By the time of Edward I. we begin to arrive at sentences of imprisonment, and read of such penalties as one year and then a fine, or two years in default of fine, in the first Statutes of Westminster. For such offences as carrying off a nun, allowing a prisoner to evade prison, or stealing tame beasts out of parks, a sentence of three years might be awarded besides the customary fine. As we have seen, the profits of “justice” were highly regarded; the fines were precious perquisites of the Crown (and sometimes of subordinate administrators and officials as well). The prisons were used as “squeezers” to extort them. “Imprisonment,” say Pollock and Maitland,[[118]] “was, as a general rule, but preparatory to a fine. After a year or two the wrongdoer might make fine; if he had no money he was detained for a while longer. In the thirteenth century the king’s justices wield a wide ‘common law’ power of ordering that an offender be kept in custody. They have an equally wide power of discharging him upon his making a fine with the king.”
In Henry III.’s reign “The wrongdoer but rarely goes to prison, even for a moment.[[119]] On the plea roll the custodiatur which sends him to gaol is followed at once by ‘Finem fecit per unam markam’ (or whatever the sum might be), and then come the names of those who are pledges for the payment. The justices do not wish to keep him in prison; they wish to make him pay money.” The authors just quoted say that the fines were generally light, and give several instances[[120]]—it doubtless depended much upon the judges and the reign. But wherever there are enclosing walls, there are certain to be abuses behind them.[[121]] Judicial and administrative scandals kept on occurring.[[122]]
In the fourteenth century many persons are said to have perished of hunger and thirst,[[123]] and many died in prison about the time of the Black Death (1349).[[124]] Into the fifteenth century the complaints continue; we read the following in the Liber Albus:[[125]] “Whereas great outcry has been made heretofore as to many wrongs and misprisons done by the gaolers of Newgate and Ludgate and their officers and servants, ...” and new regulations were made (and no doubt broken, as the others had been) respecting fees the prisoners should pay.
The sixteenth century showed no advance in the matter of humanity.[[126]] Torture, which, legally or illegally, has always been a ready trick of statesmen, developed after 1468,[[127]] and under the Tudor sovereigns the rack was ever creaking to extort confessions. The “common” criminals were treated with the utmost severity; in 1530 an Act was passed by which all poisoners were to be boiled alive.[[128]] Burning was the penalty appointed for heresy, high and petty treason[[129]] (i.e. murder of a husband by a wife, murder of a master or mistress by a servant,[[130]] and several offences against the coin), and, unlike the punishment of boiling, continued legal until 1790.[[131]] The right hand might be taken off before hanging for aggravated murder, or a man might be hung in chains and left to perish.[[132]] There was the drawing and quartering in some executions, and ordinary hangings were exceedingly numerous.[[133]] Men lost their hands for exporting sheep and for libel,[[134]] and there was branding, etc., for perjury, and sometimes for persistent vagrancy.[[135]]
A picture of the prisons has been left us in a work of 1545. “I see,” observes the monk whose complaint[[136]] is given, “also a pytyful abuse for presoners. O Lord God, their lodging is to bad for hoggys, and as for their meat it is euil enough for doggys, and yet, the Lord knoweth, thei haue not enough thereof. Consyder, all ye that be kyngs and lordys of presons, that inasmoch as ye shut up any man from his meate, ye be bound to giue him sufficyant fode for a man and not for a dogge.” He further declares that the charges were greater than any at the “dearest inn in Ingland,” and says that men lay six and seven years in prison before the oncoming of their case.
