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Mr. Blood's attention was divided between his
task and the stream of humanity in the narrow street below; a stream
which poured for the second time that day towards Castle Field,
where earlier in the afternoon Ferguson, the Duke's chaplain, had
preached a sermon containing more treason than divinity.
These straggling, excited groups were mainly composed of men with
green boughs in their hats and the most ludicrous of weapons in
their hands. Some, it is true, shouldered fowling pieces, and here
and there a sword was brandished; but more of them were armed with
clubs, and most of them trailed the mammoth pikes fashioned out of
scythes, as formidable to the eye as they were clumsy to the hand.
There were weavers, brewers, carpenters, smiths, masons, bricklayers,
cobblers, and representatives of every other of the trades of peace
among these improvised men of war. Bridgewater, like Taunton, had
yielded so generously of its manhood to the service of the bastard
Duke that for any to abstain whose age and strength admitted of his
bearing arms was to brand himself a coward or a papist.


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