THE three principal prisons in London in the fourteenth century were the Fleet, the King’s Bench and the Marshalsea, but Newgate took precedence in interest because identified with its earliest history. All have their peculiar histories full of interesting associations, replete with memories of famous inmates and striking incidents, and all are worthy of detailed description. All alike received prisoners for debt and on occasion, more heinous offenders, especially in the earlier years of their existence. The old King’s Bench was the peculiar prison for the Court of that name, but it also took debtors committed by the Court of Exchequer and the Court of Common Pleas. The Marshalsea Court, so called from having been originally under the control of the Knight Marshal of the Royal Household, was at first intended to settle differences between the lesser servants of the palace, and had its own judge, counsel and attorneys, but none except members of Clifford’s Inn were permitted to practise in this court. The jurisdiction of this court extended twelve miles round Whitehall, excluding the city of London. It also served the Admiralty Court and received prisoners charged with piracy.

The Fleet prison took its name from the little stream long stigmatised as the “Fleet[1] Ditch,” the open sewer or water-way which rose in the eastern ridge of Hampstead Hill, flowed by “Oldbourne” or Holborn under four bridges to discharge into the Thames on the west side of Blackfriars bridge. As time passed this ditch, after being deepened once or twice to allow for water traffic, became more and more pestilential and was at length filled up and arched over, becoming then the site of Fleet Market in what is now known as Farringdon Street, on which the main gates of the prison opened. The building was of great antiquity and is first mentioned in authentic records about A. D. 1197. A deed of that date granted it to the safe keeping of one Nathaniel de Leveland and his son Robert, in conjunction with the King’s Houses at Westminster. It is stated that the Fleet prison had been the inheritance of the Levelands since the time of the Norman Conquest. Four years later this same Robert de Leveland petitioned King John for leave to hand over the wardenship of the Fleet to Simon Fitz-Robert, archdeacon of Wells, while he, Leveland, proceeded with the crusaders to the Holy Land. He returned very shortly afterward, as appears from a grant of moneys made him by the City of London in 1205, his salary for guardianship of the prison. His wife Margaret was also granted an allowance as keeper of the Westminster Royal Houses.

Many entries in the records show that in those early days the Fleet was a place of detention for offenders of all sorts as well as of ordinary debtors, and especially of defaulters owing money to the King’s Exchequer. The Chamberlain of Chester in the reign of Edward I was imprisoned in the Fleet for a year on account of a debt to the King. A similar case was that of the sheriffs of Nottingham and Derby, who were detained in 1347 for sums owing to the Exchequer in the reign of Edward III; another, that of William de Hedersete, who was answerable for great “arrears to our lord the King,” through a deceased partner who had died insolvent. The Fleet received debtors for the Court of Chancery, and was essentially the King’s prison to which were committed all who came under his displeasure or failed in their obligations and payments. When one Guy de Codemore was ordered into exile and did not leave the country, forthwith he was thrown into the Fleet. French prisoners of war taken in the capture of Harfleur, in 1423, were brought to the Fleet. When Sir Geoffrey Poole of Hampshire fell out with a neighbour, the Lord Privy Seal summoned him to appear before him and committed him to the Fleet until the King’s (Henry VIII) further pleasure should be known. Lady Poole won her husband’s pardon this time, but Sir Geoffrey was again in trouble the very next year for assaulting the parson of Pacton in the county of Sussex.

In these troublous times various offenders found themselves in the Fleet. It was a place of penitence for young gentlemen who misbehaved, such as the son and heir of Sir Mathew Browne of Surrey who, with his servants, was guilty of arson in a wood; a printer who sold seditious books was committed to it in 1541; the riotous servants of a gentleman of the Privy Chamber were laid by the heels in the Fleet. Smugglers and all who infringed the Customs’ laws were committed to the prison as debtors to the King. A ship master of Southampton who was “privately conveying five packets of wool to Flanders without a license” was arrested and sent to the Fleet, the wool being seized and the captain fined half the value of his ship. It was made a place for the detention of state prisoners, for when Cowley, the Master of the Rolls in Ireland, was under examination in 1541 he was lodged in the Fleet until the King himself should come to London. This was the fate of the illustrious knight, Sir John Falstaff, when he bearded the Lord Chief Justice, as Shakespeare tells us in “Henry IV”:—

