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<document>
<title>Marshalsea</title>
<authors>Wikipedia</authors>
<publisher>wikipedia.org</publisher>
<publishedplace>network</publishedplace>
<publishedyear>2010</publishedyear>
<edition></edition>
<category>English law</category>
<section id="45275" fatherid="0" title="" lv="" priority="-1" level="1">
The Marshalsea was a prison on the south bank of the River Thames in Southwark, now part of London. From at least 1329 until it closed in 1842, it housed men under court martial for crimes at sea, including "unnatural crimes", political figures and intellectuals accused of sedition or other inappropriate behaviour, and-most famously-London's debtors, the length of their stay determined largely by the whim of their creditors.Philpotts 1991.
Run privately for profit, as were all prisons in England until the 19th century, the Marshalsea looked like an Oxbridge college and functioned largely as an extortion racket.Ginger 1998, p. 217. For prisoners who could afford the fees, it came with access to a bar, shop, and restaurant, and the crucial privilege of being allowed to leave the prison during the day, which meant debtors could earn money to pay off their creditors. Everyone else was crammed into one of nine small rooms with dozens of others, possibly for decades for the most modest of debts, which increased as unpaid prison fees accumulated.Ginger 1998, pp. 41–46. A parliamentary committee reported in 1729 that 300 inmates had starved to death within a three-month period, and that eight to ten prisoners were dying every 24 hours in the warmer weather.Darlington 1955; Journal of the House of Commons, May 14, 1729, 378a, cited in Ginger 1998, p. 45, footnote 14: "A Day seldom passed without a Death, and, upon the advancing of the Spring, not less than Eight or Ten usually died every 24 hours."
The prison became known around the world during the 19th century through the writings of the English novelist Charles Dickens, whose father was sent there in 1824 for a debt of £40 and 10 shillings. Forced to leave school at the age of 12 for a job in a factory, Dickens based several of his fictional characters on this experience, most notably Little Dorrit, whose father, like his own, was a Marshalsea debtor.Although the character, Amy (Little Dorrit), was based on Dickens's own experiences as a child, the nickname of Little Dorrit was that of a childhood friend of his, Mary Ann Mitton, later Mrs. Mary Ann Cooper. She lived with her parents in Clarendon Square in 1882, opposite the Dickens family, and the two became friends (The New York Times, December 16, 1906).
Much of the prison was demolished in the winter of 1849, though some of its buildings were used into the 20th century, housing an ironmonger's, a butter shop, and later a printing house for the Marshalsea Press. All that is  of it now is a long brick wall separating an unkempt public garden from a local history library, the existence of what Dickens called "the crowding ghosts of many miserable years" marked only by a plaque from the local council. "It is gone now," he wrote, "and the world is none the worse without it."Little Dorrit, pp. xxxvi, 59.

</section>
<section id="45276" fatherid="0" title="Background" lv="" priority="-2" level="1">
<section id="45277" fatherid="45276" title="Etymology, Marshalsea Court" lv="" priority="1" level="2">
"Marshalsea" is historically the same word as "marshalcy"-"the office, rank, or position of a marshal"-deriving from the Anglo-French mareschalcie. The word was believed in the 16th and 17th centuries to be marshal + see, for seat, but, in fact, it comes from marshal + cy, as in "captaincy". "Marshal" originally meant farrier, from the Old Germanic marh ("horse") and scalc ("servant"), later becoming a title bestowed on those presiding over the courts of Medieval Europe.Oxford English Dictionary 1989; Kirkpatrick 1983; also see Grimm and Grimm 1854-1960.
"Marshalsea" was originally the name of the Marshalsea Court. Also called the Court of the Verge, the Court of the Steward and Marshal, and the Court of the Marshalsea of the Household of the Kings of England, it was a special jurisdiction of the English royal household that emerged around 1290, when the domestic rules and personnel of the Lord Steward and Knight Marshal began to constitute a judicial body. It assumed jurisdiction over members of the household living within "the verge", defined as within  of the King's person, wherever that might be; it was therefore an "ambulatory" court, moving around the country with the King.From 1530 until 1698, the "verge" would have meant, for the most part, within  of the Palace of Whitehall, which was the main residence of the royal family during that period. This explains why many of the sources refer to the jurisdiction of the court extending to 12 miles beyond Whitehall. Later sources refer to 12 miles within Westminster, when the main residence of the royal family was Buckingham Palace, which became the official residence in 1837. It dealt with pleas of trespass, pleas of contempt, and cases of debt.Jones 1970(a), pp. 1-29; Jones 1970(b); Philpotts 1991, pp. 133-45. In practice the court was often used for private disputes among people unconnected with the royal household, and its definition of "verge" went somewhat beyond 12 miles.McIntosh 1979. The prison was originally built to hold prisoners being tried by the Marshalsea Court and the Court of the King's Bench, to which Marshalsea rulings could be appealed, but its use was soon extended, and the term "Marshalsea" came to be used for the prison itself.

