pack-horses, probably borrowed from a neighbouring monastery to carry the heavy Rolls in which state business was chronicled, were hastily laden.  Baggage of every kind was slung across the backs of horses, or stowed into cumbrous two-wheeled waggons made of rough planks, or of laths covered with twisted osiers, which had been seized from farmer or peasant for the king’s journey.  The forerunners pushed on in front to give notice of the king’s arrival, and in the dim morning light the motley train of riders at last crowded along the narrow trackway, followed heavily by the waggons dragged by single file of horses, which too often foundered in the muddy hollows, or half-plunged into the torrents through rents and chasms in the low, narrow bridges that threatened at every instant to crumble away under the strain.  But before the weary day’s journey was over the king would suddenly change his mind, stop short of the town towards which all were toiling in hope of food and shelter, and turn aside to some spot in the woods where there was perhaps a solitary hut and food only for himself:  “And I believe, if I dare to say so, that he took delight in our distresses,” groans the poor secretary as he pictures the knights wandering by twos and threes in the thickets, separated in the darkness from their followers, and drawing their swords one against another in furious strife for the possession of some shelter for which pigs would scarcely have quarrelled.  “Oh, Lord God Almighty,” he ends, “turn and convert the heart of the king from this pestilent habit, that he may know himself to be but man, and that he may show a royal mercy and human compassion to those who are driven after him not by ambition but by necessity.”

But at whatever inconvenience to his courtiers Henry carried out his own purposes, and kept pace with the enormous mass of business that came to him.  In all his hurried journeys we see busy royal clerks scribbling away at each halt charters, grants, letters patent and letters close, the king too fighting, riding, dictating, signing, sometimes dating his letters from three places on the same day.  A travelling king such as this was well known to all his people.  He was no constitutional fiction, but a living man; his character, his look and presence, his oaths and jests, his wrath, all were noted and talked over; the chroniclers who followed his court with their gossip and their graver news spread the knowledge of his doings.  A new sense of law and justice grew up under a sovereign who himself journeyed through the length and breadth of the land, subduing the unruly, hearing pleas, revising unjust sentences, drawing up charters with his own hand, setting the machinery of government to work from end to end of England.  More than this, the king himself had learned to know his people.  He had seen for himself the castles of the barons, the huts of the peasants, the little villages in the clearings; he had seen the sheriff sitting in the shire court, the lord of the manor doing