Sentence:  When she related that a band of fanatics, after robbing a church of all its silver-plate, and burning the adjacent vicarage, drunk with their success, had <WSD>invested</WSD> the Castle, and cried aloud for ‘"the man''' to be brought unto them, that he might be hewed to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal—[…]her young hearers felt a deep stirring of the heart,—a proud yet mellowed elation that never yet was felt by the reader of a written history, though its pages were as legitimate as any sanctioned by the royal licenser at Madrid. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  To lay siege to.