Was searching around and found this unanswered post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/73azc0/the_economy_of_a_royal_court/
So, who pays for lodging in a medieval royal court? Do all employees and guests stay for free? Are the any interesting exceptions to this?
What I'll summarize below is a very brief overview on logistics of royal entourage in Early and High Middle Ages, roughly corresponding from the late 9th to the early 13th century, geographically especially focusing on Germany (but to some considerable extent, the scheme must have similarly be applied to the English kingship).
Especially Ottonian and Salier kingship was known to be itinerant. In short, the ruler and royal entourage constantly traveled across the kingdom, together with his entourage. So to speak, their kingdom was ruled by such a moving court.
They tend to prefer traveling a royal palace to another royal palace, located on royal domains (Köningslandschaft) scattered across the kingdom, though with some geographical concentration determined by each ruling family, such as Harz mountains for the Salier royal family. It was the farmers in such royal domains (and subordinate reeves or castellans who governed them on behalf of the ruler) who were primarily excepted to pay the expense of lodging as (a part of ) their dues in kind while their lord, the ruler, took a visit on their domains in course of his itinerary.
Rulers sometimes held assemblies mainly in his domains on his way where the local aristocrats-magnates came to see him to confirm their friendship, or often to ask him to arbitrate the conflict between the locals. This was how so-to-be 'governance' of high medieval German rulers worked in 'pre-state' society, without almost any central as well as local administrative institutions. While I cannot say the royal court really covered the expanse for the all members of these local visitors' entourage from a magnate to the lowest rank, I suppose most of them didn't generally have to pay during their stay.
Though this subreddit does not acknowledge the movie as a source to answer the question thread, ca. 14:00 to 15:00 of following video (ZDF: Heinrich und Papst (2008)) is convenient to grasp some elementary overview of this kind of 'itinerant kingship'.
https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/die-deutschen/heinrich-und-der-papst-104.html
Such obliged payments were called 'Table properties (Tafelgüter)' by German researchers, and to give an example, a document from 968 specifies '1,000 pigs and sheep, 8 oxen, 10 barrels of wine, 1,000 bushels of grain plus chickens, fishes, eggs and vegetables' just for one day's stay for the court (Wilson 2017: 333) that sometimes amounted to over 1,000 peoples. I suppose the usual size of royal entourage of Anglo-Norman rulers were relatively modest, a few hundreds more than a thousand (Church 2007), but the economic burden of their lodging must have still been considerable.
The ruler also could sometimes claim the hospitality (called gistum in medieval Latin) or food and drink (servitium regis), or further, fodders (fodrum) on major church institutions like big monasteries or prominent bishoprics, in addition to other form of royal service like military one. This close dependence of the ruler to 'his' ecclesiastical magnates in Germany around the turn of the millennium worked as a background of the famous (notorious) conflict between the rising Papacy and German rulers since the late 11th century, best known as 'Investiture Contest'.
On the other hand, lay magnates didn't have such obligations (, or generally got no such a land grant from the ruler with this kind of reservation). Reuter even supposes that few central building of lay aristocrats could indeed have enough space to host the whole royal entourage at that time, though some of them are sometimes recorded to invite the ruler to a ritual banquet hosted by them (Cf. Reuter 1991: 210).
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