"But," said he, "what plea will you now make? Are you guilty or not guilty?" I said, "I am not guilty at all of obstinately and wilfully refusing to swear; and as for those things mentioned in the oath, as jesuitical plots and foreign powers, I utterly deny them in my heart; and if I could take any oath, I should take that; but I never took any oath in my life." The Judge said, "You speak well; but the King is sworn, the Parliament is sworn, I am sworn, the justices are sworn, and the law is preserved by oaths." I told him that they had had sufficient experience of men's swearing, and he had seen how the justices and jury had sworn falsely the other day; and if he had read in the "Book of Martyrs" how many of the martyrs had refused to swear, both within the time of the ten persecutions and in Bishop Bonner's days, he might see that to deny swearing in obedience to Christ's command was no new thing. He said he wished the laws were otherwise. I said, "Our Yea is yea, and our Nay is nay; and if we transgress our yea and our nay, let us suffer as they do, or should do, that swear falsely." This, I told him, we had offered to the King; and the King said it was reasonable. After some further discourse they committed me to prison again, there to lie until the next assize; and Colonel Kirby gave order to the jailer to keep me close, "and suffer no flesh alive to come at me," for I was not fit, he said, "to be discoursed with by men." I was put into a tower where the smoke of the other prisoners came up so thick it stood as dew upon the walls, and sometimes it was so thick that I could hardly see the candle when it burned; and I being locked under three locks, the under-jailer, when the smoke was great, would hardly be persuaded to come up to unlock one of the uppermost doors for fear of the smoke, so that I was almost smothered. Besides, it rained in upon my bed, and many times, when I went to stop out the rain in the cold winter-season, my shirt was as wet as muck with the rain that came in upon me while I was labouring to stop it out. And the place being high and open to the wind, sometimes as fast as I stopped it the wind blew it out again. In this manner I lay all that long, cold winter till the next assize, in which time I was so starved, and so frozen with cold and wet with the rain that my body was greatly swelled and my limbs much benumbed. The assize began the sixteenth of the month called March, 1664-5. The same Judges, Twisden and Turner, coming that circuit again, Judge Twisden sat this time on the crown-bench, and before him I was brought.