So much is heard of the modern facilities for travelling that one might almost think that before the days of Cook (Thomas of the tickets, not the Polar Mandeville) no Englishman had ever stirred abroad. Yet it is hardly questionable that in mediæval times the proportion of Englishmen who had visited foreign lands was far larger than at the present day. Thanks to military feudalism it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries most of our country gentlemen had seen service in France, taking with them contingents of hired or pressed men from every village in the land. For the more peaceful classes there were the attractions of the pilgrimage, the spiritual advantages outweighing the dangers and hardships of a journey to Rome, and the celebrated shrine of St. James of Compostella drawing thousands every year to Spain. Still earlier the Crusades drew the pious and the martial alike yet farther afield, but of those who journeyed to the East many did not return. At all time a pretty sharp limit was set to the travels of the ordinary man by the seaboard of Palestine, and those who penetrated still deeper into the mysterious East were few. It is therefore interesting to follow Geoffrey of Langley on his embassy to the Tartar Court in 1292 and back to England, piecing together the story of his travels from the prosaic accounts of his paymaster. Towards the end of the twelfth century the Tartars, a nomadic tribe who inhabited the district between the Caucasus and the Euphrates and professed the Christianity of the Nestorians, came into some prominence in Europe through the fame of their Khan, the celebrated 'Prester John.' He, however, was killed in 1203 by the terrible Genghiz Khan the Mogul, from Turkestan, whose successors adopted the name and, after one or two generations, the religion of the conquered Tartars. Argon, King or Emperor of the Tartars, accepted Christianity in 1289, and in alliance with the kings of Armenia and Georgia inflicted a severe defeat upon the forces of the Soldan. Later in the same year his ambassadors reached Europe, charged to preach a new crusade for the ejection of the Saracens from Palestine. Strengthened with commendatory letters from the Pope, they visited the English Court. King Edward made them welcome, and wrote to Argon expressing his delight at his proposed attack upon the Sultan of Babylon, and promising to come in person as soon as the Pope would sanction his going to the Holy Land. To cement the alliance he promised to send the king some gerfalcons, for which he had asked. This letter was written in September 1290, and next year the falcons were duly dispatched by the hands of Sir Geoffrey of Langley.