Olde London Punishments

by David Brandon

  In 1559 the Act of Uniformity required people to attend church and failure to do so could incur a fine for recusancy – non-attendance. The business of the courts was conducted in Latin, which was incomprehensible to most Englishmen. Witnesses from all classes would be called upon to tell their story and invited to tell on their master or neighbour. The courts often proceeded on the basis of mere scandal and gossip, such as the Londoner who was reported in 1620 for wearing a dirty ruff at church and subsequently fined 54s.

  Constables could haul suspects before a magistrate, as the constable Elbow in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure drags the bawd Pompey to justice on the suspicions of his wife. They even had the power to break into houses suspected of harbouring offenders. Minor officials, like the beadles or parish constables, spied out offences, often at the prompting of neighbours. Neighbours did not need a great deal of prompting; they were happy to gossip about the most intimate details of family relationships and were quick to complain to the ecclesiastical courts of anything that violated local norms. London, as with other large cities, suffered less than smaller villages in rural areas.

  Civil courts: the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand.

  Penance was often commuted for money, which worked to the advantage of the better off. The system was thus left open to corruption, which many judges were happy to exploit. Typically it was the poor that bore the brunt of punishments for all types of offences. In 1641 the publication First and Large Petition of the City of London argued that ‘the prelates, corrupt administrators of justice’ were responsible for ‘the great increase and frequency of whoredoms and adulteries’. Also critical of the dispensing of justice was poet John Milton, who agreed with the publication by attacking ‘the corrupt and venial discipline of clergy courts’.

  The following cases, all from London, were punished with suspension from church services. In 1500 Thomas Hall ‘of London’ was charged for ‘being a common breaker of faith and of the wicked crime of usury [charging of interest on loans]’. Nan Hoper committed perjury after contracting a marriage with Thomas Polard and then refusing to marry him. In 1476 Nicholas Haukyns was charged for not hearing divine service ‘but lies in bed in the time of morning service Sunday after Sunday’.

  Pamphlet showing a ‘bawdy court’ in 1641.

  Christopher Kechyn was accused in 1496 of being ‘a cheat and a seducer of many girls and an adulterer and dishonouring the sacrament of marriage with many women’. Nicholas Bembrick, a victualer of West Ham, refused to open his doors to the vicar and the churchwardens when they came to see why he was not attending service on Palm Sunday in 1615. In 1481, William Gyppe and his wife were required to purge themselves for being ‘lewd persons’. In 1476, Thomas Ysakyr was suspended for showing ‘his private parts to many women in the parish’. In 1482, William Clarke was suspended from church services for ‘employing four foreigners’.

  The case of John Gutton in 1489 might have been one for the secular courts to consider. He was ordered to pay 20s on four separate occasions ‘for the use of Elizabeth Medigo with whom he committed adultery and whom he impregnated’. Peter Manyfield, a lewd and common procurer, ‘carried away, by stealth against her will, a certain Alice Burle from her parents’ house and kept her in his room for a long time, committing with her crimes of fornication’. In addition to his fine, Manyfield also received a temporary ban from church services.

  Leticia Wall was given a penance in 1518 for not knowing the father of her child. She was made to ‘precede the procession... with unconcealed face and bare feet and with a wax candle held up in her hand... and to say the psalm of the Blessed Mary during the mass’. In 1475, Joan Talbot had a child before marriage and was also ordered to precede the procession in her bare feet and a gown with a knotted kerchief covering her head.

  Perjurer Robert Crouch avoided his punishment in 1500 for failing to pay 5s for a cloak: days before he was due to appear before the court, he died! The Church therefore had no option but to pray for his soul and discharge him. The punishment given to Francis Litton, ‘a countryman’, in 1632 is not specified but he was apprehended in St Paul’s Cathedral for ‘pissing against a pillar in the church’. In 1489, Lewis Ambrose committed adultery with Elizabeth Reynolds and had to pay a penance of 3s 4d. In Whitechapel in 1610 a group of women were standing inside the doorways of houses plying their trade when an Alice Rochester shouted to one of them, ‘Thou art a whore and an arrant whore and a common carted whore and thou art my husband’s whore’. Alice was sued for slander at the Church court. In November 1723, Lurana Knight was found guilty of fornication and was fined and whipped.

