"_Davenant Hall, Twelfth Night_, 1645-6.--Only four years since that merry sixteenth birthday of mine, when all the village were gathered in the Hall, and Olive and I gave the garments to the village maidens of my own age, and in the evening Roger stayed to help kindle the twelve bonfires. "And now we are walled and moated out from the village and from the Manor as we were in the old days of the Norman Conquest, when the Davenants first took possession of these lands, and built the old ruined keep, where the gateway is (whence they afterwards removed to this abbey), to overawe the Saxon village, where the Draytons even then lived in the old Manor. I wonder if there is anything left of the old contentions in Saxon and Norman blood now. The rebel army is so much composed, they say, both of officers and men, of the stout old Saxon yeomanry, and the traders in the towns; whilst ours is officered from the old baronial castles, by gentlemen with the old Norman historical names. How many of the higher gentry and nobility are loyal has been proved these last six months, since fatal Naseby, by the sieges (and, alas! by the stormings and surrenders) of at least a score of old castles and mansions, from Bristol, surrendered on the 11th of September by Prince Rupert to Bovey Tracey in the faithful West. Thank Heaven, they gave Oliver Cromwell and Sir Thomas Fairfax much trouble, Basing Hall especially. In future days, when the king shall enjoy his own again (as he surely will), I hold such a blackened ruin will be a choicer possession to a gentleman's family than a palace furnished regally. The rebels called Basing House _Basting_, for the mischief it did them. And our men called it _Loyally_. "Roger Drayton hath shared, no doubt, in many of these sieges. So stern in his delusion of duty, I suppose, if this brewer of Huntingdon commanded him, he would not scruple to plant his reble guns against us. 'Thine eye shall not spare,' they say, in their hateful cant. Sir Launcelot says they have been chasing His Sacred Majesty from place to place like a hunted stag; that Mr. Cromwell, whom Roger loves above king and friend, never sets on any great enterprise without having a '_text_' to lean on! That before storming Basing Hall, he passed the night in prayer, and that the text he especially 'rested on' for that achievement was Psalm cxviii. 8: '_They that make them are like unto them, so is every one that trusteth in them!_' as if we Royalists were Canaanites, idolaters, Papists, I know not what. Fancy burning down a corn-stack to a psalm-tune, or setting out on a burglary to a text. Yet what is it better to burn down loyal gentlemen's houses about their ears, from one end of England to another. It is all Conscience; this dreadful Moloch of Conscience! It was the one weak point of the Draytons always.