For murder and forgery the prisoners came under the civil law; death was the penalty for both, but until 1810 no prisoner-forgers, although convicted, had been punished with death in England, owing to a doubt in the minds of judges whether prisoners of war were answerable to municipal tribunals for this sort of offence, which is not against the law of nations.
Prisoners who were not mentally or physically gifted enough to earn money by the exercise of their talents or employment in handicraft, had other opportunities of doing so. For working about the prisons as carpenters, gardeners, washermen, they were paid threepence a day. As helpers in the infirmaries—one to every ten patients—they received sixpence a day. Officers recaptured after breaking their parole or sent to prison for serious offences were glad, if they had means, to pay prisoners threepence a day to act as their servants, and do their dirty work generally. At the same rate sweepers were engaged at the ratio of one to every hundred men; cooks, in the proportion of one for every 400 men, received 4½d. a day, and barbers earned 3d. a day. At Dartmoor some five hundred prisoners were employed in these and other ways, each man wearing on his cap a tin plate with the nature of his calling thereon inscribed. A necessarily rough estimate showed that nearly half of the inmates of the war prisons made honest money in one way or another; the remainder were gamblers and nothing else. Still, a very large number of the wage-earners were gamblers also. Of these various professions and trades much will be said in the accounts of the prison life which follow, and when comparisons are instituted between the versatility, the deftness, the ingenuity, the artistic feeling, and the industry of the French prisoners in Britain, and the helpless indolence of the British prisoners abroad, testimony is unconsciously given in favour of that national system by which men of all social grades, of all professions, and of all trades, are compelled to serve in the defence of their country, as contrasted with that which, until late years, deemed only the scum of the population as properly liable to military service.
CHAPTER IX
THE PRISONS ASHORE
1. Sissinghurst Castle
About the Sissinghurst one looks on to-day there is little indeed to remind us that here stood, one hundred and fifty years ago, a famous war prison, and it is hard to realize that in this tranquil, picturesque, out-of-the-way nook of Kent, for seven long years, more than three thousand captive fighting men dragged out a weary existence.
Originally the splendid seat of the Baker family, and in the heyday of its grandeur one of the Kentish halting-places of Queen Elizabeth during her famous progress in 1571, it had far fallen from its high estate when, in 1756, Government, hard pressed to find accommodation for the annually increasing numbers of prisoners of war, leased it.
Of the ‘Castle’, as it came to be called, of this period, the gate-house, a line of outbuildings which were partially used as barracks for the troops on guard, and a few memories, alone survive. The great quadrangle has disappeared, but the line of the ancient moat, in parts still filled with water, in part incorporated with garden ground, still enables the visitor to trace the original extent of the buildings. Part of the line of ivy-clad buildings which face the approach are said to have been used as a small-pox hospital, and the name François may still be seen carved on the brick; the field known as the ‘Horse Race’ was the prison cemetery, and human remains have sometimes within living memory been disturbed therein.
Otherwise, legends of the prison linger but faintly in the neighbourhood; but from some of these it would seem that officer-prisoners at Sissinghurst were allowed out on parole. The place-name ‘Three Chimneys’, at a point where three roads meet, exactly one mile from Sissinghurst, is said to be a corruption of ‘Trois Chemins’, so called by the French prisoners whose limit it marked.
Wilsley House, just out of Cranbrook, a fine old residence, formerly belonging to a merchant prince of the Kentish cloth trade, now occupied by Colonel Alexander, is said to have been tenanted by French officers on parole, and some panel paintings in one of the rooms are said to have been their work, but I think they are of earlier date. The neighbouring Barrack Farm is said to have been the prison garrison officers’ quarters, and the house next to the Sissinghurst Post Office is by tradition the old garrison canteen.
The only individual from whom I could gather any recollections of the French prisoner days was an old farm labourer named Gurr, living at Goford. He told me that his great-grandfather, ploughing one day near the prison, suddenly saw three men creeping along a hedgerow close to him. Recognizing them to be Sissinghurst prisoners, he armed himself with the coulter of his plough and went up to them. The poor fellows seemed exhausted and bewildered, and went with him back to the Castle without offering any resistance, telling him on the way that they had got out by tunnelling under the moat with small mattocks. Gurr said that he had often dug up human bones in the meadow opposite the Castle entrance.
The following letter, I think, was written from Sissinghurst, but it may be from Portchester. I insert it here as in all contemporary correspondence ‘le château’ means Sissinghurst.