We have detailed accounts of the Sheffield corporation. From these we find that they spent about two hundred pounds in building a workhouse and providing the necessary materials. The details of the construction were very carefully planned; the carpenters were sent to Newark to see the workhouse there and every item of expenditure is set down in the accounts[545].
At Taunton and Abingdon similar institutions seem to have been established in consequence of the special activity of the years after 1630. The Taunton workhouse was newly built in May 1631, and some children and others who were able to work were already sent there to be trained in labour[546]. In June also in 1631 the Mayor of Abingdon reports that "wee haue erected wthin our borough a workehouse to sett poore people to worke[547]."
At Cambridge the workhouse was also a House of Correction. In 1628 many houses had already been built for the benefit and employment of the poorer sort of people, and in that year Hobson gave the town the site without Barnwell Gate on condition that a more convenient place should be erected. This was soon afterwards begun, and was partially paid for by certain sums, which had been sent to the town for the plague-stricken poor in 1631, and which after that time remained in the hands of the Corporation. In 1675 Hobson's workhouse was still not only a House of Correction but a place where five combers could be employed if they wanted work, and where all the poor people of the town that desired to have work in spinning and weaving were to be provided with employment and to be paid the usual wages[548].
In these cases the workhouses are all in large towns, but in one country district there were small institutions of the kind in the parishes. The justices responsible for Little Holland in Lincolnshire report in 1635 that in "all our seuerall parishes wee haue a Towne stocke with a workhouse, a master and utensills and that there hath beene aboue two hundred poore people sett on worke and imployed weekly by the officers[549]."
Workhouses were thus fairly numerous and varied greatly in size. They were not then like a modern workhouse, but were places where people who could work were sent that they might be trained and employed. They were, too, municipal or parochial institutions, whereas Houses of Correction were not parochial, but were either municipal or county undertakings.
7 d. Bridewells.
In the sixteenth century we have seen that the distinction between the two was not very great, but in this period the new Houses of Correction are much more like gaols. This is especially the case with those erected by public funds, those which were privately endowed still retained much of their old character. London, Bristol, Norwich, Gloucester and many other places had organised their Bridewells either before or during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and we have already noticed that there were four Houses of Correction in Devonshire in 1598[550]. If was during the early part of the seventeenth century however that Houses of Correction appear to have been established in every county. They formed a necessary part of the system of the time. You could not provide work and maintenance for everybody unless you had some arrangement for coercing idlers. A great many of these institutions appear to have been established or revived after 1597. In 1598 one was founded at Liverpool, and in 1601 some measures of the same kind were taken in Nottingham and in Kendal, Westmoreland[551].
Others were erected shortly after the statute of 1610 was passed: thus in 1614 the City of London consented to help the counties of Middlesex and Surrey to build Houses of Correction: about the same time the Nottingham burgesses furnished and reorganised St John's Hospital for this purpose, and both Preston and Manchester had followed the same example before 1620[552]. In the reports of 1630 to 1639 the existence of Houses of Correction is assumed, since the justices state how many idlers have been sent to them[553]. Sometimes the reports give a few details concerning them; at Hastings the justices tell us they have kept their House of Correction in good repair[554], and from the justices of Edwinstree and Odsey in 1631 we learn that a House of Correction had been long maintained at Buntingford, and that the justices send their prisoners there although there is a more important institution of the kind in the county, fourteen miles distant[555]. The justices' reports thus indicate that Houses of Correction were established in most places before 1635. This impression is confirmed by a letter from the Earl of Pembroke to the justices of South Wiltshire. He complains that there is no place of the kind nearer than Devizes, and he asks the Council to enforce his request that another should be built in Wiltshire[556]. This letter would hardly have been written unless in 1623 it was usual for Houses of Correction to be nearer than Devizes is to South Wiltshire, and seems therefore to show that they were now a general institution.
Their character seems to have been much the same as in the preceding century. They provided a temporary lodging for stranger vagrants and a house of detention in which the idlers and offenders convicted for small causes could be made to work hard and were possibly reformed. Coarse kinds of labour were used at the London Bridewell, mainly the beating of hemp, but sometimes other plans were tried and the prisoners were put under the care of undertakers who agreed to keep them all at work and made such profit as they were able[557].
But there were many other ways in which the unemployed were provided for. The modern remedy of emigration was adopted, pressure was put upon employers and there were various ways in which money could be lent to set a young householder up in business.