  For not confessing during Lent or receiving the Holy Eucharist at Easter in 1491, Simon Paviour was suspended and excommunicated. Many parishioners were fined and punished for transgressing during Lent although many high churchmen continued to eat meat throughout this period as well as partake in other forbidden fruits. It was little wonder that the Church courts became increasingly unpopular. Churchmen were not always models of moral rectitude either. With the rise of an industrial and commercial economy, offences such as usury became more common; the old standards of perceived good conduct no longer applied. The courts themselves were known to be extortionate and corruptible on occasion. There was an eventual change in attitudes from the late seventeenth century, which saw a distinction between private sin and public law. Cases of sexual morality brought before Church courts in the eighteenth century declined dramatically as the shift towards a secular society continued.

  8

  Social Sanctions

  Victorian institutions such as workhouses, hospitals, lunatic asylums and prisons were not intended to be places of joy. They inflicted punishments varying from the mild to the downright cruel and barbaric. In 1861 the census recorded 65,000 people in London institutions, approximately 37,000 males and 28,000 females.

  The Workhouse

  Our ancient system of poor relief dates from the sixteenth century, when parishes were made legally responsible for looking after their own poor. The funding for this came from the collection of a poor-rate tax from local property owners. However, by the start of the nineteenth century the cost of poor relief was increasing; at the same time, many believed that parish relief was an easy option for those who did not want to work. In 1834 the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed, which was intended to end all outdoor-relief for the able-bodied. Outdoor-relief was to be replaced by one of the most famous institutions of the past – the workhouse.

  Around 15,000 parishes in England and Wales were formed into Poor Law Unions, each with its own union workhouse managed by a locally elected Board of Guardians. Hundreds of workhouses were erected across the country. This new Act used the threat of the Union workhouse as a deterrent to the able-bodied pauper. Poor relief would only be granted to those desperate enough to face entering the workhouse – and life inside the workhouse was intended to be as unpalatable as possible.

  Food consisted of gruel – watery porridge – or bread and cheese, and inmates had to wear the rough workhouse uniform and sleep in communal dormitories. The able-bodied did work such as stone-breaking or picking apart old ropes called oakum. Workhouses consisted of the old, the infirm, the orphaned, unmarried mothers and the physically or mentally ill. In some cases it also included those who had been wealthy but had fallen on bad times. Entering the workhouse was considered the ultimate degradation.

  Oliver Twist famously asking for more food.

  Describing a workhouse in 1838 in Sketches in London, James Grant commented:

  Nothing but the direst necessity has compelled them to take refuge in these places: it is only when... they see absolute starvation staring them in the face, that such individuals have been induced to submit to the alternative of seeking an asylum in a workhouse. And once in, the idea of again coming out, until they are carried out in their coffins, never for a moment enters their mind. When they cross the gate of the workhouse, they look on themselves as having entered a great
prison, from which death only will release them. The sentient creations of Dante’s fancy saw inscribed over the gate of a nameless place the horrific inscription, ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here’.

  The following is a summary of the rules drawn up for the conduct of the inmates at the workhouse in Hackney in the 1750s. Anyone not abiding by them could face imprisonment and be would be punished with the utmost rigour. Inmates were expected to observe the saying of prayers and to attend church. Anyone found loitering, begging, swearing or getting drunk was to be punished in the stocks. There was to be no distilled liquors brought into the house, and anyone causing a disturbance by brawling, quarrelling, fighting or using abusive language would lose one day’s meal. For a second offence they would be put into the dark room for twenty-four hours. Inmates refusing to work were to be kept on bread and water, or expelled. Any person pretending to be sick in order to avoid work would appear before a magistrate. Inmates were also expected to clean themselves, wash and mend their clothes, and clean their dishes. Failure to do so meant having to suffer an appropriate punishment.

