in or out of the City, was raised to help pay for street repairs, the streets and roads of that time being in a continual state of slush, mud, and pits of water.
Let us imagine Edward III. and his retinue passing over Wakefield Bridge before he reduced his enormous company.
The two priests, William Kaye and William Bull, stand waiting for the King outside the new Saint Mary’s Chapel. First come the guard of four-and-twenty archers in the King’s livery; then a Marshal and his servants (the other King’s Marshal has ridden by some twenty-four hours ago); then comes the Chancellor and his clerks, and with them a good horse carrying the Rolls (this was stopped in the fourth year of Edward’s reign); then they see the Chamberlain, who will look to it that the King’s rooms are decent and in order, furnished with benches and carpets; next comes the Wardrobe Master, who keeps the King’s accounts; and, riding beside the King, the first personal officer of the kingdom, the Seneschal; after that a gay company of knights and their ladies, merchants, monks dressed as ordinary laymen for travelling, soldiers of fortune, women, beggars, minstrels—a motley gang of brightly-clothed people, splashed with the mud and dust of the cavalcade.
Remembering the condition of the day, the rough travelling, the estates far apart, the dirty inns, one must not imagine this company spick and span.
The ladies are riding astride, the gentlemen are in civil garments or half armour.