Poets, dramatists and pamphleteers were from time to time cast into the Fleet, and it was christened by Pope the “Haunt of the Muses.” Among the first was Lord Surrey and among the latter Nash, author of the satirical play “The Isle of Dogs.” Wycherley, the wit and dramatist, who married the Countess of Drogheda, languished for seven years as a debtor in the Fleet, and Sir Richard Baker, author of the famous “Chronicles,” wrote them as a means of subsistence when an impecunious debtor there, where he died. Francis Sandford, author of the “Genealogical History,” also died in the prison in 1693. James Howell, who wrote the delightful “Familiar Letters” during the troublous times of the Civil War, was a tenant of the Fleet prison in the years 1643 to 1647. In one of his letters dated from the Fleet in 1643, he describes his arrest one morning betimes, by five men armed with “swords, pistols and bills,” who took him to gaol where, as he says, “as far as I can tell I must lie at dead anchor a long time unless some gentle gale blow thence to launch me out.” He consoles himself, however, with the thought that all Englishmen being islanders, are, in effect, prisoners.

The Fleet was arbitrarily used by Sir Richard Empson in the reign of Henry VII, when that overbearing law officer was indicted for committing to it, without process, persons accused of murder and high crimes. Cardinal Wolsey was charged with a like invasion of the liberty of the subject, “by his power and might contrary to right,” in the case of a Sir John Stanley who had taken possession of a farm illegally. This man would not yield but preferred to turn monk in Westminster monastery, where he died.

Other prisoners were committed to the Fleet for political misdemeanours and severely dealt with by the ruling powers. It was an offence to marry the sister of Lady Jane Grey and for this imprisonment was adjudged to Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. Dr. Donne, who married Sir George More’s daughter without his knowledge, was laid by the heels; the penalty of durance overtook Sir Robert Killigrew for entering into conversation with Sir Thomas Overbury, when returning from a visit to Sir Walter Raleigh, then a prisoner in the Tower. James I, when overmuch importuned by the Countess of Dorset, who broke into the Privy Council Chamber, sent her to the Fleet, and Lucius Carey, Lord Falkland, was imprisoned for sending a challenge.

Many painful memories hang about the old Fleet prison in connection with the religious and political persecutions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was crowded with the martyrs to intolerance in the reign of the bigoted Queen Mary and the victims Elizabeth sacrificed in the way of reprisals when she came to the throne. The Protestant party had been in the ascendant under Edward VI and the old religion had been sharply attacked, so that many eminent Catholic bishops burned at the stake,—Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and the pious Hooper, whose chief offence was that being a priest, he had married a wife. He was now Bishop of Worcester but he had been in the Fleet before, imprisoned by his own friends for refusing to wear vestments on the occasion of his consecration. He was soon set free but came again to the Fleet on his way to the stake.

His own account of this second confinement is to be found in Fox’s Book of Martyrs. “On the first of September, 1553, I was committed unto the Fleet from Richmond, to have the liberty of the prison, and within five days after I had paid for my liberty five pounds sterling to the warden for fees, who immediately upon the payment thereof complained unto Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and so I was committed to close prison one quarter of a year in the lower chamber of the Fleet and used very extremely. Then by the means of a good gentleman, I had liberty to come down to dinner and supper; not suffered to speak to any of my friends, but as soon as dinner and supper were done to repair to my chamber again. Notwithstanding ... the warden and his wife picked quarrels with me and complained untruly of me to their great friend the Bishop of Winchester.

“After one quarter of a year and somewhat more, Babington, the warden, and his wife fell out with me for the wicked mass; and thereupon the warden resorted to the bishop and obtained to put me in the ward, where I have continued a long time, having nothing appointed to me for my bed but a little pad of straw and a rotten covering with a tick and a few feathers to lie on, the chamber being vile and stinking, until by God’s means good people sent me bedding. On one side of the prison is the stink and filth of the house and on the other side the town ditch (the Fleet ditch) so that the evil smells have affected me with sundry diseases. During which time I have been sick and the doors, bars, hasps and chains being all closed and made fast upon me, I have mourned, called and cried for help, but the warden when he hath known me many times ready to die, and when the poor men of the ward have called to help me, hath commanded the doors to be kept fast and charged that none of his men should come at me saying, ‘Let him alone, it were a good riddance of him.’”

