On our march from Pangbourne we shunned the townships and castles as much as we could, and took especial heed not to get near unto Wallingford; for the strong castle there was held by Brian Fitzcount, the most terrible of all Matilda's partisans, and the greatest robber of them all; and the castle at this very time was known to be full of unfortunate prisoners whom he kept and daily tortured in order to make them disclose their supposed hidden treasures, or to pay a heavier ransom than any they had the means of paying. Christian burghers and franklins, noble knights who had warred against the heathen in Palestine, nay churchmen, the highest in the hierarchy, were known to be in his foul prison, pent up with Jewish traffickers and money-dealers; the noblest and the purest with the vilest and foulest of the earth: and the gaolers and torturers of Brian Fitzcount treated the Christians no whit better than the Israelites that were chained at their sides, contaminating them with their touch and poisoning the air they breathed. Night after night, such of the poor townfolk as had contrived to live in the midst of these horrors without deserting Wallingford, were startled in their sleep by the cries and shrieks which came from the grim castle; and when in the morning they adventured to ask what had been toward in the night watches, the Count's people would tell them jestingly from the battlements that it was nothing, or that Brian Fitzcount had only been coining a little more money, or that a Jew had had his teeth drawn, or that a traitor to the empress-queen had been questioned about his treason and treasure. The great prison in this castle of Wallingford was called Brian's Hell, and it was deserving of the name. But the fiends were abroad, as well as within those abominable walls--the spirit of the arch-fiend was everywhere. The village churches and the chapels and hospitia in solitary places had been destroyed or turned into fortalices; deep trenches were cut in the churchyards among the consecrated abodes of the dead; the sweet sounding church bells had been thrown down, and engines of war had been set up on the church towers. Yea! the resting places which the church and the piety of the faithful had built and stocked for the poor and hungry wayfarers in the desert had been plundered and destroyed--the last holy resting-places had been profaned! The temple of peace and mercy had been turned into a place of arms!