Bridewell in the eighteenth century.
In the eighteenth century, London contained the largest prisons and a disproportionate share of the country’s total prison population.
Newgate
Newgate is the prison whose name most readily springs to mind when mention is made of the ‘Tyburn Tree’. Unfortunately the early records of Newgate’s use as a prison are sparse but it is likely that the first gaol with that name was located over the Newgate entrance to the City itself; it was certainly in existence in 1189 because it is mentioned in a Pipe Roll of that year as a royal prison. John Stow (1525-1605) in his seminal Survey of London, published in 1598, mentions that in 1218 Henry III told the Sheriffs of London to ensure that the gaol at Newgate was kept in good order. In 1241, London Jews were threatened with imprisonment in Newgate unless they paid a fine of 20,000 marks during a wave of anti-Semitic hysteria. In its early years Newgate seems to have played the role of high-security prison for political and other high-profile prisoners, not only from London but also from the provinces, and others who could not be housed in county gaols. It was its role as a royal or state prison that led to the opening of a small gaol designed for many of London’s petty offenders in the nearby Ludgate.
Newgate was the prison for both the City of London and the County of Middlesex and it had already acquired an evil reputation by the early fourteenth century. In 1334 an official enquiry into conditions in Newgate revealed that even prisoners on minor charges were incarcerated in deep dungeons which they shared with hardened recidivists and all manner of other woebegone inmates, some of whom were not necessarily criminals but were simply unable to cope with life. They were subjected to systematic brutality from the keepers and many depended for their existence on charity. Although under the overall jurisdiction of the city sheriffs, Newgate was in effect privatised and its day-to-day management was let out to contractors who saw it as a source of income by which they could enrich themselves over and above the contractual financial arrangements they had made with the sheriffs. All sorts of services were available to those prisoners who had deep pockets. It was a living hell for those who did not.
Newgate suffered attack and considerable damage from the insurgents during the uprising in 1381 under Wat Tyler. In 1419 the keeper and sixty-four of his charges perished in an attack of the plague. ‘Gaol fever’, a form of typhus, was ever-present as the rats and lice which spread the Rickettsia pathogens found ideal conditions in the foetid, insanitary and overcrowded surroundings. In 1423 a sizeable enlargement and refurbishment took place and this was undertaken using money pledged by the late, very wealthy Sir Richard Whittington. For a while Newgate became ironically known as ‘Whittington’s Palace’ and was palatial in size compared to the previous premises. It had a dining hall and separate accommodation for different classes of offenders. It was also more secure but it swiftly deteriorated because the infamous old system of leasing it for profit continued, even though from 1440 it had supposedly been more carefully scrutinised by the sheriffs.
Plaque outside the site of old Newgate Prison.
Plan of Newgate Prison.
A practice which had been operating for many years was that of ‘garnish’, whereby the keepers or turnkeys found ways of extracting money from new arrivals for even the barest necessities such as candles and soap. Many rackets were practised to extort money from prisoners. One example was ‘ironing the prisoners’. Most prisoners were placed in heavy iron shackles when they were admitted. These were removed before departure but not before fees were extorted by the keepers for both fixing the shackles and taking them off. It was probably no coincidence that the fees were very similar in amount to the bond that the keeper was expected to pay for every prisoner who escaped.
By the 1690s the office of keeper could be bought and sold. In such a situation it was perhaps inevitable that the fabric of Newgate should deteriorate: repairs ate into the keepers’ profits. This only exacerbated the overcrowding problem as the miserable inmates were packed into those parts of the building that were still useable. In turn the overcrowding encouraged the spread of the gaol fever and other contagious diseases. The bulk of prisoners had no duties to attend to all day and simply loafed about causing trouble, usually for the weaker of their brethren. Some of the less feckless prisoners managed to make items which could be sold outside the prison, but often had difficulties in pocketing the proceeds because of the presence within the prison of a ubiquitous and omniscient mafia. They would run a range of rackets, often in conjunction with the keepers themselves and involving systematic extortion and violence. The prison subculture was very deep-rooted and mock trials were not uncommon. They would ridicule the official process of the law and bore considerable similarity to the long-standing tradition of charivari, or rough justice, perpetrated by the community on those whose behaviour it particularly disapproved of.