  Institutions such as the workhouse often included sadists amongst the staff. The Times reported on 8 December 1868 that Mrs Wells, the matron of Bethnal Green Workhouse Schools at Leytonstone, came before the Board of Guardians on a charge of cruelty for ill-treating and beating girls placed under her care by the workhouse authorities. Her husband, the master, also had a charge against him for neglect and being drunk on duty.

  At Hackney in 1894, Ella Gillespie, one of the school’s nurses, was accused of ‘systematic cruelty’ to the children in her charge – allegedly beating them with stinging nettles and forcing them to kneel on wire netting that covered the hot water pipes. She also deprived them of water and made them drink from the toilet bowls. At night children would lay awake in fear, bracing themselves to face her ‘basket drill’. Then they would be woken from their sleep and made to walk around the dormitory for an hour with a basket on their heads containing their day clothes, receiving a beating if they dropped anything. Gillespie was regularly drunk and in 1893 a local brewery supplied her with nineteen 4½ gallon casks of beer.

  Other examples of her brutality included knocking the head of a thirteen-year-old girl against the wall seven times for talking to another girl. This incident happened as two girls were scrubbing the nursery floor, after a third girl entered and accidentally knocked over two scuttles of coal. Furious, Gillespie turned over four pails of water, and rubbed a girl’s head into the wet coal on the floor. On another occasion she struck a girl with a bunch of keys, cutting her head and drawing blood. Many girls gave evidence against her, including thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Fawcett, who stated that Gillespie had slapped her face, pulled her hair and struck her with a frying pan. Alice Payne told how she and other girls were subjected to punishments such as laying naked on the bed whilst being thrashed with stinging-nettles. The evil and sadistic Gillespie was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.

  In 1882 able-bodied men at Mary Place, Notting Hill, performed tasks such as stone-breaking, corn-grinding and oakum picking for fifty to sixty hours a week. The diet was basic and monotonous and smoking was forbidden. No inmate was ever allowed temporary leave from the premises.

  The original St James’s workhouse between Poland Street and Marshall Street in Soho was erected in 1725. During the eighteenth century this workhouse was reported to be in a ‘very nasty condition, the stench hardly supportable, poor creatures almost naked and the living go to bed to the dead’. The workhouse was not without its own criminal activity, despite there being little worth stealing. For example, in October 1818 fifty-six-year-old pauper Cuthbert Ramshaw stole a piece of woollen cloth worth 5s which was the property of the Governors and Directors of the Poor. For such ungrateful behaviour Ramshaw was whipped and given three months’ confinement.

  Inside and outside of the Old Operating Theatre, Southwark.

  In 1818 seventeen-year-old John Dunn, who had spent his whole life as a pauper in the workhouse, stole one coat, a pair of trousers and a waistcoat belonging to James Horwood, master of the workhouse. Dunn, who was probably conditioned to the harshness of life in the institution, also received a whipping.

  St Marylebone parish workhouse began operating in 1730. However, by the 1840s the demand for places in the workhouse exceeded 2,000 and with such high numbers there were pressures to economise. In 1856 allegations were made against workhouse staff for beating several young female inmates.

  The punishment for being poor was severe enough, without any legal sanctions in addition. Even in death there was no escape, for the corpses of the impoverished were preyed upon by the body snatcher and the anatomist. The demand for corpses gave rise to the grisly activity of the resurrection men – the body snatchers. The only corpses available for medical study were those of hanged murderers. The 1832 Anatomy Act made it an offence to rob graves, so the only other corpses a doctor could legally dissect were the unclaimed bodies of people who had died in hospitals or workhouses. The stigma and fear of the workhouse was bad enough, but it was now made infinitely worse. Workhouses responded differently to the demands for the bodies of their poor. In the 1830s St Giles workhouse (average death rate of 200 per year) delivered 709 of its ‘unclaimed’ poor for dissection, while Marylebone gave up only fifty-eight. The system of delivering corpses of the poor also led to corruption. At St Giles parish in 1841, ‘considerable excitement’ was caused when it was discovered that the workhouse mortuary keeper, who had been bribed, decapitated a smallpox victim’s body.

