At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Royal progresses were nearly always greeted with a mixture of excitement and dread by those on whom the monarch called. On the one hand they provided unrivaled opportunities for preferment and social advancement, but on the other they were stupefyingly expensive. The royal household numbered up to about 1,500 people, and a good many of these—150 or so in the case of Elizabeth I—traveled with the royal personage on her annual pilgrimages. Hosts not only had the towering expenditure of feeding, housing, and entertaining an army of spoiled and privileged people but also could expect to experience quite a lot of pilfering and property damage, as well as some less salubrious surprises. After the court of Charles II departed from Oxford in about 1660, one of those left behind remarked in an understandably appalled tone how the royal visitors had left “their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars.”