Yet the sums extorted from the poor bishop were as high as for a peer of the realm. A lord, spiritual or temporal, paid the sum of five pounds as “fyne” for liberty of the house and irons on first coming in. It was a graduated scale, each item according to rank ranging from ten pounds for an archbishop, duke or duchess, to twenty-five shillings for an esquire. The rates were proportionate and laid upon everything: fees for dismission, for entering the obligation and to everyone concerned in the administration, porter, “jayler,” chamberlain, charge for commons or board and for “coyne.” When these fees were not promptly paid the wretched prisoner was “left to lye in the common prison without ‘bedd’ or ‘dyete,’ subject to the discomfort of low companions and the dangers of distemper.”

Bishop Hooper sums up his griefs thus: “I have suffered imprisonment almost eighteen months. My goods, living, friends and comfort taken from me; the Queen [Mary] owing me by first account eighty pounds or more, she hath put me in prison and giveth nothing to find me; neither is there any suffered to come at me whereby I might have relief. I am with a wicked man and woman [the warden and his wife] so that I see no remedy (save God’s help) but I shall be cast away in prison before I come to judgment. But I commit my just cause to God whose will be done whether it be life or death.” It was death, and as he esteemed it, a glorious death, that of being burnt at the stake after some more months in confinement, during which he was frequently examined and called upon to recant. He was sent down for execution to Gloucester, of which diocese he had been bishop before his translation to Worcester. He was burned alive at a slow fire and suffered exceeding torment, but bore it with the splendid endurance vouchsafed to so many victims to savage laws that counted difference in religious belief an abominable crime.

We have an authentic account of the interior of the prison early in the seventeenth century, in the volume published by the Camden Society, entitled the “Æconomy of the Fleete” by Alexander Harris, at one time warden there. Charges were brought against him by a number of his prisoners, of oppression and ill-usage and he is at great pains to make his defence. The prison, as he describes it, was no doubt identically the same as that of earlier date. It consisted of “six great rooms and a courtyard with Tower chambers and Bolton’s ward,” the strongest part of the prison. There was a further sub-division. One ward of the Tower chambers was appropriated to females exclusively; another was called the “Twopenny” ward from the price charged; a third the “Beggars’” ward in which nothing was demanded and nothing given. At a lower level was the Dungeon, a receptacle for refractory prisoners where they were kept in irons and confined in the stocks.

The inmates one and all were entirely at the mercy of the warden, who inherited his office, or purchased it, and looked to recoup himself by the fees he extorted from his prisoners. The place was a sort of sorry hotel kept by a brutal and rapacious landlord, as a life tenant, with a keen eye to profit, and who gave his lodgers nothing, exacting payment often exorbitant for even light and air and the barest necessaries. The English law was so neglectful and inhuman that it made no regular provision for the imprisoned debtor. A fiction existed that the creditor was bound to contribute four pence daily to provide him with food, but, as has been said, as late as 1843 this payment of the “groat” was not punctually made, if at all, and could only be enforced by slow process of law at a cost prohibitory to the penniless prisoner, and he was thrown on his own resources, to starve if without friends or private means, or in the extreme case to drag out a miserable existence from the doles of the charitable. Great numbers of hapless folk in the passing ages were detained for five and twenty, thirty and even forty years, on account of debts of a few pounds, grown out of a first pitifully small sum and largely increased by arbitrary charges for fees and maintenance, which but for unjust arrest and detention would never have existed. Thousands died of hope deferred or slow starvation and with them suffered those naturally dependent upon them. It was a calculation well within the mark that every debtor was saddled with two dependents for whom he was the stay and breadwinner. Some figures are given by John Howard when, later, he began his self-sacrificing philanthropic labours, and may be quoted here to show how numerous were the innocent victims of the iniquitous and remorseless legal system in force:

“I have found,” he writes in 1777,[2] “by carefully examining sundry gaols, that upon an average two dependents (by which I mean wives and children only) may be assigned to each man (debtor) in prison. My computation is confirmed by the account which we have from the Benevolent Society at the Thatched House, October 9th, 1777. Since its institution in 1772 there were yearly about 3,980 discharged debtors who had 2,193 wives and 6,288 children.” From this he reasoned that as there was a total of debtors in England and Wales of 4,084, the dependents would be twice that number.

