If the besieged could form a probable conjecture as to the point of the walls towards which the movable tower, whose threatening height they saw gradually growing at a bow-shot from their walls, would be ultimately directed, they sometimes sent out under cover of night and dug pitfalls, into which, as its huge bulk was rolled creaking forward, its fore wheels might suddenly sink, and so the machine fall forward, and remain fixed and useless. As it approached, they also tried to set it on fire by missiles tipped with combustibles. If it fairly attained its position, they assailed every loop and crevice in it with arrows and crossbow bolts, and planted a strong body of men-at-arms on the walls opposite to it, and in the neighbouring towers, to repel the "boarders" in personal combat. A bold and enterprising captain did not always wait for the approach of these engines of assault, but would counter-work them as he best could from the shelter of his walls. He would sometimes lower the drawbridge, and make a sudden sally upon the unfinished tower or the advancing sow, beat off the handful of men who were engaged about it, pile up the fragments and chips lying about, pour a few pots of oil or tar over the mass, and set fire to it, and return in triumph to watch from his battlements how his fiery ally would, in half an hour, destroy his enemy's work of half a month. In the early fourteenth century MS. Add. 10,294, at fol. 740, we have a small picture of a fight before a castle or town, in which we see a column of men-at-arms crossing the drawbridge on such an expedition. And again, in the plates in which Hans Burgmaier immortalised the events of the reign of the Emperor Maximilian, a very artistic representation of a body of men-at-arms, with their long lances, crowding through the picturesque gate and over the drawbridge, brings such an incident vividly before us.