Olde London Punishments

by David Brandon

  Sign outside the Clink Prison, Bankside.

  The Clink Prison Museum.

  It was in use as early as 1161. In 1381 it was attacked during the Peasants’ Revolt, and again in 1450 during Cade’s Rebellion. On both occasions the attackers took a great delight in releasing the inmates. ‘The Clink’ was noted for housing debtors and famous inmates including the Protestant Martyrs John Bradford and Bishop Hooper in 1555, as well as the Catholic recusants of the sixteenth and also seventeenth century. ‘The Clink’ went into a long decline after it was removed from the jurisdiction of the bishops. It burnt down in the Gordon Riots in 1780. It was not rebuilt.

  The Marshalsea

  Close by in the Borough was the Marshalsea. Dating from the fourteenth century, it was originally used as a state prison and was second only in importance in that respect to the Tower. When rebels attacked London, it almost seems to have been de rigeur to attack one or more prisons. The Marshalsea was no exception, being attacked by Wat Tyler’s rebels in 1381 and again by Jack Cade’s followers in 1450. Notorious for its awful conditions, there was a great riot and mass breakout at the Marshalsea in 1504. Those involved were ruthlessly hunted down and many of them hanged. This seems particularly vindictive given the fact that the building was a most ramshackle establishment from which escape must have been relatively simple. It is known that prisoners frequently bribed the keepers to be allowed to enjoy the pleasures that went with an exeat.

  Plaque to the Marshalsea Prison, off Borough High Street, Southwark.

  In 1557 this prison housed Gratwick, one of the Protestant martyrs who, after his trial, was burned to death in St George’s Fields. When Elizabeth succeeded her sister Mary on the throne, one of her first actions was to incarcerate Bonner, the last Catholic Bishop of London, in the Marshalsea, where he died some years later. In 1601 one Christopher Brooke took up residence for the unusual crime of giving a young lady by the name of Anne More in marriage to the poet John Donne without the knowledge – and therefore the consent – of her father.

  Conditions in the Marshalsea were atrocious. In 1728 it was reported that the inmates were suffering unduly because of the frugality and cruelty of the keeper, William Acton, who used the post to supplement his main income as a butcher. Many prisoners died of neglect and starvation. A row broke out but although there were calls for Acton to be charged with murder, he served only a short prison term and little was done to improve the regime. In 1738 an anonymous pamphlet called Hell in Epitome described the Marshalsea as, ‘An old pile most dreadful to the view, dismal as wormwood or repenting rue’.

  Remains of the Marshalsea Prison wall.

  As with a number of other prisons, the site of the Marshalsea was changed, in this case on a couple of occasions, to locations close by. This was done because the old buildings seem literally to have been falling down. In the final reincarnation of the Marshalsea, which opened in 1811, Charles Dickens’s father was briefly imprisoned for debt in 1824 and this experience was incorporated by the novelist into The Pickwick Papers and Little Dorrit. The Marshalsea was closed in 1842, by which time it contained only three prisoners. It was amalgamated with the King’s Bench and the Fleet.

  King’s Bench

  The third of Southwark’s major prisons was the King’s Bench. This owes its curious name to the gaols attached to the court of King’s Bench, which travelled around the country from town to town.

  It was certainly in existence during Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in 1381, and by 1554 it included John Bradford among its inmates. Bradford had been condemned to death in the Church of St Saviours, now Southwark Cathedral, and was shortly after burned at the stake at Smithfield for his faith. Other Catholic and Protestant martyrs spent time within this prison in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before, in most cases, going to their deaths elsewhere. During the Commonwealth, with an eye to contemporary political correctness, the prison was known as ‘the Upper Bench’, but it later reverted to its original name. In 1670 Richard Baxter resided there as a result of his stand against the Act of Uniformity which established new regulations for the Church of England after the monarchy had been restored. He seems quite to have valued, even enjoyed, his sojourn in the King’s Bench. He was accompanied by his wife and, as he explains in his Autobiography, ‘We kept house as contentedly as at home, though in a narrower room, and I had the sight of more of my friends in a day than I had at home in half a year’. A particularly unusual prisoner was the King of Corsica, who spent several years in the King’s Bench after 1752, attempting to work off his debts.

  ‘King’s Bench Prison’, by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson (c. 1808-11).

  In 1758 the King’s Bench moved from the east side of Borough High Street to a new and much larger site only a short distance away in St George’s Fields. Its internal arrangements seem to have been extremely austere but contemporary records make mention of drink and facilities for playing various competitive games. Probably these were only available to the well-off prisoners. Certainly it was possible for wealthy prisoners to buy a licence which gave them the right to visit the taverns, brothels and other places of entertainment within three square miles of the prison.