</section>
<section id="45278" fatherid="45276" title="Southwark" lv="" priority="2" level="2">
Southwark (, locally ) was settled by the Romans around 43 CE.Philpotts 2003, p. 90. Also see Cowan 2000. It served as an entry point into London from southern England, particularly along Watling Street, the Roman road from Canterbury, which ran into Southwark's Borough High Street. As a result, it became known for its travellers and inns, including Geoffrey Chaucer's Tabard Inn, and its population of criminals hiding out on the wrong side of the old London Bridge.Mackay 1840, cited in Thornbury 1872, p. 17; Philpotts 2003, p. 90.
The itinerant population brought with it poverty, prostitutes, bear baiting, theatres-including Shakespeare's Globe-and, inevitably, prisons. In 1796, there were five within its boundaries: the Clink, King's Bench Prison, the White Lion, the Borough Compter, and the Marshalsea, compared to just 18 in London as a whole.There is some confusion regarding the names of the prisons in Southwark in the 18th century. Charles Knight (1841, p. 325) writes that there were five prisons in 1796: the Marshalsea, Clink, King's Bench Prison, Horsemonger Lane Gaol, and the Borough Compter. Trey Philpotts also writes that there were five, but lists them as the Marshalsea, Clink, King's Bench Prison, the White Lion, and the Borough Compter. (2003, p. 90). This article uses Philpotts's list.

</section>
<section id="45279" fatherid="45276" title="Debt in England" lv="" priority="3" level="2">
Before the Bankruptcy Act of 1869 abolished debtors' prisons, men and women in England were routinely imprisoned for debt at the pleasure of their creditors, sometimes for decades. They would often take their families with them, the only alternative for the women and children being the shame of uncertain charity outside the jail, so that entire communities sprang up inside the debtors' prisons, with children born and raised there. Other European countries had legislation limiting imprisonment for debt to one year, but debtors in England were imprisoned until their creditors were satisfied, however long that took. When the Fleet Prison closed in 1842, some debtors were found to have been there for 30 years.Cory 2000.

The law offered no protection for people with assets tied up by inheritance laws, or for those who had paid their creditors as much as they could. Because prisons were privately administered, whole economies were created around the debtor communities, with the prison keepers charging rent (the so-called "jailor's fee"), bailiffs charging for food and clothing, attorneys charging legal fees in fruitless efforts to get the debtors out, and creditors, often tradesmen, increasing the debt simply because the debtor was in jail. The result was that the prisoners' families, including children, often had to be sent to work simply to pay the costs of keeping their breadwinner in prison, the debts accumulating to the point where there was no realistic prospect of release.
According to a petition presented to parliament in 1641, around 10,000 people in England and Wales were in prison for debt.Barty-King 1991, p. 38. Legislation began to address the problem from 1649 onwards, though it was slow to make any real difference. Helen Small writes that, under George III (1760-1820), new legislation prevented debts of under 40 shillings leading to jail-roughly £ in 2009-but even the smallest amounts would quickly exceed that once lawyers' fees were added. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act 1813, debtors could request release after 14 days in jail by taking an oath that their assets did not exceed £20, but if any of their creditors objected, they had to stay inside. Even after a lifetime in prison, the debt remained to be paid.Small 2003, p. 909.

</section>
<section id="45280" fatherid="45276" title="Prisons in England" lv="" priority="4" level="2">
Until the late 19th century, imprisonment alone was not regarded in Britain as a punishment, at least not by those imposing it. Prisons were intended only to hold people until their creditors had been paid, or their fate decided by judges: usually execution, the stocks, flogging, the pillory, or the ducking stool. Before the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776, convicts were also sent to one of the American colonies, a process known as penal transportation, often for the most minor offence. When that stopped, they started being held instead in disused ships called hulks moored in the Thames, and at Plymouth and Portsmouth, with the intention that they would be transported somewhere at some point. According to The National Archives at Kew, the establishment of these hulks marked the first involvement of central government in Britain in the administration of prisons. In 1787, penal transportation to Australia began, lasting until 1867. A number of prisons were built by central government during this period to hold convicts awaiting transportation, mostly notably Millbank, built in 1816, but also Parkhurst (1838), Pentonville (1842), Portland (1848), Portsmouth (1850), and Chatham (1856)."Sources for convicts and prisoners", The National Archives; Philips 1991.
Prison reform gathered pace with the appointment of Sir Robert Peel as Home Secretary in 1822. Before the Gaols Act 1823, then the Prisons Act of 1835 and 1877, prisons such as the Marshalsea were administered by the royal household, and run for profit almost entirely without regulation by private individuals who purchased the  to manage and make money from them. Prisoners had to feed and clothe themselves and furnish their rooms. If food was supplied, it was bread and water, or something confiscated from the local market as unfit for human consumption; anyone unfortunate enough to have no money for food, and no one to bring it in for him, simply died of starvation. Robert Hughes writes that jailors assumed the  to chain prisoners with as many iron fetters as they chose, charging for their removal one at a time, the so-called "trade of chains," a practice that survived into the 1790s.Hughes 1988, cited in Griffith 1993, p. 162. In the Bishop of Ely's prison, prisoners unable to pay for "easement of irons" were chained to the floor on their backs, with a spiked collar round the neck and heavy iron bars over the legs, until they somehow found the money.Phillips 2006; Griffiths 1884, p. 429, writes that, in the 18th century, some of the worst prisons in England were owned by the Dukes of Portland, Devonshire, Norfolk, and Leeds, the Marquis of Carnarvon, Lords Salisbury, Exeter, Arundel, and Derby, the Bishops of Salisbury, Ely, and Durham, and the Dean and Chapter of Westminster.

