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proceedings of June 30th, 1867, page 529). A cannon ball and some few buckles 

 and buttons, however, which were discovered with the skeletons have been 

 pronounced to be of a more recent period ; and further enquiries were therefore 

 directed to the local histories of the Siege of Gloucester. 



Shortly after this, two old men, Samuel Colwall and Charles Smith, at that 

 time both of them living in one of the Tibberton Alms Houses, of whom only the 

 former now survives, confirmed the statements of Hannah Taylor. Colwall said 

 that his father worked in the construction of the Canal, and that the bones 

 discovered at that time were said to be the remains of Welshmen who came up to 

 beseige Gloucester for the King ; that they were entrenched at Highnam, and 

 attacked the gate which then stood on Westgate Bridge, but were beaten back ; 

 that they fought a battle on Ludnam's Hill, the field m which Mr. Gambler Parry's 

 church now stands ; that they were defeated and driven along the road to Barber's 

 Bridge, where they were met by fresh troops and cut to pieces; that their 

 " trenchments " were to be seen when he was a boy, and he believed were still to 

 be seen in the wood, on each side of the Newent road, near the three mile stone 

 on the "point of the hill"; that he lived for many years at Highnam, and 

 afterwards ynth his father at a house in Highleadon, known as the Camp House, 

 now the property of Mr. Ellis, of Minsterworth, and has often heard that soldiers 

 formerly " camped " round that house at night, and were posted at the brook by 

 day, and that the brook was called Red Brook, as it still is at and below the 

 bridge, because it ran red with the blood of the slain. As Samuel Colwall 

 is still living close at hand, he will be able to confirm these statements if seen 

 at the alms houses, but he is not able to get far away from home. In the material 

 facts he was confirmed by Smith, who lived and worked at Highnam when a boy, 

 and remembers when the turnpike road was diverted at the Cross Hands about 40 

 years ago that many bones and buttons and other relics were discovered in the 

 excavations. There was now very little difficulty in connecting these remains with 

 the Welsh Army under Lord Herbert, which was encamped at Highnam, and 

 defeated and captured there by the combined forces of Massey and Sir William 

 Waller, on the 24th March, 1643. Archdeacon Fearney in his manuscriist in the 

 Bodleian Library, at Oxford, relates a conversation he had in 1717, with a Welsh- 

 man who had served in this army as a boy, and Samuel Taylor's father who had 

 died at a very advanced age, might have been living at that time. When the bones 

 were found in cutting dovni the hill to form the Canal embankment, but little more 

 than 150 years had elapsed since the surrender of the Welsh army, and men of 

 the age of Samuel Taylor at his death, and even men no older than my informants 

 in the alms houses now may well have related in 1795 the details received by 

 them from eye witnesses of the events of March 24th, 1643. The fate of this 

 Welsh army is locally recorded in " Corbett's Military Government," and it is 

 officially recorded in Sir William Waller's letter to both Houses of Parliament, 

 both of which are reprinted in the Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis at pages 29 and 195. 

 The latter is printed in the Journals both of the House of Lords and House 

 of Commons, as well as in the tract from which the Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis 

 has reprinted it. It is a singular circumstance that neither of these records 