About the year 1552 the City authorities selected what had been a palace at Bridewell[[137]] (given by Edward VI.) for (among other purposes) locking up, employing, and (as heretofore, according to Holinshed) whipping beggars, prostitutes, and night-walkers of all sorts.[[138]] Later on similar detention places were also called Bridewells, after the first one at Blackfriars just alluded to. In 1597 they planned Houses of Correction,[[139]] and in 1609 it was ordered that they should be builded in every county.[[140]] Though they became, in practice, one with the common gaols, they lasted at least in name till 1865.[[141]] But to resume our survey of ordinary prisons. The seventeenth century affords the usual evidence of what walls can hide. The gaolers, as of old, appear to have been all powerful;[[142]] sometimes friendly, often the reverse, always extortionate. John Bunyan, during his twelve years’ incarceration, was allowed to work for his family—for a large part of the time in tolerable surroundings; but while in the Gate House prison he was charged huge fees.[[143]] The prisoners hung collecting bags out of their windows on Sunday mornings.
George Fox,[[144]] the Quaker, agreed with the keeper and his wife for meat and drink, chamber, and other accommodation at a certain rate. But he refers to one of their party being put “down in the Doomesdale[[145]] amongst the felons,” and this, it appears, was a “noysome, filthy, stinking hole, where was a puddle of ... and filth over their shoes and the ... of the felons, and straw almost broken to chaffe with their long lying thereon and full of vermin, wherein is neither chimney nor easing house.” Confirmatory evidence as to how felons fared in 1667 may be deduced out of a Statute of Charles II.[[146]] “Whereas,” it says, “there is not yet any sufficient provision made for the relief and setting to work of poor and needy persons committed to the common gaol for felony and other misdemeanours, who many times perish before their trial, and the poor there living idly and unemployed become debauched and come forth instructed in the practice of thievery and lewdness,” etc.
The excellent plan was proposed that the profits of the prisoners’ labour should be placed to their relief. But to find useful labour within prison walls has always been a most difficult problem, and the world outside was always far too busy to see to it. The prisons of the eighteenth century were very much like those that had been before, but perhaps we know more about them through the great work of John Howard, The State of the Prisons. It is a matter of history how that grim, conscientious Puritan went where the ruling classes neither cared nor dared to venture.[[147]] For, besides the dreadful stench which stuck to his notes and garments, deep in the windowless (window tax), airless rooms and dungeons through which he went, down in the stale, cramped yards[[148]]—when there were any—without space or sun, and in which even the supply of water was mostly beyond the bounds and so inaccessible,[[149]] rising amidst the putrefaction of those places, there lurked the dreaded typhus or gaol fever.
It had always been about since prisons were used, and sometimes proved the Nemesis of neglect.[[150]] In 1522, at the assize in the castle at Cambridge,[[151]] many of the knights and gentlemen attending caught the infection from the “sauor of the prisoners or the filthe of the house.” Writing of the year 1577, we read in Baker’s Chronicle:[[152]] “About this time when the judges sate at the Assize in Oxford, and one Rowland Jenks, a bookseller, was questioned for speaking opprobrious words against the queen, suddenly they were surprised with a pestilent savour, whether rising from the noisome smell of the prisoners or from the damp of the ground is uncertain; but all that were present, almost every one, within forty hours died.” Much the same happened at Exeter in 1586[[153]] and at Taunton in 1730, and some hundreds perished at both these places.
Thomas Allen, in his History of London,[[154]] relates that in 1750 “The Lord Mayor, some of the aldermen, two of the judges, the under sheriff, many lawyers, and a number of lookers-on, died of the gaol distemper.” The prison was afterwards cleansed! Howard asserts that in 1773–4 more people died from the gaol fever than were executed in the kingdom;[[155]] we lost 2000 sailors (criminals were often given the choice between punishment and the services) with the fleet in the war with America.[[156]] He quotes Lord Bacon as saying that the most pernicious infection next to the plague is the smell of the jail.[[157]] Such were the mephitic dens into which were cast men, women, and children of all sorts; and there they would rot away or survive, as the case might be, until the expiration of their (generally short) sentences of imprisonment, if they could pay the fees charged on their coming out; or until they ultimately came up for trial, after which they would either be acquitted and discharged (again when they paid the fees), or they would be convicted and transported or executed.[[158]]