</section>
</section>
<section id="45281" fatherid="0" title="Marshalsea: two locations" lv="" priority="-3" level="1">
<section id="45282" fatherid="45281" title="" lv="" priority="-1" level="2">
The Marshalsea occupied two buildings on what is now Borough High Street, the first from the beginning of the 14th century, and possibly earlier, at what would now be 161 Borough High Street, between King Street and Mermaid Court. In 1799, the government reported that the prison had fallen into a state of decay, though Robyn Adams writes that it was already crumbling and insecure by the late 16th century, and decided to rebuild it 130 yards (119 m) south on Borough High Street, on the site of the White Lion prison, also called the Borough Gaol.British Parliamentary Papers: Prisons 8, p. 356 cited in Philpotts 1991; and Young 1932, also cited in Philpotts 1991. The second Marshalsea functioned as a prison from 1811 until 1849 at what is now 211 Borough High Street. Much of it was demolished in the 1870s, when the Home Office took over responsibility for running prisons, though parts of it existed into the 1950s at least, providing rooms and shops to rent.Philpotts 1991; Wheatley and Cunningham 1891, p. 476.
Although the first Marshalsea survived for 500 years, and the second for just 38, it is the latter that became widely known, thanks largely to Charles Dickens. Trey Philpotts writes that every detail about the Marshalsea in Little Dorrit has a referent to the real Marshalsea of the 1820s. Dickens rarely made mistakes and did not exaggerate; if anything, he downplayed the licentiousness of Marshalsea life, perhaps to protect Victorian sensibilities.Philpotts 2003, p. 8. Philpotts writes (pp. 115-116) that the only factual discrepancy he can find between the real and fictional worlds in Dickens, regarding the Marshalsea, is that Dickens locates the chandler's shop in the tap room, which Philpotts believes may not be correct. Most of our information about the first Marshalsea comes from John Baptist Grano (1692-ca. 1748), one of Handel's trumpeters at the opera house in Haymarket, who kept a detailed diary of his 458-day incarceration in the first Marshalsea-for a debt of £99-from May 30, 1728, until September 23, 1729.House of Lords Records Office, "An Account of the Prisoners in the Marshalsea, February 1729", cited in Ginger 1998, p. 25, footnote 99.

</section>
<section id="45283" fatherid="45281" title="First Marshalsea (ca. 1329-1811)" lv="" priority="2" level="2">
<section id="45284" fatherid="45283" title="" lv="" priority="-1" level="3">
The first Marshalsea was set slightly back from Borough High Street, its buildings measuring no more than 150 by 50 feet. There is no record of when it was built, but there is an early reference to it in 1329, when Agnes, wife of Walter de Westhale, surrendered herself there for having committed "trespass by force and arms" on Richard le Chaucer and his wife, Mary, relatives of the writer Geoffrey Chaucer, by helping her daughter, Joan, marry their son, John, who was only 12 years old and did not have their consent.There is some discrepancy between the sources regarding dates. "Chaucer's Life by Walter Skeat", Online Library of Liberty, retrieved January 5, 2007, gives the date of a court hearing in the case as 1326, but the Calendar of letter-books of the city of London: E: 1314–1337 (1903) gives the date that Agnes surrendered herself to the Marshalsea as 1329. See "Folios cxcii – cc: Feb 1328–9 -", Calendar of letter-books of the city of London: E: 1314–1337 (1903), pp. 234-246, retrieved December 25, 2007. There is a reference to a "prison of the marshalsea at York" in 1324, but it is not known to be connected to the Marshalsea in Southwark; see "Edward II", vol 5, part 1, p. 13, University of Iowa.
Most of the first Marshalsea, as with the second, was taken up by debtors; in 1773, debtors within 12 miles of Westminster could be imprisoned there for a debt of 40 shillings.Noorthouck 1773, pp. 678-690, retrieved December 24, 2007; also see Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911; and Hughson  1807, p. 495. It also held a small number of men being tried at the Old Bailey for crimes at sea.
The prison was technically under the control of the Knight Marshal, but it was let out to private individuals who ran it for profit. In 1727, for example, the Knight Marshal, Sir Philip Meadows, hired John Darby, a printer, as prison governor, who in turn leased it illegally to William Acton, a butcher (see below). Acton paid Darby £140 a year-roughly £ in 2009-for the  to act as resident warden and chief "turnkey", and an additional £260 for the  to collect rent from the rooms, and to sell food and drink.Ginger 1998, p. 45.

