From the Stamford Mercury of September 16, 1808, I take the following:
‘Early on Friday morning last Charles François Maria Boucher, a French officer, a prisoner of war in this country, was conveyed from the County Gaol at Huntingdon to Yaxley Barracks where he was hanged, agreeable to his sentence at the last assizes, for stabbing with a knife, with intent to kill Alexander Halliday, in order to effect his escape from that prison. The whole garrison was under arms and all the prisoners in the different apartments were made witnesses of the impressive scene.’
I shall deal later in detail with the subject of prisoners on parole, so that it suffices here to say that every care was taken to avoid the just reproach of the earlier years of the great wars that officer prisoners of war in England were promiscuously herded on hulks and in prisons with the rank and file, and it was an important part of Prison Agent’s duties to examine each fresh arrival of prisoners with a view to selecting those of character and the required rank qualifying them for the privileges of being allowed on parole in certain towns and villages set apart for the purpose.
In 1796 about 100 Norman Cross prisoners were out on parole in Peterborough and the neighbourhood. The Wheatsheaf at Stibbington was a favourite house of call with the parole prisoners, says the Rev. A. Brown in the before-quoted book, and this, when afterwards a farmhouse, belonged to an old man, born before the close of the war, who told Dr. Walker that as a child he had often seen the prisoners regale themselves here with the excellent cooking of his grandmother, the milestone which was their limit from Wansford, where they lodged, being just outside the house.
The parole officers seem to have been generally received with kindness and hospitality by the neighbouring gentry, and a few marriages with English girls are recorded, although when it became known that such unions were not recognized as binding by the French Government, and that even the English wives of Frenchmen were sent back from Morlaix, the cartel port, the English girls became more careful. Some of the gentry, indeed, seem to have interested themselves too deeply in the exiles, and in 1801 the Transport Office requests the attention of its Agent ‘to the practices of a person of some property near Peterborough, similar to those for which Askew was convicted at the Huntingdon Assizes’—which was for aiding prisoners to escape.
By the Treaty of Paris, May 30, 1814, Peace was declared between France and Britain, and in the same month 4,617 French prisoners at Norman Cross were sent home via Peterborough and Lynn unguarded, but the prison was not finally evacuated until August. It was never again used as a prison, but was pulled down and sold.
We have already become acquainted with General Pillet as a rabid chronicler of life on the Chatham hulks; we shall meet him again out on parole, and now let us hear what he has to say about Norman Cross in his book on England.
‘I have seen at Norman Cross a plot of land where nearly four thousand men, out of seven thousand in this prison, were buried. Provisions were then dear in England, and our Government, it was said, had refused to pay the balance of an account due for prisoners. To settle this account all the prisoners were put on half-rations, and to make sure that they should die, the introduction of food for sale, according to custom, was forbidden. To reduced quantity was added inferior quality of the provisions served out. There was distributed four times a week, worm-eaten biscuit, fish and salt meat; three times a week black, half baked bread made of mouldy flour or of black wheat. Soon after eating this one was seized with a sort of drunkenness, followed by violent headache, diarrhoea, and redness of face; many died from a sort of vertigo. For vegetables, uncooked beans were served up. In fact, hundreds of men sank each day, starved to death, or poisoned by the provisions. Those who did not die immediately, became so weak that gradually they could digest nothing.’ (Then follow some details, too disgusting to be given a place here, of the extremities to which prisoners at Norman Cross were driven by hunger.) ‘Hunger knows no rules. The corpses of those who died were kept for five or six days without being given up by their comrades, who by this means received the dead men’s rations.’
This veracious chronicler continues:
‘I myself took a complaint to Captain Pressland. Next day, the officers of the two militia battalions on guard at the prison, and some civilians, arrived just at the moment for the distribution of the rations. At their head was Pressland who was damning the prisoners loudly. The rations were shown, and, as the whole thing had been rehearsed beforehand, they were good. A report was drawn up by which it was shown that the prisoners were discontented rascals who grumbled at everything, that the food was unexceptionable, and that some of the grumblers deserved to be shot, for an example. Next day the food was just as bad as ever.... Certainly the prisoners had the chance of buying provisions for themselves from the wives of the soldiers of the garrison twice a week. But these women, bribed to ruin the prisoners, rarely brought what was required, made the prisoners take what they brought, and charged exorbitant prices, and, as payment had to be made in advance, they settled things just as they chose.’