Judgments in Vacation

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

But Elizabethan mercy was not a very vigorous virtue and did little to temper the wind to the criminal lamb. Here is a typical day’s work and its terrible results. “Upon Friday last we sat at the Justice Hall at Newgate from seven in the morning until seven at night when were condemned certain horse-stealers, cut-purses and such like to the number of ten, whereof nine were executed and the tenth stayed by a means from the Court. These were executed on Saturday in the morning. There was a shoemaker also condemned for wilful murder committed in the Black friars, who was executed upon the Monday in the morning.” The superior criminal dignity of murder over larceny appears to have given the murderer two days further life.

The Recorder’s main work however, was a constant warfare with rogues and masterless men. The Elizabethan vagabonds were to be “grievously whipped and burnt through the gristle of the right ear” unless they could find someone who under penalty of five pounds would keep them in service for a year. Rogues and vagabonds were all those able-bodied men having no land or master practising no trade or craft and unable to account for the way in which they earned their living, and further included actors, pedlars, poor scholars and labourers who would not work for what employers called “reasonable wages.” London swarmed with these vagabonds, and Fleetwood seems to have been the official who was made responsible if they committed any excesses.

One January afternoon in 1582, Her Majesty at even was taking of the air in her coach at Islington, in which suburb she had a Lodge. During her drive, writes Fleetwood, “Her Highness was environed with a number of rogues. One, Mr. Stone, a footman, came in all haste to my Lord Mayor, and after to me and told us of the same.” No mention is made of any molestation, but the complaint rouses the Recorder to extraordinary efforts. “I did, the same night,” he writes, “send warrants out to the said quarters and in the morning I went abroad myself and I took seventy-four rogues whereof some were blind, and yet great usurers and very rich.” All these were sent to the Bridewell, and the next day “we examined all the said rogues and gave them substantial payment, (a euphemism for grievous whipping), and the strongest we bestowed in the mylne (mill) and the lighters. The rest were dismissed with a promise of double pay if we met with them again.” In the Southwark district, forty rogues, men and women, were taken and “I did the same afternoon peruse Poole’s (St Paul’s) where I took about twenty cloaked rogues.” All these went to the Bridewell and to punishment. The constables of the Duchy (the Savoy), brought in “six tall fellows that were draymen unto brewers. The Master did write a very courteous letter unto us to pardon them. And although he wrote charitably unto us, yet they were all soundly paid and sent home to their masters”; which seems to have been in excess of the Recorder’s jurisdiction, as the draymen were clearly not “masterless.” Another day a hundred lewd people were taken and the Master of Bridewell received them and immediately gave them punishment. The bulk of these poor wretches were unemployed seeking work in the City, which they could not obtain in their own counties. And Fleetwood writes: “I did note that we had not of London, Westminster nor Southwark, nor yet Middlesex nor Surrey above twelve, and those we have taken order for. The residue for the most were of Wales, Salop, Chester, Somerset, Buckingham, Oxford and Essex and that few or none of these had been about London above three or four months. I did note also that we met not again with any in all our searches that had received punishment. The chief nursery of all these evil people is the Savoy, and the brick-kilns near Islington.” It is curious to remember that a hundred and fifty years afterwards Defoe writes of the beggar boys getting into the ash-holes and nealing arches of the glass houses in Ratcliff Highway, and that to-day one of the difficulties of Manchester magistrates is to keep vagabonds from sleeping in suburban brick-kilns. Truly the ways of the vagabond seem to be a force of nature which centuries of progress and reform have done very little to amend.

The history of the Bridewell which was filled with so many generations of evil-doers, is a very curious one. An ancient palace of the Kings of England, it was in the reign of Edward VI. standing empty. The suppression of the monasteries and other religious houses filled London with multitudes of necessitous and to some extent dissolute persons. It was Bishop Ridley who wrote to Sir William Cecil: “Good Mr. Cecil I must be a suitor unto you in our Master Christ’s cause,” and pointed out that “there is a wide, large empty house of the King’s Majesty called Bridewell, that would wonderfully serve” to house these poor wanderers. Thus in a spirit of pure charity, did the good Bishop open the doors of one of the most miserable prisons that ever disgraced humanity. Already we see in Fleetwood’s time how it had fallen away from the Bishop’s ideal Christian home to shelter the hungry, naked and cold. What it was then it remained for more than a hundred and fifty years, as we may see in Hogarth’s print in the “Harlot’s Progress,” with its pillory and its whipping post, and the heavy log to be fastened on the prisoner’s leg and the gaoler with his rod standing over the wretched woman beating out the hemp with her mallet.