</section>
<section id="45285" fatherid="45283" title="Master's Side" lv="" priority="2" level="3">
The prison had separate areas for its two classes of prisoner: the Master's Side, which housed about 50 rooms for rent, and the Common Side, consisting of nine small rooms into which 300 people were locked up from dusk until dawn. Room rents on the Master's Side were ten shillings a week in 1728, with most prisoners forced to share. (Ten shillings in 1728 is £58 in 2009 using the retail price index or £773 using average earnings.See conversion chart) John Grano paid 2s 6d (two shillings and six pennies, pronounced "two and six"; £14 in 2009) for a room with two beds on the Master's Side, shared with three other prisoners: Daniel Blunt, a tailor who owed £9, Benjamin Sandford, a lighterman from Bermondsey who owed £55, and a Mr. Blundell, a jeweller.
The inmates called the prison the Castle. There was a turreted lodge at the entrance, as with the older Oxbridge colleges, with a side room known as the Pound, where new prisoners would wait until a room was found for them. The courtyard leading out of the lodge was called the Park. It had been divided in two by a long, narrow wall, so that prisoners from the Common Side could spend their daylight hours there without being seen by those on the Master's Side, who preferred not to be distressed by the sight of abject poverty, especially when they might themselves be plunged into it at any moment.
There was a bar run by the governor's wife, and a chandler's shop run in 1728 by a Mr and Mrs Cary, both prisoners, which sold candles, soap, and a little food.Ginger 1998, p. 41. When John Howard (1726-1790), one of England's great 18th-century prison reformers,Other well-known 18th-century prison reformers were William Blackstone, William Eden, Sir George Onesiphorus Paul, James Neild, and Jeremy Bentham. See Cooper 1976, pp. 73-93. visited the Marshalsea on March 16, 1774, he found the shop being run by a man and his family who were not prisoners, and who were living in five of the rooms intended for inmates on the Master's Side. There was a coffee shop run in 1729 by a long-term prisoner, Sarah Bradshaw, and a chop-house called Titty Doll's, run by another prisoner, Richard McDonnell, and his wife. There was also a tailor and a barber, and prisoners from the Master's Side could hire prisoners from the Common Side to act as their servants. Howard reported that there was no infirmary, and that the practice of "garnish" was in place (see below), whereby new prisoners were bullied into giving money to the older prisoners upon arrival.Dixon 1856, p. 166; Bouvier p. 598.
During Howard's visit, the taproom, or beer room, had been let to a prisoner who was living "within the rules" of the King's Bench prison, which meant he was formally incarcerated in the King's Bench, but was allowed to live outside, within a certain radius of the prison, for a fee. Although legislation prohibited jailors from having a pecuniary interest in the sale of alcohol within their prisons, it was another rule that was completely ignored. Howard reported that, one Sunday, 600 pots of beer were brought into the Marshalsea from a public house, because the prisoners did not like the beer that was available in the taproom.Field 1850, p. 120. Rioting and drunkenness were, in fact, the only ways to get the prisoners to "disregard the confinement", he wrote.Brown 1831.
The wives, daughters, and lovers of male prisoners were allowed to live with them, so long as they behaved themselves and someone was paying their way. Women prisoners who could pay the fees were housed in the women's quarters, called "the Oak".Ginger 1998, p. 44.

</section>
<section id="45286" fatherid="45283" title="Common Side" lv="" priority="3" level="3">
Prisoners on the Master's Side rarely ventured to the Common Side. John Baptist Grano went there just once, on August 4, 1728, writing in his diary that, "I thought it would have kill'd me."Ginger 1998, pp. 46, 67. There was no need for other prisoners to see it, John Ginger writes. It was enough that they knew it existed to keep the rental money, legal fees, and other gratuities flowing from the prisoner's families, fees that anywhere else would have seen them living in the lap of luxury, but which in the Marshalsea could be trusted merely to stave off disease and starvation.Ginger 1998, p. 215.
By all accounts, living conditions were horrific. In 1639, prisoners complained that 23 women were being held in one room without space to lie down, leading to a revolt, with prisoners pulling down fences and attacking the guards with stones. Prisoners were regularly beaten with a "bull's pizzle", a whip made from a bull's penis, or tortured with screws and a skullcap, a vice for the head that weighed 12 lb. What often finished them off was being forced to lie in the Strong Room, a windowless shed near the main sewer, next to human carcasses awaiting burial, of which there was a plentiful supply.Ginger 1998, p. 296. Dickens wrote of it that it was "dreaded by even the most dauntless highwaymen and bearable only to toads and rats".Dickens 1867b, p. 252. One diabetic army officer ejected from the Common Side because other inmates had complained about the smell of his urine, was moved to the Strong Room only to die and have his face eaten by rats within three or four hours of his death, according to a witness.Cobbett 1813, p. 530; Hostettler 2009, p. 152.
During the wardship of William Acton in the 1720s, the income from charities, collected from various begging bowls in circulation around Southwark and intended to buy food for inmates on the Common Side, was directed instead to a small group of trusted prisoners who policed the prison on Acton's behalf. The same group swore during Acton's trial in 1729 for murder (see below) that the Strong Room was the best room in the house. Ginger writes that Acton and his wife, who lived in a comfortable apartment near the Lodge, knew they were sitting on a powder keg. "When each morning the smell of freshly baked bread filled ... the yard ... only brutal suppression could prevent the Common Side from erupting", he writes.

</section>
<section id="45287" fatherid="45283" title="1729 Gaols Committee" lv="" priority="4" level="3">
The Common Side did erupt after a fashion in 1728, when Robert Castell-an architect and debtor in the Fleet prison, who had been living in lodgings outside the jail "within the rules"- was taken to a "sponging house" after he refused to pay a higher prison fee to the Fleet's notorious warden, Thomas Bambridge. Sponging houses were private lodgings where prisoners were incarcerated before being taken to jail. They acquired the name from their habit of squeezing the prisoner's last money out of him as if he were a sponge. When Castell arrived at the sponging house on November 14, he was forced to share space with a man who was dying of smallpox, and as a result he became infected and died himself less than a month later.Cobbett 1813, p. 383ff.
Castell had a friend, James Oglethorpe, a Tory Member of Parliament (MP), who became known a few years later for founding the American colony of Georgia. He began to ask questions about the treatment of debtor prisoners, which resulted in the appointment in February 1729 of a parliamentary committee, the Gaols Committee, which he chaired. The committee visited the Fleet on February 27 and the Marshalsea on March 25. Commissioned by Sir Archibald Grant (see image on the ; Grant is standing third from the ), William Hogarth accompanied the committee on its visit to the Fleet, sketching it, then later painting it in oil. The art historian Horace Walpole wrote of the painting in 1849:
The committee was shocked by the conditions prisoners were living in. They reported back to parliament that they had found, "the sale of offices, breaches of trust, enormous extortions, oppression, intimidation, gross brutalities, and the highest crimes and misdemeanours."Lewis 2009, p. 20. In the Fleet, they had found Sir William Rich, a baronet, in irons.Smollett 1766, cited in Trusler 1833, p. 138. Unable to pay the prison fee, Rich had apparently been burned with a red-hot poker, hit with a stick, and kept in a dungeon for ten days for having wounded the warden with a shoemaker's knife. In the Marshalsea, they found that prisoners on the Common Side were being routinely starved to death:

