The horsemen were armed for most part with suord and pistoll, some onlie with suord.
The foot with musket, pike, sith (scythe), forke, and suord; and some with suords great and long.' He admired much the proficiency of their cavalry, and marvelled how they had attained to it in so short a time.
{96b} At Douglas, which they had just left on the morning of this great wapinshaw, they were charged--awful picture of depravity!--with the theft of a silver spoon and a nightgown.

Could it be expected that while the whole country swarmed with robbers of every description, such a rare opportunity for plunder should be lost by rogues--that among a thousand men, even though fighting for religion, there should not be one Achan in the camp?
At Lanark a declaration was drawn up and signed by the chief rebels.

In it occurs the following: 'The just sense whereof '-- the sufferings of the country--'made us choose, rather to betake ourselves to the fields for self-defence, than to stay at home, burdened daily with the calamities of others, and tortured with the fears of our own approaching misery.' {97} The whole body, too, swore the Covenant, to which ceremony the epitaph at the head of this chapter seems to refer.
A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark to Bathgate, where, on the evening of Monday the 26th, the wearied army stopped.

But at twelve o'clock the cry, which served them for a trumpet, of 'Horse! horse!' and 'Mount the prisoner!' resounded through the night-shrouded town, and called the peasants from their well-earned rest to toil onwards in their march.

The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wetting rain descended.