Let us close this reign with its mournful end, when Piers Gaveston feels the teeth of the Black Dog of Warwick, and is beheaded on Blacklow Hill; when Hugh le Despenser is hanged on a gibbet; when the Queen lands at Orwell, conspiring against her husband, and the King is a prisoner at Kenilworth. Here at Kenilworth the King hears himself deposed. 'Edward, once King of England,' is hereafter accounted 'a private person, without any manner of royal dignity.' Here Edward, in a plain black gown, sees the steward of his household, Sir Thomas Blount, break his staff of office, done only when a King is dead, and discharge all persons engaged in the royal service. Parliament decided to take this strong measure in January; in the following September Edward was murdered in cold blood at Berkeley Castle. EDWARD THE THIRD Reigned fifty years: 1327-1377. Born 1312. Married, 1328, Philippa of Hainault. THE MEN 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.