Not that being in the sick ward necessarily made the last month of life any easier:

</section>
<section id="45288" fatherid="45283" title="Trial of William Acton" lv="" priority="5" level="3">
As a result of the Gaols Committee's inquiries, several key figures within the jails were tried for murder in August 1729, including Thomas Bambridge of the Fleet, and William Acton of the Marshalsea. Given the strongly worded report of the Gaols Committee, the trials were major public events. John Ginger writes that, when the Prince of Wales's bookseller presented his bill at the end of that year, two of the 41 volumes on it were accounts of William Acton's trial.Ginger 1998, p. 295.
The first case against Acton was for the murder of Thomas Bliss, a debtor. Unable to pay the prison fees, he had been  with so little to eat that he tried to escape by throwing a rope over the wall, but his pursuers severed it and he fell 20 feet into the prison yard. Wanting to know who had supplied the rope, Acton beat him with a bull's pizzle, stamped on his stomach, placed him in "the hole"-a small damp space under the stairs, which had no floor, and was too small to lie down or stand up in-then in the Strong Room. Originally built to hold pirates, the Strong Room was just a few yards from the prison's sewer. It was never cleaned, had no drain, no sunlight, almost no fresh air-the smell was described as "noisome"-and was full of rats, and sometimes "several barrow fulls of dung".Corbett 1813, p. 550. A number of prisoners told the court that it contained no bed, so that prisoners had to lie on the damp floor, often next to the corpses of previous inhabitants. But a group of favoured prisoners Acton had paid to police the jail said there was indeed a bed. One of them said he often chose to lie in there himself, because the Strong Room was so clean; the "best room on the Common side of the jail", said another. This, despite the court's having heard that one prisoner's  side had mortified from lying on the wet floor, and that a rat had eaten the nose, ear, cheek and  eye of another.Cobbett 1813, p. 482ff.
Bliss was  in the Strong Room for three weeks wearing a skullcap,  screws, iron collar, leg irons, and irons round his ankles called sheers. One witness said the swelling in his legs was so bad that the irons on one side could no longer be seen for overflowing flesh. His wife, who was able to see him through a small hole in the door, testified that he was bleeding from the mouth and s. He was given a small amount of food but the skullcap prevented him from chewing; he had to ask another prisoner, Susannah Dodd, to chew his meat for him. He was eventually taken to the sick ward, and died a few months later.
The court was told of three other cases. Captain John Bromfield, Robert Newton, and James Thompson all died after similar treatment from Acton: a beating, followed by time in "the hole" or Strong Room, before being moved to the sick ward, where they were  to lie on the floor in leg irons.Cobbett 1813, p. 512ff, p. 526ff. So concerned was Acton for his reputation that he requested the indictments be read out in Latin, but his worries were misplaced. The government wanted an acquittal to protect the good name of the Knight Marshal, Sir Philip Meadows, who had hired John Darby as prison governor, who in turn had leased it to Acton. Acton's favoured prisoners had testified on his behalf, introducing contradictory evidence that the judge could not ignore. A stream of witnesses spoke of his good character, including his butcher, brewer, confectioner, and solicitor-his coal merchant thought Acton "improper for the post he was in from his too great compassion"-and he was found not guilty on all charges.Ginger 1998, pp. 296, 299. The Gaols Committee had succeeded in drawing attention to the situation in England's jails, but reform had eluded them.Pitofsky 2000.

