(IMO any sensible woman would just walk around it.)

There was a legend that Sir Walter Raleigh threw his expensive new cloak over a puddle so Queen Elizabeth could cross without getting her shoes dirty. The usual longer version of the story is Elizabeth has never met Raleigh before and she asked for him to come to her court the next day, where he proposed that there should be an English colony in the new world and she gave her blessing. However the story is probably embellished or outright made up, likely by historian Thomas Fuller or Sir Walter Scott in the novel Kenilworth (I'm not sure where Fuller mentioned this story, but in Kenilworth there was this passage: "'Hark ye, Master Raleigh, see thou fail not to wear thy muddy cloak,' the queen exhorts Sir Walter"). The story is embellished further to add the part about New World colony (such as in Fifty Famous Stories Retold by James Baldwin in 1895.

As far as I know it was never the norm.