London City

by Walter Besant

The case of Hugh le Bever may also be mentioned. He was charged with the murder of his wife Alice. He refused to plead. He was therefore taken to Newgate and there put in penance until his death. That is to say, he was placed in solitary confinement—one can still see the narrow cell in the old gate-prisons (for example, that at Rouen)—and there left to his own meditations, with a daily allowance of bread and water. One wonders how long the poor wretch lingered there. Perhaps his mind fell into a comatose condition in which the days passed on without any other feeling than that of blank misery, while the body grew weaker. Perhaps he went mad. Perhaps he begged to be taken out and hanged. So difficult it was, so heavy the task of making the people obedient to the law.

In the fourteenth century we find a new departure of a remarkable character. There sprang up a new thing in the land—a feeling of compassion for the misery of the unhappy prisoners of Newgate and other gaols in London. The wills beginning in the year 1348 show bequests for the poor prisoners. From 1348 to 1500 the wills published in the Calendar show eighty-one such bequests. This is very curious. It shows an humanising influence of some kind—what was it? Not the influence of monks and friars, because their spiritual force was fast declining. Was it the Lollarding with which the City of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was notoriously “infested”? The question is not easy to answer. But the fact remains. Further, we find that light bread was confiscated and given to the prisoners of Newgate; that all other kinds of food when confiscated for any reason, were also sent there; and that broken meats were sent to the prison from all men’s tables. It would appear, therefore, that no food was supplied to prisoners at the time, an inhuman practice, followed, until their abolition, by all the debtors’ prisons, causing for hundreds of years miseries unspeakable and incredible, were it not that compassion is a plant of such slow growth and so fragile.

The outbreak of gaol fever of 1419 was caused by the well-meant but injudicious action of the Mayor and Corporation.

They issued an ordinance, the reason of which is explained by the preamble.

“Whereas the commendable intentions and charitable purpose of those who have been governors and presidents of the City of London heretofore have ordained a prison, called Ludgate, for the good and comfort of poor freemen of the said city who have been condemned, to the end that such poor prisoners might, more freely than others who are strangers, dwell in quiet in such place, and pray for their benefactors, and live upon the alms of the people.... Now, from one day to another, the charitable intentions and commendable purposes aforesaid are frustrated and turned to evil, inasmuch as many false persons, of bad disposition and purpose, have been more willing to take up their abode there, so as to waste and spend their goods upon the ease and licence that there is within, than to pay their debts; and, what is even more, do therein compass, conspire, and imagine oftentimes, through others of their false coin, to indict good and loyal men for felonies and treasons of which they have never been guilty.”

In other words, freemen of the City chose rather to live in the gaol of Ludgate, on the alms provided for poor prisoners, than to work and pay their debts; and, worse still, they made use of their time to get up conspiracies against honourable citizens. The only remedy that could be devised was to move all the prisoners to Newgate, and close the gaol. This was done in the month of June, but in November, Richard Whittington being mayor, it was found that most of the wretches taken to Newgate had died there, “by reason of the fetid and corrupt atmosphere”; whereupon Ludgate was reopened, “seeing that every person is bound to support and be tender of the lives of men.”

In April 1431, Whittington being dead, the prisoners of Ludgate were once more removed to Newgate, and, to the general indignation, eighteen of them were led through the streets, pinioned as if they had been felons, to the Sheriff’s Compter, probably with the view of not crowding Newgate again. But in June of the same year they were all taken back to Ludgate, which remained a debtor’s prison for the citizens of London till the year 1762, when the gate was taken down and the prisoners removed to the London Workhouse in Bishopsgate Street. This double removal looks as if works of enlargement or of repair were in progress at Ludgate. Twenty years later, in 1454, it was greatly enlarged by Dame Agnes Forster; see also p. [196].

Meanwhile, however, New Gate and Prison had been enlarged or practically rebuilt by Whittington, who began it, and his executors, who finished it. He seems to have furnished the prison with additional chambers on the south side. It is pleasant to think that one of the last actions of this great and good man was to improve the “fetid and corrupt atmosphere in the noxious Prison of Newgate.”

It may be remarked that the gate was decorated with a bas-relief of the famous cat, showing that there was current in Whittington’s own life the story of the cat.