</section>
<section id="45289" fatherid="45283" title="Notable prisoners" lv="" priority="6" level="3">
Though most of the prisoners in the Marshalsea were debtors, the prison was regarded as second in importance only to the Tower of London, and several political figures were held there, mostly for sedition and other kinds of inappropriate behaviour. William Hepworth Dixon wrote in 1885 that it was full of poets, pirates, parsons, plotters, coiners, libellers, defaulters, Jesuits, and vagabonds of every class.Dixon 1885, p. 128.
It became the main holding prison for Roman Catholics suspected of sedition during the Elizabethan era.Adams 2009. Bishop Bonner, the last Roman Catholic Bishop of London, was imprisoned there in 1559 until his death 10 years later, supposedly for his own safety. William Herle, a spy for Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I's chief adviser, was held there in 1570 and 1571. In correspondence with the Queen's advisers regarding Marshalsea prisoners he suspected of involvement in a plot to kill her-the so-called Ridolfi plot-Herle reveals an efficient network within the prison for smuggling information out of it, which included hiding letters in holes in the crumbling brickwork for others to pick up. Robyn Adams writes that the prison leaked both physically and metaphorically.
Intellectuals also regularly found themselves in the Marshalsea. Ben Jonson, the playw, a friend of Shakespeare, was jailed in 1597 for The Isle of Dogs, regarded as so inappropriate that it was immediately suppressed, with no known extant copies; on July 28, the Privy Council was told it was a "lewd plaie that was plaied in one of the plaie houses on the Bancke Side, contaynynge very seditious and sclandrous matter".Vickers 2004 p. 25. The poet Christopher Brooke was jailed in 1601 for helping the 17-year-old Ann More marry John Donne without her father's consent.Wheatley Cunningham 1891, p. 477. George Wither, the political satirist, wrote his poem, "The Shepherd's Hunting", in the Marshalsea in 1614, while being held for four months for libel, based on his Abuses Stript and Whipt, 20 satires criticizing revenge, ambition, and lust, one of them directed at the Lord Chancellor.Pritchard, pp. 337-345.
Nicholas Udall, vicar of Braintree and headmaster of Eton, was sent there in 1541 for buggery and suspected theft, though his appointment in 1555 as headmaster of Westminster suggests the episode did his name no lasting harm.Carney 2001, p. 355. In 1632, Sir John Eliot, the Vice-Admiral of Devon, after being sent to the Marshalsea from the Tower of London for questioning the  of the King to tax imports and exports, described the move as leaving his palace in London for his country house in Southwark. John Selden, the jurist, was jailed there in 1629 for his involvement in drafting the Petition of Right, a document limiting the actions of the King, regarded as seditious even though it had been passed by Parliament, and Colonel Culpeper in 1685 or 1687 for striking the Duke of Devonshire on the ear.Walford 1878, pp. 57-75, retrieved December 24, 2007; also see Howell et al, 1816-1828.

</section>
<section id="45290" fatherid="45283" title="Closure" lv="" priority="-7" level="3">
When James Neild, the reformer, visited the prison in December 1802, just 34 debtors were living there, along with eight wives and seven children. Neil wrote that it was in "a most ruinous and insecure state, and the habitations of the debtors wretched in the extreme."Neild 1802, p. 207; also see Edward Cave, writing as "Sylvanus Urban", the fictitious letters editor of Gentleman's Magazine, replying to a reader's letter about the Marshalsea in 1803. The government had already acknowledged in 1799 that it had fallen into a state of decay.British Parliamentary Papers: Prisons 8, p. 356 cited in Philpotts 1991; and Young 1932, also cited in Philpotts 1991. A decision was made to rebuild it 130 yards south (119 m), on the site of the White Lion prison, also called the Borough Gaol.
</section>
</section>
<section id="45291" fatherid="45281" title="Second Marshalsea (1811-1842)" lv="" priority="3" level="2">
<section id="45292" fatherid="45291" title="" lv="" priority="-1" level="3">
Construction began at 150 High Street-now called Borough High Street-on the south side of Angel Court and Angel Alley, two narrow streets that no longer exist.This has led to confusion as there is currently an alley called Angel Place to the north of what remains of the southern prison wall. When standing in Angel Place, one stands on the site of the Marshalsea prison (see Wikimapia entry;) and Richard Horwood's 18th century map, which shows Angel Court/Angel Alley near the Borough Goal sic, marked by the number 2. The site was just north of St George's Church, the location of the 16th-century White Lion prison or "Borough Goal" sic, as it is known on Richard Horwood's 1792 map of London (see ).Knight 1841, p. 325.
James Neild, the prison reformer, visited the second Marshalsea during its first year in existence, publishing a description of it in 1812. This was supplemented by reports from the Committees and Commissioners on the State and Management of Prisons in London and Elsewhere, published between 1815 and 1818, and later by a pamphlet called "Expose", written in 1833 by an anonymous eyewitness.Philpotts 2003.

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<section id="45293" fatherid="45291" title="Dickens connection" lv="" priority="2" level="3">
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) became another major source of information about the second Marshalsea after his father, John, was sent there as a debtor on February 20, 1824, under the Insolvent Debtor's Act of 1813, because he owed a baker, James Kerr, £40 and 10 shillings,Allingham 2004; BBC News 2004. Darlington 1955 says he was imprisoned for £10. a sum equivalent to £ in .
Twelve years old at the time, Dickens was sent to live in lodgings with Mrs. Ellen Roylance in Little College Street, Camden Town, from where he walked five miles (8 km) every day to Warren's blacking factory at 30 Hungerford Stairs, a factory owned by a relative of his mother's. There he spent 10 hours a day wrapping bottles of shoe polish for six shillings a week to pay for his keep. His mother, Elizabeth Barrow, and her three youngest children, joined her husband in the Marshalsea in April, and from then on, Dickens would visit them every Sunday, until he found lodgings in Lant Street, closer to the prison, in the attic of a house belonging to the vestry clerk of St George's Church. This meant he was able to breakfast with his family in the Marshalsea and dine with them after work.Allen 1988, cited in Philpotts 2003, p. 91.
His father was released after three months, on May 28, 1824,Allingham 2004 but the family's financial situation remained poor, and Dickens had to continue working at the factory, something he reportedly never forgave his mother for. He subsequently wrote about the Marshalsea and other debtors' prisons in three novels, The Pickwick Papers (published in installments between 1836-1837); David Copperfield (1849-1850); and finally Little Dorrit (1855-1857), in which the main character, Amy, is born in the Marshalsea to a debtor imprisoned for reasons so complex no one can fathom how to get him out.

