Everyone has heard of the Bloody Assize which followed, but the names and the number of those who perished were not accurately known till a manuscript of forty-seven pages, of folio size, was offered for sale among a mass of waste paper in an auction room at Dorchester, December, 1875.[2] It was bought by Mr. W. B. Barrett, and he found that it was a copy of the presentment of rebels at the Autumn Assizes of 1685, probably made for the use of some official of the Assize Court, as no doubt the list that Jeffreys had would have been written on parchment, and this was on paper. It gives the names of 2,611 persons presented at Dorchester, Exeter, and Taunton, as having been implicated in the rebellion, the parishes where they lived, and the nature of their callings. Of these, 312 were charged at Dorchester, and only about one-sixth escaped punishment. Seventy-four were executed, 175 were transported, nine were whipped or fined, and 54 were acquitted or were not captured. It is worth notice that the percentage of those punished at Exeter and Taunton was far less than at Dorchester. Out of 488 charged at Exeter, 455 escaped; and at Taunton, out of 1,811, 1,378 did not suffer. It is possible that the Devon and Somerset rebels, having heard of Jeffreys’ severity at Dorchester, found means of escape. No doubt many of the country folk who had not sympathized with the rebellion would yet help to conceal those who were suspected, when they knew (from what had happened at Dorchester) that if they were taken they would in all probability be condemned to death or slavery—for those “transported” were really handed over to Court favourites as slaves for work on their West Indian plantations. It is gratifying to know that it has been discovered, since Macaulay’s time, that such of the transported as were living when William and Mary came to the throne were pardoned and set at liberty on the application of Sir William Young. Monmouth was the last invader to land in Dorset; but there was in the early part of the nineteenth century very great fear among the Dorset folk that a far more formidable enemy might choose some spot, probably Weymouth, on the Dorset coast for landing his army. Along the heights of the Dorset downs they built beacons of dry stubs and furze, with guards in attendance, ready to flash the news of Napoleon’s landing, should he land. The general excitement that prevailed, the false rumours that from time to time made the peaceable inhabitants, women and children, flee inland, and sent the men capable of bearing arms flocking seaward, are well described in Mr. Hardy’s _Trumpet Major_. But Napoleon never came, and the dread of invasion passed away for ever in 1805.