Notwithstanding this letter, the judges were resolved not to suffer me to be brought before them; but reviling and scoffing at me behind my back, left me to the magistrates of the town; giving them what encouragement they could to exercise their cruelty upon me. Whereupon (though I had been kept up so close in the jailer’s house that Friends were not suffered to visit me, and Colonel Benson and Justice Pearson were denied to see me,) the next day, after the judges were gone out of town, an order was sent to the jailer to put me down into the dungeon among the moss-troopers,[29] thieves, and murderers, which accordingly he did. A filthy nasty place it was, where men and women were put together in a very uncivil manner, and not even a house of convenience to it; and the prisoners so lousy that one woman was almost eaten to death with lice. Yet, as bad as the place was, the prisoners were all made very loving and subject to me; and some of them were convinced of the truth, as the publicans and harlots were of old; so that they were able to confound any priest, that might come to the grates to dispute. But the jailer was very cruel, and the under-jailer very abusive to me and to Friends that came to see me; for he would beat Friends with a great cudgel, that did but come to the window to look in upon me. I could get up to the grate, where sometimes I took in my meat; at which the jailer was often offended. One time he came in a great rage, and beat me with a great cudgel, though I was not at the grate at that time; and as he beat me, he cried, “Come out of the window,” though I was then far enough from it. While he struck me, I was made to sing in the Lord’s power; and that made him rage the more. Then he fetched a fiddler, and brought him in where I was, and set him to play, thinking to vex me thereby; but while he played, I was moved in the everlasting power of the Lord God to sing; and my voice drowned the noise of the fiddle, and struck and confounded them, and made them give over fiddling and go their way. Footnote 29: Moss-troopers were the remnant of a kind of freebooters, who infested the borders of England and Scotland in feudal times, making incursions on each other, less for the purpose of contention in arms, than for committing depredations on cattle and property. Justice Benson’s wife was moved of the Lord to come to visit me, and to eat no meat but what she ate with me at the bars of the dungeon window. She was afterwards herself imprisoned at YORK, when she was great with child, for speaking to a priest; and was kept in prison, and not suffered to go out, when the time of her travail was come; so she was delivered of her child in the prison. She was an honest, tender woman, and continued faithful to the truth until she died.