Though the usual conveyance during the thirteenth century was a horse litter for women of rank, and men rode on horseback, yet covered and open carriages or waggons were not unknown in that and in the following century. A charette containing a number of maids of honour in attendance on Anne of Bohemia at her public reception in London in 1392, was upset on London bridge from the rush of the crowd to get a sight of the queen, and her ladies were not without difficulty replaced. These charettes, cars, or waggons were covered carts on four wheels, like country waggons of our days, panelled at the sides, and the tilt covered with leather, sometimes with lead, and painted. [Illustration] We must not pass without a very brief notice the large constructions of roofs of wood begun as early as the twelfth, and continued and improved through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the period during which the finest efforts of mediæval Gothic art were embodied all over the north and over parts of the south of Europe. The older part of Westminster hall dates from the reign of Rufus, and the walls of the present building belong to that period, though faced at a later time. How the roof of the enormous space, sixty-five feet diameter, was at first constructed there is no evidence to show. It had, perhaps, a row of arches down the middle, like the great hall of the palace of Blois, said to be of the thirteenth century, or huge kingposts supporting the ties between rafters, which in that case may have been as long as those of the later roof. The present roof, work of the fourteenth century, marks the beginning of a change in the style of architecture that accompanied and caused great changes in furniture and household woodwork. The ties are supported by curved braces that descend like arches on the stone corbels made in the wall to receive them. These braces take two flights, being tied back where they meet by hammer beams into a lower part of the rafter. The lower brace upholds another upright or collar post which supports the junction of these beams with the rafter, at its weakest part. A rich subdivision of upright mullions with cusped arch heads fills up the spandrels between these braces and the beams they support, and adds stiffness as well as decoration to the whole.