Browbeaten and bullied by staff and fellow-prisoners alike, those who had no money or could not stand up for themselves might be consigned to the remotest, coldest and darkest parts of the prison without any heating, bedding and with the barest minimum of food. However, anything could be bought in a prison like Newgate. Drink flowed freely and banquets were enjoyed by the well-to-do. The well-off might also be able to pay to have their spouses or partners living with them. Prostitutes conducted lucrative business in prisons. Some prisoners had their pets with them, a practice which cannot have helped the chronic overcrowding or the general ambience. A pamphlet appeared in 1717 explaining that access to the superior lodgings in Newgate required a down payment of 20 guineas and an ongoing rent of 11s a week. The services of a cleaner could be had for 1s a week and a whore for the night cost 12d. In fact, the regime inside the prison was little different from that on the outside. The one thing that money could not usually buy was freedom.
The City authorities must bear much of the blame for the abuses which took place in Newgate: their aim seems to have been one of systematic neglect while trying to avoid drawing attention. In 1628 a structural survey was undertaken which described Newgate as a ‘ruin’ desperately in need of repair, the cost being estimated at £500. Newgate was damaged severely in the Great Fire of 1666 but was rebuilt with rather fine decorative embellishments on the outside (which contrasted greatly with what rapidly became the noisome conditions which had to be endured by its inmates). Nothing was done to improve the supply of fresh water or to make provision for effective ventilation. The irony of equipping Newgate with a splendid façade with prominent statues symbolising ‘Peace’, ‘Security’, ‘Plenty’ and ‘Liberty’ was not lost on the satirists of the day.
In 1665 the plague had struck Newgate with lethal effect. Fear of the plague is entirely understandable, and led to the temporary suspension of court sessions. Unfortunately, this may have caused even more deaths, as prisoners who might have been acquitted were kept confined with other prisoners in conditions where fatalities from plague were bound to be high. In fact, the conditions inside Newgate in the early eighteenth century were so pestilential that many of the condemned felons sent there before being taken to be hanged at Tyburn got no further, succumbing to gaol fever and other epidemic scourges. The nadir was probably reached in 1750 when Newgate was more than usually overcrowded, and inmates who appeared in the nearby Old Bailey seemed to bring an almost tangible contagion with them. In May, more than sixty people attending the Old Bailey died as gaol fever raged indiscriminately through prisoners, judges, jury and anyone else in attendance. Such a disaster led to prisoners from Newgate being soused in vinegar as a disinfectant before they appeared in court and to the practice, still extant, whereby judges on certain occasions carry nosegays with them as they enter court. Immediate steps to counter the foulness of Newgate’s atmosphere included building an open exercise yard and a windmill on the roof as a primitive air extraction device. Such was the smell emanating from Newgate, particularly in hot weather, that passers-by would cross the street to avoid the stench and keep their noses cov
ered!
The prison had many notable inmates over the centuries. These included Anne Askew, the English Protestant martyr who was racked in Newgate and burnt at Smithfield, the highwayman Claude Duval in 1670 and Daniel Defoe in 1702 and 1703. The darling of the London crowd, Jack Sheppard, the burglar, highwayman and escapologist, was in and out on several occasions in 1723 and 1724 – and the hated Jonathan Wild was incarcerated in 1725. With the exception of Defoe, when the others finally left Newgate, it was to undertake their last journey. In most cases this was to Tyburn. Innumerable other wretches ‘went west’ from Newgate.
The hated Jonathan Wild displayed on a ‘Tyburn Ticket’ for his execution.
Jack Sheppard in Newgate Prison.
