Many anecdotes are told of Edward I. of England and his strange doings, and of his merry pranks in the royal household. One day, when the Queen went to her palace at Waltham, the King, so runs the story, espied her laundress, Matilda of Waltham, among the lookers-on in the courtyard while the hounds were coupling and the hunters were mounting. Thereupon, in a mischievous mood, he made a wager that Matilda could not ride hunting with them, and be in at the death of the stag. To his surprise she accepted the challenge, mounted the horse, and rode with such success that Edward was fain to pay his fine of forty shillings. In the earlier part of his life Edward appears to have been subject to violent fits of rage; and at the nuptials of his daughter Margaret, having given one of his esquires a rap with his wand without just cause, he afterwards paid him as compensation £13, 6s. 8d. He is also said on more than one occasion to have thrown coronets behind the fire. But among the merry scenes which took place between Edward and the Queen’s ladies, with whom he now and then indulged in romping, was his being “heaved” on Easter Monday, 1290. It is recorded how seven of Queen Eleanora’s ladies unceremoniously invaded the chamber of the King, and seizing their majestic master, proceeded to “heave” him in his chair, till he was glad to pay a fine of £14 to enjoy “his own peace,” and be set at liberty. Levity of deportment has been laid to the charge of Edward II., and in one of his freaks he is accused of having made a party on the Thames in a returned fagot-barge, and of buying cabbages of the gardeners on the banks of the river to make his soup. On one occasion, when he was keeping his Court with his queen at Westminster during the Whitsuntide festival of 1317, as they were dining in public in the great banqueting-hall, a masked woman entered on horseback, and riding up to the royal table, delivered a letter to King Edward, who, thinking it contained some elegant compliment, ordered it to be opened and read aloud for the amusement of his courtiers; but, to his great disgust and mortification, it was a cutting satire on his unkingly propensities, setting forth the various calamities which his misgovernment had brought on the country.