[Illustration: Beacon.] [Illustration: Swepe.] In the celebrated lampoon upon Richard, king of the Romans, who was obliged, at the battle of Lewes, to take refuge in a windmill, the following lines occur: "The Kynge of Alemaigne wende to do full wel, He saisede the mulne for a castel; With hare sharpe swerdes he ground the stel, He wende that the sayles were _mangonel_!"[115] The _caltrap_ was a cruel contrivance for galling the feet of horses. It was made of iron, and so constructed that, however it might fall, one of its four sharp points should be erect. Numbers of them strewed in the enemy's path served to retard the advance of cavalry, and a retreat was sometimes secured by dropping them in the flight, and thus cutting off the pursuit. Its etymology is uncertain, cheval-trap and _gall_-trap have been suggested with nearly equal claims to probability. Water-bowgets, or budgets, date from the Crusades, when water had often to be conveyed across the sandy deserts from a great distance. They are represented in various grotesque forms as-- [Illustration] so that it is a matter of curiosity to know in what manner they were carried. Leigh and others call them _gorges_; but the charge properly known by that name is a whirlpool, as borne in the armes parlantes of the family of Gorges. The _mullet_, a star-like figure, has been taken to represent the rowel of a spur; but a doubt of this derivation of the charge may be suggested, as the spur of the middle ages had no rowel, but consisted of one sharp spike. Some of the old heralds considered mullets as representations of falling stars--"exhalations inflamed in the aire and stricken back with a cloud"--which, according to Guillim, are sometimes found on the earth like a certain jelly, and assuming the form of the charge. The substance alluded to bears the name of star-jelly. In the Gentleman's Magazine for 1797, are several communications on this subject, in which there is a great contrariety of opinion, some of the writers contending that it is an animal substance, while others consider it a vegetable. As it is usually found in boggy grounds, Dr. Darwin deemed it a mucilage voided by herons after they have eaten frogs, and Pennant attributed it to gulls. The antient alchemists called it the flower of heaven, and imagined that from it they could procure the universal menstruum; but all their researches ended in discovering that by distillation it yielded some phlegm, volatile salt, and empyreumatic oil.[116]