  Social reformer Henrietta Barnett (1851-1936) played an important role in leading the movement to abolish the inhuman institutional care of pauper children and replace it with fostering. In her report, published in The Cornhill Magazine, there were 22,000 children in workhouses and 12,000 in the hateful barrack schools. Details of the care given in workhouses make shocking reading:

  The whole nursery has often been found under the charge of a person actually certified as of unsound mind, the bottles sour, the babies wet, cold and dirty... one feeble-minded woman was set to wash a baby; she did so in boiling water, and it died.

  ‘Bedlam’

  The most famous institution for the mentally ill was Bethlem Hospital, or ‘Bedlam’ (now known as the Bethlem Royal Hospital), based in Beckenham, south-east London. Although no longer in its original location, it is recognised as possibly the oldest psychiatric facility in Europe. The present hospital is at the forefront of psychiatric treatment, but for much of its history it was notorious for cruelty and inhumane treatment. Being mad was, in effect, a punishable condition.

  The first site of Bedlam was in Bishopsgate Street in 1330. It became a hospital when the first Bethlem lunatics were recorded there in 1403. Conditions were awful and what care existed amounted to little more than restraining patients. Violent or dangerous inmates were manacled and chained to the floor or wall whilst some were allowed to leave and licensed to beg. By the late sixteenth century one inspection reported that there was great neglect, with the cesspit in dire need of emptying and the kitchen drains in need of replacing.

  It was common practice in the eighteenth century for people to go to Bedlam to stare at the lunatics and even poke them with long sticks. There were some reforms, including the ending of casual public visiting in the 1770s; however, in 1814 the philanthropist Edward Wakefield was shocked when he encountered a patient:

  A stout iron ring was riveted round his neck, from which a short chain passed through a ring made to slide upwards and downwards on an upright massive iron bar, more than six feet high, inserted into the wall. Round his body a strong iron bar about two inches wide was riveted; on each side of the bar was a circular projection; which being fashioned to and enclosing each of his arms, pinioned them close to his sides.

  Bedlam, as depicted by William Hogarth.

  Bethlem Hospital in 1828.

  One patient, James Norris, had suffered this type of treatment for twelve y
ears. Wakefield’s disclosure led to the setting up of a Parliamentary committee to investigate asylums, which in turn revealed some shocking evidence. Here is Wakefield’s description of the women’s galleries:

  One of the side rooms contained about ten patients, each chained by one arm or leg to the wall, the chain allowing them merely to stand up by the bench or form fixed to the wall, or to sit down on it. The nakedness of each patient was covered by a blanket-gown only.

  Mercifully, the findings at least led to a new start when rebuilding began, including the addition of blocks for criminal lunatics.

  However, in 1851 there was a scandal over the death of a patient which led to a further inquiry. This again exposed a number of unpleasant cases of ill-treatment. For example, the case of patient Hannah Hyson typified the worst sort of cruelty and wanton neglect. Her father wrote to the president of Bethlem, Sir Peter Laurie, complaining of his daughter’s treatment. He noted over twenty wounds and lacerations on her body and described how her bones were almost showing through her skin. Tragically, Hannah died shortly after the letter was written.

  Hannah’s case was soon followed by that of Ann Morley who complained she had been hit by a nurse, forced to sleep on straw in the basement and hosed down with cold water despite being ill. Anne’s complaints opened the door for other patients who told of their experiences. Some of these were in a skeletal condition, whilst others told of being force fed (which led in at least one case to a man dying).

  In 1815 Bethlem was moved to St George’s Fields, Southwark – now the site of the Imperial War Museum – and in 1930 the hospital was moved to the site of Monks Orchard House, Beckenham.

  Schools

  The most commonly experienced sanction is undoubtedly school punishment. Parliament abolished corporal punishment in state schools in 1986, though the verbal reprimand and the feared detention remain (a staple of school punishment for years). Gone are the days when a good thrashing would be meted out for almost any misdemeanour, or when pupils had to stand on a stool at the back of the class wearing a tall, cone-shaped hat decorated with a large ‘D’ for dunce.