The sufferings entailed upon poor debtors and their families appealed forcibly to good people and produced much spontaneous assistance. Societies were formed having considerable sums at their disposal to be expended in the relief of poor debtors by the payment of and legal extinction of small debts. Other sums were subscribed, granted or bequeathed with the direct intention of purveying to the daily crying needs of the imprisoned, as moneys held in trust to be expended on bread and improved dietaries for those who would otherwise starve. These allowances survived to a comparatively recent date, and when the state assumed control of all British prisons in 1878, a long list still existed and was absorbed by the Charity Commissioners. These poor creatures were active on their own behalf and collected funds by begging openly in the public streets. This was practised by the so-called “Running Box;” a prisoner ran about the streets adjacent, carrying a box which he shook constantly, rattling its contents and imploring alms from passers by for the poor prisoners in the Fleet. There was also the prison gate or “grating,” which at the Fleet was a window barred, behind which always sat an emaciated debtor rattling his money box and ever chanting dolorously his appeal, “Pray remember the poor prisoners who have no allowance.” The practice was universal and in Salisbury it went the length in 1774—as Howard says—of exhibiting two Crown debtors at the door of the County Gaol, who offered articles manufactured in the prison for sale. Hard by the outer gate was a row of staples fixed in the walls and through the rings was run a chain, to each end of which was padlocked a “Common Side” debtor appealing to the passers by. At Salisbury there was a custom of sending out felons to roam the city in quest of alms; two were chained together, one carrying a money box, the other a sack or basket for food.

No debtor was allowed to benefit by the funds thus obtained until they had been formally sworn at the “grate,” to the effect that they were not worth five pounds in the world. After this they were entitled to a share in the contents of the collection box and to participate in the donations and bequests of the charitable souls who compassionated their poverty-stricken, hardly-used brethren.

A detailed list of the benefactors and their gifts will be found in Howard’s “State of Prisons” (1784), and some are curious enough and may be quoted, such as the bequest known as “Eleanor Gwynne’s bread,” which gave the debtors in Ludgate every eighth week five shillings’ worth of penny loaves, and the gift of Mrs. Elizabeth Mission, the yearly income of two hundred pounds, three per cent. annuities for free bread and coals. A mysterious gift was sent for years to the Wood Street Compter, “nine stone of beef and fourteen quartern loaves,” but its origin was kept secret until at the death of Princess Caroline its royal origin was displayed, and the alms was continued by the order of George III during his life. Mr. Allnutt, who was for many years a prisoner in the Marshalsea for debt, came in for a good estate while incarcerated and at his death he left one hundred pounds a year to be applied to the release of poor debtors. In the Southwark County Gaol, once known as the

White Lion Prison, there were sixteen legacies and donations, all applied to the relief of debtors, and “Nell” Gwynne also bequeathed a sum to be expended in loaves for Common Side debtors.

Returning to the misgovernment of Warden Harris, and the malfeasances laid to his charge, one of the most serious against him was that he allowed two prisoners, well-known to be bitter enemies and constantly quarrelling, to consort together in the same cell or room, that called the Tower chamber, where one fell suddenly upon the other and stabbed him so that he presently died. The story told is much confused. It was not clear who was the aggressor and whether or not the fatal blow was struck in self-defence. The two prisoners in question were a Sir John Whitebrook, against whom the warden had a grievance (no less than that Whitebrook had murderously assaulted him), and the other was one Boughton, of whose hostile feelings toward Whitebrook the warden astutely availed himself.

It was stated that Whitebrook was held a close prisoner by the order of two courts, but that he became violently disturbed, and breaking out went to the warden’s study, where he found Harris in his gown writing. A talk ensued as to the quality of the lodging provided and the charge for the chamber-rent, and as the warden was using the pomice-box to dry his writing, Sir John Whitebrook struck him on the head with the sharp end of a hammer, inflicting four wounds upon his skull and other bruises, before the warden could close with him. Then the assailant was thrown on his back and the hammer taken from him so that the warden might easily have beaten out his brains, “but that he was neither wrathful nor daunted.” When the servants came upon the scene, Whitebrook was seized by the butler but yet contrived to take out a stiletto and use it fiercely. The warden’s deputy was stabbed through the hand and the porter or doorkeeper of the house would have been killed but the stiletto did not enter. After this the furious creature was carried in irons to Bolton’s ward.

This affray was part of a settled plan of mutinous disturbance in which some three score prisoners had combined to break up the strongest wards and the massive doors of the Tower chamber. At that time Whitebrook and Boughton agreed amicably and the malcontents set themselves to “bar out” the warden from the prison and refused all persuasions of the officials to “unlock” the chambers even at the request of the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Justice and the Sergeant at Arms, but they yielded to the Clerk of the Council when sent from the Lords. Whitebrook was still insubordinate and refused the chamber offered him but seized upon five others which they “again fortified,” so that the warden “had no command in that part of the prison.” The authority of the officials was at last vindicated and the turbulent prisoners were removed into the common prison, where Boughton and Whitebrook came together and, after a suspension of hostilities for some months, the fatal quarrel with the results described took place.

