It may here be observed, that in the wardrobe accounts of Edward I, there is an item, of money paid for the use of the king for playing at the Four Kings--Quatuor Reges--and that it has been conjectured that the game was cards. The Hon. Daines Barrington, who appears to have been of this opinion, says: "the earliest mention of cards that I have yet stumbled upon is in Mr. Anstis's History of the Garter, where he cites the following passage from the Wardrobe Rolls, in the sixth year of Edward the First, [1278]: 'Waltero Sturton, ad opus regis ad ludendum ad _quatuor reges_ viiis. _vd._' From which entry Mr. Anstis with some probability conjectures, that playing cards were not unknown at the latter end of the thirteenth century; and perhaps what I shall add may carry with it some small confirmation of what he supposes."[26] As this is not the place to discuss the question, if playing cards were known in England so early as the reign of Edward I, it may be sufficient to remark that the substance of what Mr. Barrington has adduced in confirmation of Anstis's conjecture consists in a statement of the fact of Edward having been in Syria, and that he might have learned the game of cards there[27]--taking it for granted that cards were of Eastern invention, and known in Syria at that period,--and in a second-hand reference to Breitkopf for a passage in the Güldin Spil, wherein it is stated that a certain game--cards being unquestionably meant--first came into Germany about the year 1300. From Sir William Jones's account of the game of _Chaturanga_ or, more specifically, _chaturaji_--the Four Rajas, or Kings--there can scarcely be a doubt that the game of the Four Kings played at by Edward I, was chess, and that this name was a literal translation of the Indian one. Assuming this, then, as an established fact, we have evidence of the number four being associated in Europe at that period with the game of chess, which, as has been previously shown, bore so great a resemblance to a game of cards.