A great deal of argument has been expended upon the name of Bridgwater. The name is apparently of the most obvious and elementary derivation, for here is the “water” (largely impregnated, it is true, with mud) in the river Parret, and here is the bridge, the modern representative of others of different degrees of antiquity, erected at the lowest place down the estuary where it was possible to fling a bridge across. It is evident, then, that it must ever have been impossible to enter or leave the town in an easterly or westerly direction without crossing a bridge or ferry at this point. Other place-names in the district, those of Highbridge and Boroughbridge, for example, prove the word “bridge” to have been used in the ordinary way, when necessary, as an integral, and indeed scarcely avoidable, part of a name. Yet the derivation of “Bridgwater” has nothing to do, explicitly, with water, although “Brugge,” _i.e._ Bridge, the name of the place at the time of the Conquest, certainly implies water beneath. The manor was given, after the Conquest, to one of the Conqueror’s Norman barons, Walter of Douai, and became therefrom known as “Brugie of Walter” and by degrees, by a natural elision of letters readily dropped in ordinary speech, what it is now. [Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF ADMIRAL BLAKE] Of the Castle of Bridgwater, once a strong fortress, both by virtue of its own stout walls, and by reason of the fine position it held at the crossing of the Parret, nothing is left, except portions of the Water Gate, on the West Quay, and the cellars of what is now the Custom House. The last occasion of its appearance in history was the shameful surrender of it to a besieging army under Fairfax, on July 23rd, 1645, after a two days’ assault. It had been so generally considered impregnable that the wealthy Royalists of the countryside, afraid for the safety of their jewellery and other valuables, had sent them hither from what they thought to be the insecurity of their own houses. Thus the taking of the impregnable castle and the surrender of the invincible garrison resulted in exceptionally heavy spoils, amounting to £100,000 value.