Another serious allegation was that a prisoner, who was in possession of a large sum in cash, was robbed of it with the connivance of the warden. A man named Coppin was supposed to have fifty-one pounds concealed in his bed and orders were issued to remove him to another room and keep him close while the turnkeys rifled his bed and carried off his treasure. The answer given was that Coppin was known for six years past to be quite impecunious and unable “to pay the warden one penny for meate, drink, lodgings or attendance.” It was proved by the evidence of other prisoners that when Coppin was transferred from the Tower Chamber into Bolton’s ward, he took his bedding with him and that he never complained of having lost “one penny or any other thing.”

There were many more charges against the warden, Alexander Harris, which he answered speciously and sometimes denied categorically. He was accused of breaking into prisoners’ rooms, forcing the locks of their trunks, seizing their goods and cash and applying them to his own use; but he replied that Peck, the particular complainant, although worth money, never paid a sou and when set free left the Fleet deeply in the warden’s debt, having occupied a good room for eight years, for which he paid not one penny. He was a debtor whom a small sum would discharge, but “he never paid any man.” Peck’s children were known thieves, who sought shelter in the Fleet until the gallows got one and the other died a natural death. Peck himself “purloyned the goods of his fellow-prisoners and by force, with knife drawn, took away the bedding of a dead room-mate from the mother who claimed it. Peck with his accomplices came into the gaoler’s lodge and thrust him out, with his aged wife, and in resisting grievously bruised the gaoler, offering to stabb the man that was under the gaoler.”

For these foul abuses Peck was moved to Newgate by order of the Lord Chief Justice, where he lay for a long time not daring to open his trunks, for they were full of stolen goods; but the warden called in neighbours and with the help of some prisoners forced them and inventoried the contents. The warden of the Fleet found more than enough to satisfy his debt for eight years’ lodging and fees. Peck’s remaining property consisted of only three blankets, two pillows, “an ould covering of darnex” and two bolsters.

Harris was also accused of impounding the moneys paid as fees to the servant who went as escort with prisoners allowed to go at large for the day. This curious custom obtained in the Fleet, from the earliest to the latest times, of permitting a prisoner on payment of a fee to go at large in the city and even into the country if accompanied by a “baston” or tipstaff. When the practice began it was understood that no prisoner was meant to go further than to Westminster or to his counsel, but by degrees custom enlarged their walks all over London and indeed far beyond it. In all cases the warden was always responsible for his prisoner and if he escaped was mulcted to the amount of his debt. Permission to go abroad was always preceded by the prisoner or his friends giving security for the amount due. The extent to which this privilege was conceded is seen by the fact that twenty officers were on the staff of the prison for the purpose of providing the requisite escorts. The warden estimated that he paid out to them some eighty pounds a year, which at twenty pence a day would account for about a thousand absences, or an average of ten days annually to say a hundred prisoners, who could afford the luxury of an “exeat.” The warden’s risk was great, for there were times when the aggregate of the debts owed by the inmates of the Fleet amounted to two hundred thousand pounds, besides the State obligations or sums owing to the king. The warden’s emoluments were necessarily large to cover this liability, and often exceeded two thousand pounds a year.

Residence beyond the prison within the “Rules,” was another form of privilege. “The liberty of the rules and the ‘day rules’ of the Fleet may be traced,” says Mr. Timbs, “to the time of Richard II, when prisoners were allowed to go at large by bail, or with a ‘baston’ (tipstaff), for nights and days together. This license was paid at eightpence per day and twelvepence for his keeper that shall be with him. These were day rules. However they were confirmed by a rule of court during the reign of James I. The rules wherein prisoners were allowed to lodge were enlarged in 1824, so as to include the churches of St. Bride’s and St. Martin’s, Ludgate; New Bridge Street, Blackfriars to the Thames; Dorset Street and Salisbury Square; and part of Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill and Ludgate Street, to the entrance of St. Paul’s Churchyard, the Old Bailey and the lanes, courts, etc., in the vicinity of the above; the extreme circumference of the liberty being about a mile and a half. Those requiring the ‘rules’ had to provide sureties for their punctual reappearance and keeping within the boundaries, and to pay a percentage on the amount of debts for which they were detained, which also entitled them to the liberty of the day rules, enabling them during term or the sitting of the courts of Westminster, to go abroad during the day, to transact or to arrange their affairs, etc. The Fleet and the Queen’s Bench were the only prisons in the Kingdom to which these privileges had for centuries been attached.”