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<section id="45294" fatherid="45291" title="Debtors" lv="" priority="3" level="3">
Like the first Marshalsea, the second was notoriously cramped.Philpotts 2003, p. 92. The debtors' section consisted of a brick barracks, a yard measuring 177 × 56 ft (54 m x 17 m),Neild cited in Small 1998. a kitchen, a public room, and a "tap room" or snuggery, where debtors could drink as much beer as they wanted, at fivepence a pot in 1815.Philpotts 1991; Neild wrote that the tap room consisted of two rooms, not one as Dickens wrote (Neild cited in Small 1998). The barracks was less than ten yards wide and 33 yards long (nine by 30 m) and was divided into eight houses, each with three floors, containing 56 rooms in all. Each floor had seven rooms facing the front and seven in the back. There were no internal hallways. The rooms were accessed directly from the outside via eight narrow wooden staircases, a situation regarded as a fire hazard, because the stairs were the only exits and the houses were separated only by thin lathe and plaster partitions.
Women debtors were housed in rooms over the tap room. Most of the rooms for men were 10.5 feet square (0.98 m2) and 8.5 feet square (0.79 m2), with boarded floors, a fireplace, and a glazed window. Each housed two or three prisoners, and as the rooms were too small for two beds, prisoners had to share.Philpotts 2003, p. 92. The anonymous witness complained in 1833: "170 persons have been confined at one time within these walls, making an average of more than four persons in each room-which are not ten feet square!!! I will leave the reader to imagine what the situation of men, thus confined, particularly in the summer months, must be."Expose, p. 6, cited in Philpotts 1991.
Much of the prison business was run by a debtors' committee of nine prisoners and a chair-a position held by Dickens's father, John-who were appointed on the last Wednesday of each month, and met every Monday at 11 a.m.British Parliamentary Papers: Prisons 7, p. 637, cited in Philpotts 1991. There were six officers in addition to the keeper: the head turnkey (jailor) appointed for life by the Knight Marshal; a subordinate turnkey; two watchmen, one of whom would also be a third turnkey; a chaplain, and a doctor (British Parliamentary Papers: Prisons 7, p. 637, cited in Philpotts 1991). The committee was responsible for imposing fines for rules violations, an obligation they appear to have met with enthusiasm. Debtors could be fined for theft; throwing water or filth out of windows or into someone else's room; making noise after midnight; cursing, fighting, or singing obscene songs; smoking in the beer room between eight and ten in the morning, or twelve and two in the afternoon; defacing the staircase; dirtying the privy seats; stealing newspapers or utensils from the snuggery; urinating in the yard; drawing water before it had boiled-and for criticizing the committee, which the parliamentary commissioners wrote had "too frequently been the case".British Parliamentary Papers: Prisons 7, pp. 631-632, cited in Philpotts 1991.
As dreadful as the Marshalsea could be, it was a haven for some prisoners, especially if they had no prospect of employment, to the point where discharge might be used as a form of punishment-one Marshalsea debtor was discharged in 1801 for "making a Noise and disturbance in the prison".Palace Court Rule Book, 1801–02, May 22, 1801, cited in Finn 2007. John Ginger writes that one of the few times John Baptist Grano let loose and cursed the Marshalsea, calling it the "vilest Gaol in the Three Kingdoms", was the night he found himself accidentally locked out of it.Ginger 1998, p. 299. Dr. Haggage in Little Dorrit tells another prisoner, "We are quiet here; we don't get badgered here; there's no knocker, sir, to be hammered at by creditors and bring a man's heart into his mouth ... we have got to the bottom, we can't fall, and what have we found? Peace. That's the word for it. Peace."

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<section id="45295" fatherid="45291" title="Garnish and chummage" lv="" priority="4" level="3">
The tradition of "garnish" was still practised, so the first thing a debtor imprisoned for having no money was confronted with was a request for money. Prisoners were expected upon entry to make a donation to the prisoners' committee general fund-it was five shillings and sixpence when the commissioners reported to Parliament between 1815 and 1818, increased to eight shillings and sixpence by the time the anonymous witness was writing in 1833. Women were asked for a smaller sum. This allowed the prisoners to use the snuggery, where water could be boiled and meals cooked, and candles and newspapers obtained. Prisoners failing to pay the garnish were declared to be defaulters by the prison crier, had their names written up in the kitchen, and were sent to Coventry."Expose", pp. 7-8 cited in Philpotts 1991; Finn 2007, p. 143.
After garnish, prisoners were given a "chum ticket", which told them which room was theirs. Most were expected to "chum" with other prisoners. They would often spend the first night in the infirmary until a room could be made ready, and would sometimes spend three or four nights walking around the yard before a chum could be found, though they were already being charged for the room they did not have."Expose", p. 8 cited in Philpotts 1991. There was a strict principle of rotation, whereby the newest arrival was placed with the youngest prisoner who was living alone. A wealthier prisoner could pay his roommates to go away-"buy out the chum"-for half-a-crown a week, and could live by himself, while the outcast chum would either pay for lodgings somewhere else in the prison, or sleep in the tap room. The only prisoners not expected to pay "chummage" were debtors who had declared themselves insolvent by swearing an oath that their assets were worth fewer than 40 shillings. If their creditors agreed, they could be released after 14 days, but if anyone objected, they remained confined to the "poor side" of the building, near the women's side, receiving a small weekly allowance from the county, and money from charity.The Pickwick Papers, p. 654, cited in Philpotts 1991.

