“Around you gazing jiggers[4] swarm,
Your form and features strictly they survey
Then leave you if you can, to run away.”
Then follows the description of the chamberlain “who settles the price of quarters; one pound six and light weekly for the best room, or as low as half a crown per month.”
“Take my advice I’ll help you to a chum;
With him you’ll pay but fifteen pence a week,”
and so on page after page illustrating the daily life, sorrows, dirt and rags; the sports—backgammon, Mississippi, portobello, racquets, billiards, fives; increasing drought quenched by gin; rough horseplay with newcomers who are borne to the pump and drenched, the whole presented in a picture crowded with the ragged, slipshod figures standing treat to the tipstaffs and one another. The poem concludes with the closing of the prison when
“The warning watchman walks about
With dismal tone repeating ‘who goes out.’ ”
The cry is heard from half-past nine till the clock of St. Paul’s strikes ten, very like the familiar shout on shipboard “Any more for the shore.” The final “all told” was the signal to shut and lock the gate after which no person was permitted to pass either in or out.
The philanthropist’s inspection, naturally, was a more serious matter, and his account of what he found in the Fleet was a striking item in his general indictment of British prisons. The Fleet at that date held three hundred and twenty-four inmates in the “House” and one hundred resided within the “Rules.” The prison buildings were partly old and partly new, having been rebuilt a few years previous. It now consisted of a long house (198 feet) facing a narrow courtyard and having four stories or galleries with a basement or cellar floor called Bartholomew Fair, which was appropriated to the Common Side or the solvent pauper debtors. In the galleries the rooms opened on either side of a central passage, narrow and dark, with one window at each end. The rooms were for the most part 14½ feet in length by 12½ feet wide, and 9½ feet in height, all provided with fire-place and chimney, and lighted with one window. On the ground-floor or Hall Gallery were a chapel, a tap-room, a coffee-room and eighteen chambers for prisoners; on the first floor twenty-five rooms, on the second twenty-seven, with prisoners’ committee-room, the infirmary and a “dirty billiard table, kept by the prisoners who slept in that room.” This billiard table was open to outsiders, and Howard saw “several butchers and others from the market playing, who were admitted as at any public house. Besides the inconvenience to prisoners,” says Howard, “the frequenting a prison lessens the dread of being confined in one.” The gallery rooms on the top floor were reserved for Master’s Side debtors who paid the warden’s rent, nominally, at the rate of one shilling and three pence weekly, a price liable to be much increased. They fell to prisoners in succession, and when any became vacant it was taken by the first on the warden’s lists who had paid his full entrance fee. If all rooms were occupied, a newcomer must hire of some tenant a part of his room or shift as he could. The same practice obtained some fifty years later as described by Charles Dickens when telling of the imprisonment of Mr. Pickwick.
The discipline was very lax, due to the unrestrained admission of all classes, male and female, the latter often of very indifferent character. “Social evenings” were of common occurrence; on Monday nights a wine club, on Thursdays a beer club, each lasting until one or two in the morning. “I need not say,” remarks Howard, “how much riot these meetings occasioned, and how the sober prisoners are annoyed by them.” Master’s Side debtors, mostly well disposed, respectable people, were moved to maintain order and better government and formed themselves into a committee to establish rules and insist upon their observance. This committee was chosen every month and consisted of three members from every gallery, with a president and secretary. They met every Thursday in their own committee room and at other times when summoned by the cryer (the servant of the prison who called persons from within when a visitor came to see them), at command of the president or a majority of their own number. This committee raised contributions by assessment, heard complaints, determined disputes, advised fines and seized goods for payment. It claimed to speak the sense of the whole House. The president held the cash and the committee disposed of it. It appointed a scavenger who washed the galleries once a week, watered them and swept them daily, every morning before eight, and who swept the yards twice a week, and lit the lamps all over the House. The cryer’s fee for calling a prisoner to any stranger who visited the prison was one penny; from a complainant who desired that the committee might be brought together he got a fee of twopence. The tax levied on a newcomer, besides the two shillings for “garnish” to be spent in wine, was one shilling and sixpence to be appropriated for the use of the House. Distinction of rank was overlooked in the Fleet, for Common Side debtors were confined to their own apartments in Bartholomew Fair and were forbidden to associate with “the lawmakers.”
There were public regulations also in force dating, it was said, from the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Among other orders the warden was empowered to appoint turnkeys with arms, to prevent persons from bringing arms past the gate, and to watch if any escape was being agitated. Such as attempted to escape or greatly misbehaved might be shut up in a close room or dungeon, which must be certified to by four judges as “boarded, wholesome and dry.” Clandestine Fleet marriages were forbidden, but to very little purpose, seeing that they were constantly performed. (Fleet marriages of imprisoned debtors were legitimate and openly solemnised in the Fleet Prison chapel till 1686.) Other rules ignored were those against the demand for “garnish” and that which forbade the detention of a debtor in a Sponging House, an order constantly contravened by Huggins and Bambridge, as we have seen. A portion of the infirmary (two rooms) was to be allotted to Common Side debtors and it was strictly prescribed that no prisoner should be obliged to sleep in a bed with any one diseased. A coroner’s inquest must be held upon any dead prisoner and the body delivered to friends free of cost, but these very important provisions were constantly evaded.
A chaplain was appointed to the Fleet, his salary of thirty pounds per annum being paid by the warden, supplemented by a fee of twopence to fourpence per head from each prisoner. The Fleet had its own chapel, in which marriages might be legally performed, the earliest on record being that of a prisoner, Mr. George Lester, who in 1613 married a woman of good fortune, Mistress Babington by name. In a contemporary letter, it is stated that “she is a woman of good wealth, so that now the man will be able to live and maintain himself in prison, for hitherto he has been of poor estate.” We are not told why his rich wife did not proceed to pay his debts and secure his enlargement. Soon after this, the system of clandestine and irregular marriages, which afterwards became notorious, began to be practised within the Fleet and the Rules beyond. The practice seems to have originated in the desire to escape the expense attending a regular wedding at which it was the fashion to make a great show in feasting and entertainment lasting several days. Besides the costs of marriage settlements, presents, pin-money and so forth had to be met. To avoid all this wasteful outlay, the weddings became private and unpretending. A French traveller in England, one Henri Mission, describes one of these ordinary or incognito marriages,—