  Among its early prisoners was Tobias Smollett, a writer who in 1760 was deemed guilty of libel for an article about Admiral Knowles which appeared in the Critical Review. He wrote his novel Sir Lancelot Greaves while he was in the King’s Bench. John Wilkes (1727-1797) was housed in The King’s Bench between 1768 and 1770. He was already immensely popular with the London crowd for his general irreverence to those in positions of power and his identification with the cause of ‘liberty’, but he had been forced to flee abroad when he had been found guilty of obscene libel for his poem Essay on Women. On his return, his popularity was confirmed when he was elected in 1767 as MP for Middlesex amidst scenes of huge popular jubilation. However, he decided it was expedient to surrender instead, whereupon he was committed to the King’s Bench. Large and supportive crowds accompanied him as he was escorted to Southwark. William Combe (1741-1823) was a prisoner for many years and it was in the King’s Bench that he wrote Dr Syntax’s Three Tours, which were scathing satires on contemporary travel books. Whatever income he received from these was insufficient to pay off his debts.

  Another inmate consigned on several occasions to the King’s Bench for debt was also one of the prison’s most colourful occupants: the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846). Attempting to make a living as a portrait and landscape painter, he did not allow lack of talent to stop him producing large numbers of paintings of biblical and historical subjects, all of exceptionally poor quality. In spite of his practical shortcomings as an artist, Haydon was a very fine teacher of art history and a trenchant art critic, one of whose main targets was the Royal Academy. This obviously did not endear him to the art establishment and as a result he lost much of his credibility and struggled to sell his works. His literary efforts received greater recognition but the most successful of these, his Autobiography and Journals, only received major plaudits after he had died. Haydon spent several periods in the King’s Bench for debt and committed suicide later. Charles Dickens gives the King’s Bench a mention in David Copperfield: Mr Micawber was confined there.

  The burial ground in the perimeter of Millbank Prison.

  The King’s Bench had been largely destroyed in the Gordon Riots of 1780 and its replacement soon became known for the superior accommodation it offered to wealthy inmates and the squalid conditions with which the poorer prisoners were forced to put up. Those who were prepared to pay for the privilege could actually take lodgings close to the prison, but there is some evidence that this licence was abused – to the extent that some prisoners actually resided overseas! In 1842 its name was changed to the Queen’s Bench and it took over large numbers of debtors previously housed in the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons. It later became a military prison and was finally demolished in 1880.

  Millbank

  Millbank Prison was int
ended to be a model. Built at Millbank, Pimlico, it was opened in 1816 and eventually closed in 1890. In the prison’s early years sentences of five to ten years were offered as an alternative to transportation, but it soon ceased to have a penitentiary function and became a holding centre for those awaiting transportation. It was designed by William Williams in 1812 in accordance with the principles laid down by reformer and philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

  Morpeth Arms, Millbank, where the wardens of Millbank Prison drank.

  One of the few remains of Millbank Prison.

  In the Handbook of London (1850) it was described as a mass of brickwork equal to a fortress. The external walls form an irregular octagon and enclose upwards of sixteen acres of land. Its ground-plan resembles a wheel, the governor’s house occupying a circle in the centre from which radiate six piles of building, terminating externally in towers. The ground on which it stands is raised but little above the river, and was at one time considered unhealthy.

  Millbank received its first prisoners in 1816 and stood on the lonely and marshy riverside linking Westminster to Chelsea. Charles Dickens described the area in David Copperfield (1849) as ‘a melancholy waste... A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land’. Not surprisingly, many prisoners suffered from malaria. Nonetheless, Millbank Penitentiary was hailed as the greatest prison in Europe and held as a model for others to follow.

  So complex were the three miles of cold, gloomy passages that the turnkeys invented a code of chalked directions to stop them from getting lost. It beggars belief that anyone could escape from this warren of tunnels. When transportation came to an end in 1868 the prison fell into disrepair and disrepute, despite its earlier promise, and was demolished in 1891. The prisoners were transferred to the newly built Wormwood Scrubs Prison.

  The Fleet

  The Fleet Prison was first mentioned in 1197 and was London’s earliest purpose-built prison. It also served as a royal citadel, along with Baynards Castle and The Tower, from which the early Norman monarchs could browbeat their unwilling new subjects in the teeming streets of the City.

  It seems to have been built on the most ill-favoured site of any of London’s prisons. It stood on the east side of the Fleet River where it debouched into the Thames among a number of small, muddy and odoriferous islands that acted at that time both as a defensive moat and a barrier to escape. In dry summers the Fleet became almost stagnant. It was a convenient receptacle into which all those who lived and worked along its banks despatched their rubbish and effluents of every description. Its neighbourhood was considered to be especially obnoxious in a city already noted for the diversity and extreme repulsiveness of the stenches it produced. From 1343 things became even worse for the inmates of the Fleet Prison. In this year the butchers of nearby Newgate Street were given permission to use the Fleet to dispose of the unwanted items from their trade. A small tributary called the Faggeswell Brook already made its way into the Fleet after being used as a dumping ground for the slaughterhouses of Smithfield Meat Market. This stream brought much blood and offal with it and meant that when the Fleet was flowing sluggishly in hot summers, the area around the prison exuded a variety of rank odours dominated by the stench of festering animal refuse. In turn this provided the optimum conditions for all kinds of disease-bearing pathogens, which meant that the Fleet was probably the most pestilential of all of London’s early prisons. It was said jokingly that a man might walk across the surface of the Fleet River where it passed the prison, so blocked was it by the foul and festering detritus.