An entertaining feature of life in Newgate was the presence of the chaplain or ordinary whose ostensible job was to cater for the spiritual welfare of the inmates. The services this man offered cut little ice with most of Newgate’s residents (except perhaps when they were in extremis). Routine services were frequently a noisy shambles as the ordinary struggled to make his voice heard above the uncouth and irreverent hubbub of his captive audience. For all that the ordinary had an important role to play in the carnivalesque atmosphere that was expected in Newgate on the day before a felon was taken off to Tyburn to be hanged. This involved the condemned prisoner being taken to the prison chapel where he was subjected to an extremely lengthy tirade from the ordinary about the need to expiate his sins before his awful imminent death. Partly dependent on the notoriety of the prisoner, the chapel would be crowded with members of the public who had paid good money to see how the condemned bore up to this very stressful time. On occasions a spirited prisoner would sit and shout insults and obscenities at the ordinary – and this of course was exactly the kind of entertainment the audience had paid to see.
Despite the fact that the ordinary was generally held in low esteem and his pastoral efforts were so fruitless, when a vacancy occurred there was no shortage of applicants for the post. It was not usually the cream of the clerical profession that were attracted to the Newgate ordinary’s job: in fact, some who obtained the job were inhumane brutes who were only there because of the opportunities for peculation. These centred on the highly profitable writing and selling of broadsheets – usually known as the Ordinary’s Accounts – which claimed to contain the condemned prisoner’s last confessions and utterances. Sometimes the ordinary would browbeat a frightened prisoner into a confession that he might then embellish with gory and salacious detail. This would then be printed and would sell among the teeming crowds around Newgate, along the route to Tyburn and by the scaffold. If a suitable basis for the ‘confession’ was not forthcoming from the prisoner, most ordinaries were not above simply inventing one. In his book The London Hanged, Peter Linebaugh summed up the ordinary’s role with customary felicity: ‘Between the justices and the hangman, one of the most coveted positions and one of the most loathed, stood the Ordinary of Newgate whose unenviable task it was to justify the decisions of the former and to lend Christian sanction to the dark work of the latter’.
The conditions in Newgate continued to attract criticism even after the City bought back the right to appoint the keeper in 1734. All seemed to agree that desperate action was needed as the deaths continued and the fabric crumbled further. However, the authorities seemed incapable of reaching any accord on exactly what should be done and how it should be paid for. In 1770 another rebuilding was started which included knocking down that part of the old Newgate gateway to the City that had for so long been incorporated in the fabric of the prison. The new building was scarcely complete when it was again the butt of the mob’s rage, this time in the Gordon Riots of 1780. Much of it was demolished in a frenzied and sustained attack during which the insurgents managed to release most of the inmates. The prison was rebuilt to a grand design as it had been just before the riots by the highly thought-of architect George Dance the Younger. Dance was the Clerk of the City Works and in turn was influenced in his design by the Italian architect Piranesi. It reopened in 1783, in which year executions ended at Tyburn and were transferred to the area just outside Newgate. Ironically, one of its first inmates was the very same Lord George Gordon whose crazed rabble-rousing had fomented the riots of 1780 named after him. He died in Newgate in 1793. He hosted lavish dinners and dances while serving his time and entertained so many guests in his cell that it was frequently a case of standing room only.
The gallows at Newgate Prison.
The Gordon Riots of 1780 destroyed Newgate Prison.
It is clear that the authorities had not really seriously considered how the space outside Newgate would cope with the massive crowds attracted to especially piquant hangings. Their neglect had tragic effects in 1807. In that year an angry crowd of about 40,000 gathered to view the hanging of John Holloway and Owen Haggerty who had been convicted of murder but were generally believed to be innocent. In the intense press, someone fell. Others tripped and also tumbled down. Panic broke out and twenty-eight people were crushed to death.
