_Hull._--From an early period this seaport has been defended by fortifications. In the seventeenth century these comprised a moat and a complete system of walls, fortified gates, and drawbridges. It possessed five gates, called Hessle Gate, Myton Gate, Beverley Gate, Low Gate, and North Gate, and two sally-ports. The whole fortified walls were 2,610 yards, or slightly less than one-and-a-half miles in circuit. In front of the principal gates were drawbridges and half-moon shaped batteries. In the year 1540 the eastern side of the town was defended by two blockhouses, erected by Henry VIII. These were known as the North Blockhouse and the South Blockhouse, and both mounted guns when the town was besieged during the Civil War. A castle was also built on the eastern side of the town by Henry VIII. _King's Lynn._--The eastern side of this important town was in former times defended by a wall strengthened by nine bastions, and by a broad and deep fosse over which were three drawbridges leading to the principal gates. One of the latter and fragments of the wall remain. From the statement of Stow in his "Chronicle," and from certain illustrations of the walls as they existed in 1800, we may infer that the walls at any rate belonged to the first half of the thirteenth century. The East Gate and the West Gate were rebuilt on the sites of earlier gates in the fifteenth century. [Illustration: FIG. 19. NORTH GATE, YARMOUTH, 1807] _Yarmouth._--The town-wall, of which some traces remain, measured between six and seven thousand feet in compass, and possessed ten gates and sixteen towers. Swinden,[20] the historian of Yarmouth, states that the building of the wall "was begun on the east side, and very probably at the north-east tower in St. Nicholas's churchyard, and so proceeded southward: for in the 11th of Edward III we find them at work at the Black Friars, at the south end of the town; and afterwards we trace them to the north end, which, I presume, was the last part that was finished. "And there is a tradition, that the north gate was built by the person or persons who had amassed considerable sums of money by being employed in burying the dead in the time of the plague.