  The Fleet, being a royal prison, was used to detain those who owed money to the Crown, had in various ways displayed their contempt for his courts or who just generally got on the King’s nerves. Royal it may have been, but the Fleet was like London’s other prisons in that its running was put out to private contractors who were every bit as venal in their management of royal prisons as they were with those they ran on behalf of other authorities. In the case of the Fleet, a family called the Levelands managed to keep the management of the prison and its profits in their clutches for over 400 years. As one would expect under a regime run for profit, the Fleet allowed those with money to enjoy the best facilities available compatible with custodial confinement. The first prison on the site had suffered serious structural decay and was rebuilt in the reign of Edward III (1327-1377). Readers will not be surprised to hear that the Fleet was destroyed by Wat Tyler’s rebels in 1381. It was quickly rebuilt.

  ‘Fleet Prison’ by Rudolph Ackermann, 1808.

  Over the centuries, the Fleet housed a number of distinguished prisoners, most particularly in the Tudor and Stuart periods. Among them was Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), a noted writer of sonnets who was held on a charge of treason and later executed. Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) wrote a satirical comedy, The Isle of Dogs, which offended the authorities and led to him serving his time in the Fleet. John Donne, who died in 1631, was a prominent poet and later Dean of St Paul’s who was imprisoned for marrying without his father-in-law’s consent. James Howell, who died in 1666, was a writer and pamphleteer imprisoned from 1643 to 1651 for being a Royalist. The dramatist William Wycherley (1641-1715), meanwhile, was placed in the Fleet to work off his insolvency but was released on the orders of James II who (quite wrongly) thought that a character in one of Wycherley’s plays was meant to portray him in a very flattering light. Few prisons can ever have housed such a galaxy of literary talent.

  The Fleet was razed to the ground in the Great Fire of London and rebuilt on the same site. In 1691 a debtor called Moses Pitt revealed in his Cry of the Oppressed that on entry to the prison he had to part with £2 4s 6d to the keeper for the privilege of being put in better quality accommodation even though the legitimate fee was a mere 4d. Other illegal fees were extorted from him until his money ran out – whereupon he was transferred to a dismal and stygian dungeon where he slept on the cold floor with twenty-seven companions, all ‘so lowsie that as they either walked or sat down, you might have pick’d lice off from their outward garments’.

  Depiction of a Fleet Marriage.

  Gambling on blood sports such as cock fighting was common, particularly in pubs.

  One common practice associated with the Fleet was that of improvised weddings. Previously, couples wanting to marry speedily and clandestinely had made use of the service available in the chapel in the White Tower within the Tower of London. When this ended, unscrupulous parsons transferred the business to the Fleet and its surrounding streets as they constituted a liberty with certain immunities from laws applied nationally. Touts patrolled the district seeking out couples who wanted a quick, no-questions-asked completion of the nuptials. Others sometimes travelled long distances in order to make use of the service. Probably the most corrupt aspect of this highly lucrative operation was the practice of entrapping sailors who came ashore after long voyages with money in their pockets, intent on obtaining drink and sex. They would be plied with drink and then supplied with a woman. While they were in their cups, marriage might suddenly seem like a good idea and they would part with large sums in order to pay for the necessary formalities. The reality of marriage, however, might not look so tantalising in the cold light of day... On one occasion as many as 173 weddings were performed in a day. This insidious practice was ended in 1753.

  In the seventeenth century the Fleet was an especially dirty and corrupt prison. An enquiry in the early 1720s showed that the then keeper, Thomas Bambridge, made full use of every opportunity for abusing his position – including the rather unusual service of taking money to allow people to escape. To assist this he even had a door specially made for the purpose. He was promptly dismissed and new rules were brought in to apply to future keepers and their operations. John Howard, the prison reformer, visited the Fleet in 1774 and found it ‘crowded with women and children, being riotous and dirty’ and altogether poorly-managed. Once again it was burned during the Gordon Rio
ts, but only after one of the rioters had rather politely informed the authorities that they should expect an attack. It was rebuilt and became notorious for the blatant abuses of authority enjoyed by the wealthier inmates.

  However, no other prison seems to have equalled the Fleet for providing the facilities that allowed one of its inmates, Robert Mackay, to win the world rackets championship in 1820! An official inquiry into the management of the Fleet had taken place in 1819, which revealed that many women and children were sharing the prison accommodation with the inmates, prostitutes were plying their trade without hindrance, gambling for high stakes was rife and beers, wines and spirits were freely available. The report based on the inquiry was a very mild one which made few recommendations beyond suggesting that the prison’s tap-room and coffee shop should be closed during divine service on Sundays. The Fleet features in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. The prison closed in 1842, by which time one of its last inmates had been immured there for no less than twenty-eight years. It was demolished in 1844.