A battle of Gnats (probably an appearance of Ephemera) is recorded in Stow’s Chronicles of England, p. 509, to have been fought in the reign of King Richard II.: “A fighting among Gnats at the King’s maner of _Shine_, where they were so thicke gathered, that the aire was darkened with them: they fought and made a great battaile. Two partes of them being slayne, fel downe to the grounde; the thirde parte hauing got the victorie, flew away, no man knew whither. The number of the deade was such that they might be swept uppe with besomes, and bushels filled weyth them.”[930] In the year 1736 the Gnats, _Culex pipiens_, were so numerous in England, that, as it is recorded, vast columns of them were seen to rise in the air from the steeple of the cathedral at Salisbury, which, at a little distance resembling columns of smoke, occasioned many people to think the edifice was on fire.[931] At Sagan, in Silesia, in July, 1812, a similar occurrence gave rise in like manner to an alarm that the church was on fire.[932] In May of the following year at Norwich, at about six o’clock in the evening, the inhabitants of that city were alarmed by the appearance of smoke issuing from the upper window of the spire of the cathedral, for which at the time no satisfactory account could be given, but which was most probably produced by the same cause.[933] And in the year 1766, in the month of August, they appeared in such incredible numbers at Oxford as to resemble a black cloud, darkening the air and almost intercepting the rays of the sun. Mr. John Swinton mentions, that in the evening of the 20th, about half an hour before sunset, he was in the garden of Wadham College, when he saw six columns of these insects ascending from the tops of six boughs of an apple-tree, two in a perpendicular, three in an oblique direction, and one in a pyramidal form, to the height of fifty or sixty feet. Their bite was so envenomed, that it was attended by violent and alarming inflammation; and one when killed usually contained as much blood as would cover three or four square inches of wall.[934] A similar column, of two or three feet in diameter and about twenty feet in height, was seen at eight o’clock in the evening of Sunday, July 14th, 1833, in Kensington Gardens. The upper portion of the column being curved to the east, the whole resembled the letter J inverted. The Gnats in every part of the column were in the liveliest motion.[935] The author of the “Faerie Queene” seems to have witnessed the like curious phenomenon, which furnished him with the following beautiful simile: