The system of appointment to offices in Ely was distinctively ecclesiastical. The magistrates were bespectacled and bewigged officials connected by marriage with some of the members of the Chapter. The constables were nominated for their general piety, or because they were burdened with large families. The watchmen were pensioned cripples or asthmatic incapables, whose utmost achievement was to crawl about at night and proclaim the hour. Everything in the city was managed for the residents by a benevolent and beneficent ecclesiastical authority, which exhibited its benevolence and beneficence by conferring offices, not on such as showed efficiency, but on such men as were incompetent to earn a livelihood in any profession or business that demanded the exercise of brain or of muscle. When the turbulent crew from Littleport arrived in Ely, and the rumour circulated that other Fen centres were sending their contingents of the disaffected to the capital of the Fens, neither magistrates nor constables were prepared to take prompt action to protect the town and stop the spread of disturbance. Orders were indeed issued to have the minster bell rung, to summon all sober, law-abiding citizens to unite for the common defence, but, although the bell pealed its summons, no one obeyed it, for no one knew where the rallying-point was, or what was to be done by those summoned. The temporal steward was in bed with a mustard poultice on his chest and a dose of sweet nitre in his stomach. Consequently, when a messenger from the Deanery came to request that he would do something, the wife of the temporal steward was able to point out that he was perspiring freely and the poultice drawing vigorously. To leave his bed and the house was, therefore, out of the question. There was no deputy sheriff to fill the place which the sheriff was incapacitated from filling. The vacancy had not been filled up, because the Bishop was hesitating, balancing the claims of one who was stone-blind against one who was stone-deaf. The prelate himself was absent on a confirmation tour, and he had taken his chaplains with him, and, what was more to the point, his butler—a man who did most of the thinking in sublunary matters for his master. The constables then in Ely were few. The chief constable, Mr. Edwards, was the manager of Mortlock's bank, and in the interests of the bank he had come to the resolution to keep in the background so as in no way to excite the angry passions of the mob. Another constable had swallowed a fish-bone, and this was being extracted by a fellow constable. A fourth was at the moment incapacitated for work by one of his constitutional and chronic fits of the hiccups. It was precisely because he suffered from this affliction that the benevolent and beneficent ecclesiastical authority had nominated him to, and invested him with, the office of constable.