The withholding discharge from those entitled by law to go at large until all fees and duties were satisfied, an act amounting to false imprisonment, was a frequent complaint against the warden, as against all gaolers in the old days. This was answered by the plea that it was a general rule to detain out-going prisoners until they had satisfied all just dues, and the imposition of these dues was defended as having been lawfully originated by Act of Parliament, custom or toleration of the State and judges of courts. The warden was charged too with making imprisonment more grievous by keeping prisoners too close, “chaining, manacling and bolting them with irons,” and this for months and years without order, warrant or law; but he pleaded that such treatment was the necessary restraint of dangerous prisoners, “badd” debtors for great sums, perjurers, “forgerors,” conspirators and such like censured persons by whom the warden or his servants may be “out-done or slain” through violence to his person or office, or whose cause was almost ready for hearing by the Star Chamber.

The use of irons was justified by “ancient continuance” and custom throughout the Kingdom which many “now in the Fleet do by suffering in other prisons know to be true.” The fact that a fine was paid to be freed from them “proveth the use,” said the warden, “and there be some knights now prisoners that did wear irons for thirty years past for misdemeanours after they had been fined to be freed from them in the Fleet.” In support of this use of irons the opinion of the Master of the Rolls, given twenty-three years previously, is quoted; that if abridged the discipline of the house would be subverted. “The warden protested that he did never show spleen or passion in the putting irons on prisoners for private revenge, not even when several, who were in execution for great sums, had run away and escaped and the warden was compelled to pay their debts.”

The warden indignantly denied the charge of starving “close prisoners” (those kept close), declaring it to be “fabulous and false and to have no colour;” for food was supplied although no payment was made, and in one case, when a prisoner “faigned himself sick” from starvation, the doctor saw in the window the most part of a roasted pullet, left from the meal before. This complaint of being starved drove a certain prisoner to break out, behaving himself rather as a “Bedlam frantic than a gentleman” and with others seeking “for revenge” to the utter dislike and grief of all in the prison, “with steel chisel, mallets and hammers cut all the stone work of the door of the Tower Chamber into which the bolts and locks did shut, so that no door could be shut upon eighteen prisoners of great weight.”

The exactions of the warden for chamber-rent were the cause of bitter complaint; the order was that no man should pay more than one shilling and threepence weekly for a room with bed and bedding, yet the price demanded was eight shillings, ten, even twenty, per week without bedding. The warden answered that many of his prisoners desired to have more ease than ordinary, and sought lodgings in the warden’s own house and would not lie in the prison. Better accommodation must be paid for at a higher rate, if they paid at all, but “the misery is that none will pay at all, but stand upon it they should pay nothing, which is contrary to right, custom and usage.” Yet these defaulters also brought friends, wives, children and servants which were no prisoners, to share their quarters and still would pay nothing for the privilege. On the whole it was quite a mistake to suppose that the warden’s rents “yielded a mass of benefit each year, whereof the contrary doth appear, for prisoners are not the best payers and some lie there many years and die without paying and others lie many years and then become insolvent.”

It was pleaded that where in old time no rent was charged on the Common Side, the warden Harris demanded it as if for a private chamber, and even for the dungeon as well. The answer was that the Common Side was the king’s ancient prison where for “many hundred years men were imprisoned there only” and they were not exempt from payment. In the part called the Tower Chamber there were eight bedsteads by which the warden had made seventy-one pounds by the year. In one ward, called the “Twopenny,” the inmates paid twopence a night; only in the “Beggars’” ward did prisoners pay nothing and receive nothing. In this last the insolvent debtor was forced to fend for himself; he was dependent upon chance charity for food, fire, clothing, bedding. Many hundreds succumbed to starvation and cold and died like dogs upon rotten straw, their nakedness barely covered by foul scanty rags. Rarely the degraded and neglected lodgers were suffered to go in search of water to cleanse the ward, but these as a rule were always filthily dirty.

The state of affairs was horrible within the gaol. No order was kept. Prisoners quarrelled and fought continually, many ranged the wards and corridors howling like lunatics all through the night and blowing horns, so that sleep was impossible to the sick and sorrowful. The lowest women entered freely, thieves took refuge there and thus avoided arrest; stolen goods were hidden in secure corners and never discovered. The prisoners went about armed and used swords and daggers freely in brawls and fights amongst themselves or in attacking the officers and servants of the gaol.