The Rows are connected with the streets by staircases, and sometimes, when a lane breaks through the gallery entirely, there are two flights of stairs for the wayfarer to pass over. Many of the houses have latticed windows and strongly clasped doors, such as are seldom seen elsewhere in England except in old churches and towers. The gable ends of most houses facing the lanes are turned outward, and ornamented with strong woodwork curiously painted. The colors are quite traceable yet in many houses. There are also texts of Scripture and good common-sense mottoes carved or painted over some of the doors, especially of shops and inns. The lanes are very intricate and irregular: one of them, St. Werburgh's street, gives a glimpse of the cathedral, to which it leads. The Rows have served for trade, for shelter and for defence: they were considered a point of vantage during the siege, and were also useful as gathering-places for serious consultation. In those days, however, little shops along the outer edges of the footways themselves were more numerous than they are now, and the shops within the shelter of the Rows were not glazed, but closed at night with shutters, which in the day were fastened with hooks above the heads of the people. The siege tried the city sorely, and the streets were disputed foot by foot, yet the old half-timbered houses in the Foregate street date farther back than the time when Sir William Brereton, the Parliamentarian general, was quartered there and received messages of defiance from the mayor, to whom he had sent proposals of surrender and compromise. The city did not surrender until the king himself, despairing of his cause, sent the corporation word to make terms unless relieved within ten days.