It was not yet too late for the rebels to lay down their poor arms of bows and arrows, scythes, pikes, and bill-hooks, but, fired with the successful bloodshed that had given them possession of the city, they rejected all offers made by the Earl of Warwick, commanding the strong force that now sought entrance. Three days’ fighting, in the city and on the slopes of Mousehold, followed, with varying fortunes, and had it not been for the reinforcements of 1,100 German mercenaries, the rebellion might again have proved successful. As it was, however, their arrival turned the scale. It was at this juncture that, driven from the city, the peasants, remembering the old prophetic verse, moved to the hollow of Dussin’s Dale on Mousehold, where they were to “fill the vale with slaughtered bodies.” Here, they thought, if there was any truth in prophecy, they would achieve the final victory. It never occurred to them that there were two ways of reading that verse, and thus it was here they made their last stand and were cut down in hundreds, grimly fulfilling its words, if not its spirit. Three thousand five hundred of these poor countrymen were slain in this final struggle, and perhaps an equal number had fallen in the almost two months’ fighting and skirmishing of this fatal rising. Thus it ended, but vengeance had yet to take toll of their number. The chiefs of the movement had held their court on Mousehold, under an oak they called the Oak of Reformation, and it was from its branches that nine of them were now hanged. Robert Kett was hanged higher still, three months later, when, after having been sent to London and flung into the Tower, he was brought back and suspended from a gallows on the roof of Norwich Castle. Forty-five minor leaders were hanged, drawn, and quartered in Norwich Market place, and some 250 of the others were plainly hanged, without these fiendish extras. The others, a disheartened mob of 12,000, having learned an unforgettable lesson, were bidden go home, for even the bloodthirsty rage of the victors might well be aghast at the prospect of meting out a like penalty to such a number; and moreover, counsels of prudence and expediency had something to say. “What shall we do, then?” asked the victorious Earl of Warwick, himself a Norfolk landowner, anxious how his lands should be kept tilled if they thus made away with the tillers of them, “What shall we do, then? Hold the plough ourselves, play the carters, and labour the ground with our own hands?” Good Heavens forefend such disaster!