The Recorder seems to have had absolute power in dealing with prisoners charged with offences, to use force to obtain confessions. Here is a very horrible story which Fleetwood reports to Lord Burghley as a matter of every day routine. A French merchant charged a carrier’s wife with stealing £40. After great search the money was found and restored. The carrier’s wife denied all knowledge of it. “Then,” says Fleetwood, “I examined her in my study privately, but by no means, she would not confess the same, but did bequeath herself to the devil both body and soul if she had the money or ever saw it.” After much cross-examination, the woman refused to answer anything further. “And then,” continues Fleetwood, “I took my Lord Mayor’s advice and bestowed her in Bridewell, where the Masters and I saw her punished, and being well whipped she said that the devil stood at her elbow in my study and willed her to deny it, but so soon as she was upon the cross to be punished he gave her over. And thus, my singular good Lord, I end this tragical part of this wretched woman.”

But Fleetwood did not spend all his days in the Criminal Courts. As a Serjeant-at-law, he is present when his “brother” Sir Edmund Anderson, was made Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and he took part in the ceremony by following the “ancient” in the ceremony of putting a case to the new Judge. And the way of it was thus: “my Lord Chancellor did awhile stand at the Chancery bar upon the side of the hall, and anon after that the Justices of the Common Place (Pleas) were set, his Lordship came to the Common Place and there sat down and all the Serjeants, my brethren, standing at the bar, my Lord Chancellor my brother Anderson called by name and declared unto him Her Majesty’s good liking and opinion of him, and of the place and dignity that Her Majesty had called him unto, and then my Lord Chancellor made a short discourse what the duty and office of a good Justice was, and in the end his Lordship called him up unto the midst of the Court and then Mr. Anderson kneeling, the commission was read, and that done, his Lordship took the patent into his hand, and then the clerk of the Crown, Powle, did read him his oath, and after he himself read the oath of his supremacy, and so kissed the book, and then my Lord Chancellor took him by the hand and placed him upon the bench. And then Father Benloos, because he was “ancient” did put a short case, and then myself put the next. To the first my new Lord Chief Justice did himself only argue, but to the next that I put, both he and the residue of the Bench did argue. And I assure your good Lordship he argued very learnedly and with great facility delivered his mind. And this one thing I noticed in him, that he despatched more orders and answered more difficult cases in this the fore-noon than were despatched in one whole week in his predecessor’s time.”

So too, when the Lord Mayor was sworn in in the Exchequer, the Recorder presented him in the name of the City, and they “did such services as appertained viz.: in bringing a number of horse-shoes and nails, chopping knives and little rods.” These customs were antiquarian even in Elizabeth’s days, but they are with us still.

And no doubt Fleetwood loved to take part in these things, for he was a good antiquary himself, and we must not think of him merely as a harsh persecutor of the “rogues and masterless,” for away from his work we hear record of his merry and pleasant conceit, and note that he is an eloquent and witty speaker at City banquets. And there is evidence in these letters that he did not love much of his work, as indeed what man can take pleasure in so unfortunate a task, but to him it was a duty, and one to be done like all duties—thoroughly. And that he did it to the best of his ability and with honesty seems clear, but that he longed to be removed from the intolerable toil of it, even as early as 1582, is shown by this pathetic appeal to Lord Burghley. “Truly, my singular good Lord, I have not leisure to eat my meat, I am so called upon. I am at the least the best part of one hundred nights in a year abroad in searches. I never rest. And when I serve Her Majesty, then I am for the most part worst spoken of and that many times. In the Court I have no man to defend me, and as for my Lord Mayor, my chief hand, I am driven every day to back him and his doings. My good Lord, for Christ’s sake! be such a mean for me as that with credit I may be removed by Her Majesty from this intolerable toil. Certainly I serve in a thankless soil. There is, as I learn, like to fall a room of the Queen’s Serjeant; if your Lordship please to help me to one of these rooms, I assure your honour that I will do Her Majesty as painful service as six of them shall do. Help me, my good Lord, in this my humble suit, and I will, God willing, set down for your Lordship such a book of the law as your Lordship will like of.”

The offer of a new law book did not tempt Lord Burghley, and the end did not come until nearly ten years afterwards, when in 1591 Fleetwood resigned with a pension of £100 a year, which the Common Council voted him. And in the next year he obtained the wished for post of Queen’s Serjeant, which he held for scarcely two years, as he died on February 28th, 1594.

And this is the last piece of writing I have found of his, written the day he gave up his Recordership. Even with his resignation upon his mind he notes down for Lord Burghley’s satisfaction the excellent punishment awarded to two lewd people for misconduct against the public health.