The prison’s rebuilding did not terminate the appalling conditions and vociferous criticisms continued to be heard throughout the rest of its life, most of all about the overcrowding and the unsanitary conditions. In 1811 the House of Commons established a committee to enquire into conditions in prisons. Newgate was supposed to hold 300 inmates, but on the day that members of the committee visited it, the number was no less than 900 felons and 300 debtors. One outcome of this visit was the opening of a debtors’ prison in Whitecross Street in 1815 which helped to relieve the overcrowding. From 1852, Newgate was used only to house prisoners awaiting trial or execution. Hangings ceased outside Newgate in 1868. It went out of regular use as a prison after the Home Office took over control in 1877. Demolition started in 1902 and when this was completed, in 1904, the Central Criminal Court was built on the site.
Newgate seems to have exercised a macabre fascination for Charles Dickens and it features particularly in Barnaby Rudge and also Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. The prison also appears in Thackeray’s novel Henry Esmond and Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard.
Coldbath Fields
Coldbath Fields was located in Clerkenwell, close to a natural spring, and was built in the 1790s, quickly becoming notorious for the severity of its regime. It was this notoriety which encouraged Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) to pen the following lines:
As he went through Cold-Bath Fields he saw
A solitary cell,
And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint
For improving his prisons in Hell.
Coldbath Fields gained more literary distinction when Samuel Butler in his semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903, has his character Ernest Pontifex confined there. The inmates of Coldbath Fields at one time numbered as many as 1,400. It closed in 1877.
Not far away was the Clerkenwell House of Detention, built in 1615. This had an eventful history. It housed numerous Catholic priests, was attacked by London apprentices in 1668 and briefly housed Jack Sheppard and his lady-friend Edgeworth Bess before they made a cunning escape. Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) lodged his character Humphrey Clinker from the eponymous novel in Coldbath Fields, often known as the ‘New Prison’. The prison was attacked during the Gordon Riots of the 1780s but underwent rebuilding and extensions over the next sixty years. In 1867 a Fenian trying to rescue some compatriots from the house of detention blew a huge hole in the wall, demolishing a row of artisans’ dwellings opposite and killing six people and injuring fifty others. He did not manage, however, to extract the prisoners. Although it was rebuilt, the house of detention closed in 1877.
Bridewell
Bridewell came to give its name generically to houses of correction and gaols. The original building was a royal palace on the banks of the Fleet. It was completed in 1520 for Henry VIII, and took its name from a nearby well dedicated to St Bride or Brigid. Its years of glory were brief
. In 1522 Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, was entertained to brilliant pageants and banquets by Henry at Bridewell Palace. On 30 November 1529 Henry dined there with Catherine of Aragon, this probably being the last time she saw her husband. In 1553, however, the palace became a temporary lodging place for the indigent and a prison for petty offenders, later adding a hospital and workhouse function. Much of the fabric was destroyed in the Great Fire but was quickly rebuilt, after which the building’s prime purpose was as a prison. Bridewell was closed in 1855.
‘The Clink’
On the south bank of the Thames in the Southwark area there were many penal establishments, but one of the best known was ‘The Clink’. The word ‘Clink’ is now an apt generic nickname for any prison: it so easily provokes thoughts of keys turning in locks and body irons being rattled by helpless and despairing prisoners. The original ‘Clink’ was located on land controlled by the Bishops of Winchester. These bishops took a pragmatic view of the real world with all its flaws. Obviously, they decided, sin was an inescapable feature of the human condition – and therefore they might as well cash in on it. For that reason, the bishops allowed a large number of brothels, bawdy-houses and other disreputable establishments to operate on their land in Southwark, all the while maintaining their right to police and otherwise control them. These enterprises provided a consistent and generous income for hundreds of years, and some of the bishops themselves were not above enjoying the services of the prostitutes (who were often referred to as ‘Winchester Geese’). Those who used these establishments in Southwark sometimes broke the rules, and the bishops therefore needed a facility in which offenders could cool off and ruminate at leisure on the wages of sin. This, then, was the origin of ‘The Clink’.
Olde London Punishments Page 3
