Prisoners soon arrived, the first detachment being 179 Frenchmen on 28th August. Then came 250 from Portsmouth. They arrived at Portsmouth on board the _Pegasus_, but deprived of the winged horse and reduced to Shanks’ pony, their journey from Portsmouth to Norman Cross took them from the 5th to the 18th September. In October several detachments arrived, among them one of over 200 French and 5 Dutch. Between the years 1803 and 1814 no fewer than 122,440 prisoners of war of various nationalities were brought to Great Britain, most of them during the years 1805–10; of these 10,341 died in prison, and 17,607 were exchanged or paroled to France as invalids. {248} Norman Cross had its full share of this enormous crowd of prisoners, and the discipline of the prison, the life, and occupation of the prisoners can have differed little from that of the previous seven years. The greatly diminished chance of a prisoner obtaining his freedom by exchange, and the longer duration of each man’s term of durance, must, however, have greatly aggravated for the worse their mental misery and physical discomfort. On the other hand, experience had suggested to the authorities various details in the treatment of their captives, which were adopted with the object of bettering their lot. In the structure of the prison itself there were, during this period, several important changes. The outer stockade fence was replaced by the brick wall, within which ran the dry, paved ditch. The boys’ separate prison was built in a bricked-in enclosure, outside the prison wall, through a door in which was the only entrance into the new enclosure. In 1805 the surgeon’s new brick house was built in the hospital quadrangle, but beyond these points there is nothing special to add to the description already given.