The clothworkers formed three strong companies, and the whole regiment may have numbered close on six hundred men.
The third regiment was headed by five hundred foot from Taunton, men of peaceful and industrious life, but deeply imbued with those great principles of civil and religious liberty which were three years later to carry all before them in England.

As they passed the gates they were greeted by a thunderous welcome from their townsmen upon the walls and at the windows.

Their steady, solid ranks, and broad, honest burgher faces, seemed to me to smack of discipline and of work well done.

Behind them came the musters of Winterbourne, Ilminster, Chard, Yeovil, and Collumpton, a hundred or more pikesmen to each, bringing the tally of the regiment to a thousand men.
A squadron of horse trotted by, closely followed by the fourth regiment, bearing in its van the standards of Beaminster, Crewkerne, Langport, and Chidiock, all quiet Somersetshire villages, which had sent out their manhood to strike a blow for the old cause.

Puritan ministers, with their steeple hats and Geneva gowns, once black, but now white with dust, marched sturdily along beside their flocks.