close arrest

Close arrest would have meant the cellar.

At 1 a.m. on the 31st the authorities raided the isolated hut on the Norfolk coast, captured the German telegraph operator in the act of communicating with Borkum, and hurried him away under close arrest.

Early in the eighteenth century the British took Minorca and held it for fifty years, until Admiral Byng allowed the French to capture it—a "misconduct" for which, after eight months of close arrest, he was shot.

My wife, before leaving her father’s, learned, through a letter sent by a rebel officer to his wife, that all the guards who were on duty during the night I escaped from prison, were placed under close arrest, and were still in the dungeon at the time of his writing.

A quarter of an hour later, in close arrest, Lieutenant Winn returned to his own roof and locked himself in his den.