Elizabethan/Jacobean
Prisons
A Prison is a grave to bury men alive . . . it is a microcosmos,
a little world of woe, it is a map of misery . . . . It is a place that
hath more diseases predominant in it than the Pest-house in the Plague
time, and it stinks more than the Lord Mayers dogge-house, or Paris garden
in August . . . .
- From Essays and characters of a prison and prisoners by Geffray
Mynshull (1618)
According to John Taylor, the waterman and poet,
there were eighteen prisons in and around the city of London in Shakespeare's
time including the Tower but excluding Bridewell.
In theory, all prisons as well as the bodies of his subjects were owned
by the king. Like the court system, each prison usually specialized
in a type of criminal. The most well known was Newgate,
for felons, debtors and those awaiting execution, Ludgate for debtors and
bankrupts, and the Fleet
which contained offenders in the courts of Chancery and Starchamber.
Other less known prisons were the The Wood Street Counter, Bread Street
Prison, and the Gatehouse at Westminster.
Considering its reputation, it is not surprising
that Southwark had more prisons than London. The more well known
locations were the Clink which housed religious offenders, the King's Bench
for "debt, trespass and other causes," the Marshalsea for debtors, religious
prisons, and pirates (maritime offenses), East Smithfield Prison for "theefe
or paltry debters," and New Prison for heretics. Others include The
Counter in the Poultry, The Compter, the White Lion, the Hole at St. Katherines,
and the Lord Wentworth's.
The Tower held the most important political prisoners
and was the earliest building used as a prison. Two prisons of a
different category were Bethlehem Hospital (or Bedlam as it was commonly
called), a madhouse which operated as a concession under its Tudor administration.
Many paid to see the inmates as a form of performance, a showcase for madness.
The last example is Bridewell, a house of correction for prostitutes and
vagrants - "idle knaves" - who were beaten before being brought and forced
to perform labor as an early form of rehabilitation.
A stay in prison had a different significance to
a London citizen. Experienced by innumerable members of all social
strata (the playwrights Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Marston, Lyly, and Tourneur
were familiar to its workings), prisons were used more as a holding place
before a court date than as a means of punishment. The crimes were
the focal point of interest, not the prison stay, in judging a man.
The language and conditions of the prison were familiar to any pedestrian
since the jails were not segregated from the public.
As the quote from Gefffray Mynshull suggests, these
conditions were less than ideal.
Return to Index