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<section id="45296" fatherid="45291" title="Admiralty prisoners" lv="" priority="5" level="3">
The Admiralty division housed a few prisoners under naval courts martial for mutiny, desertion, piracy, and what the deputy marshal preferred in 1815 to call "unnatural crimes". Unlike other parts of the prison that had been built from scratch in 1811, the Admiralty division-as well as the northern boundary wall, the dayroom, and the chapel-had been part of the old Borough gaol, and were considerably run down, the cells so rotten they were barely able to confine prisoners. In 1817, one actually managed to break through his cell walls. The low boundary wall together with the irregular use of spikes meant that Admiralty prisoners were often housed in the infirmary, chained to bolts fixed to the floor.British Parliamentary Papers: Prisons 7, p. 388, cited in Philpotts 1991.
They were supposed to have a separate yard to exercise in, so that criminals were not mixing with debtors, but in fact the prisoners mixed often, and according to Dickens, happily.Little Dorrit, p. 61 The parliamentary committee deplored this practice, arguing that the Admiralty prisoners were characterized by an "entire absence of all control," and were bound to have a bad effect on the debtors.British Parliamentary Papers: Prisons 7, p. 391, cited in Philpotts 1991, and Philpotts 2003, pp. 94-95.
The two groups of prisoners would retreat to their own sections during inspections, or as Dickens put it, at "certain constitutional moments when somebody came from some Office, to go through some form of overlooking something, which neither he nor anybody else knew anything about ... On those truly British occasions, the smugglers, if any, made a feint of walking into the strong cells and the blind alley, while this somebody pretended to do his something; and made a reality of walking out again as soon as he hadn't done it-neatly epitomizing the administration of most of the public affairs in this  little, tight little, island."Little Dorrit, p. 61. The expression " little, tight little island" comes from a patriotic song by Charles Dibdin (1745-1814):
Daddy Neptune one day to Freedom did say,
"If ever I lived upon dry land.
The spot I should hit on would be little Britain!"
Says Freedom "Why that's my own little island!"
Oh, it's a smug little island,
A  little, tight little island,
Search the globe round, none can be found
So happy as this little island.-Charles Dibdin, cited in Dibdin 1841, cited in Philpotts 2003, p. 96.

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<section id="45297" fatherid="45291" title="Women" lv="" priority="6" level="3">
The presence of wives, lovers, daughters, and prostitutes was taken for granted. Visitors, including women, could come and go freely, and even live with the prisoners, without being asked who they were, so long as they behaved themselves. The female prisoners living on the women's side of the barracks were also allowed to mix freely with the men.British Parliamentary Papers:Prisons 8, 1971(b), cited in Philpotts 2003, p. 100. The anonymous eyewitness reports that some of the rooms were specifically let out to prostitutes. The prison gates were closed from ten at night until eight the next morning, with a bell warning visitors half an hour before closing time, and an officer walking around the prison calling, "Strangers, women and children all out!"British Parliamentary Papers: Prisons 8, pp. 363, 412 cited in Philpotts 1991.

Whether there as visitors or prisoners, women risked being "ruined", with or without their consent. The anonymous witness talks about the risk of rape, or of being tempted into prostitution: "How often has female virtue been assailed in poverty? Alas how often has it fallen, in consequence of a husband or a father having been a prisoner for debt?""Expose" 1833, p. 9, cited in Philpotts 1991.
The prison doctor lived outside the Marshalsea and would visit every other day to attend to prisoners, and sometimes their children-to "protect his reputation", according to one of the parliamentary reports-but would not attend to their wives. This  the women to give birth alone or with the help of other prisoners. A Marshalsea doctor told a parliamentary commission that he could recall having helped just once with a birth, and then only as a matter of courtesy, because it was not included in his salary.British Parliamentary Papers: Prisons 7, p. 559; Prisons 8, p. 417, cited in Philpotts 2003, p. 100.

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<section id="45298" fatherid="45291" title="Closure and abolition" lv="" priority="-7" level="3">
The Marshalsea was closed by an Act of Parliament in 1842, and on November 19 that year, the inmates were relocated to the hospital at Bethlem if they were mentally ill, or to the King's Bench Prison, at that point renamed the Queen's Prison. On December 31, 1849, during the reign of Queen Victoria, the Court of the Marshalsea of the Household of the Kings of England was abolished, and its power transferred to Her Majesty's Court of Common Pleas at Westminster.The Jurist, 1850, p. 359.
The buildings and land were auctioned off in July 1843 and purchased by W.G. Hicks, an ironmonger, for £5,100. The property consisted of the keeper's house, the canteen-called a suttling house-the Admiralty section, the chapel, a three-story brick building, and eight brick houses, all of it closed off from Borough High Street by iron gates.Darlington 1955 In 1869, imprisonment for debt was finally outlawed in England, except in cases of fraud or refusal to pay, and in the 1870s the Home Office demolished most of the prison buildings, though parts of it were still in use in 1955 as a store for George Harding -anddocsymbol- Sons, hardware merchants. Dickens visited what was  of it on May 5, 1857, just before he finished Little Dorrit, when some of it was being rented out as rooms or apartments. He wrote in the preface:
All that remains of the Marshalsea today is the brick wall that marked the southern boundary of the prison, now separating the Local Studies library from a small public garden that used to be a graveyard. The boundary wall is marked on the garden side-on what would have been the external wall of the prison-by a plaque from the local council. The Cuming Museum has one of the prison's pumps, and the Dickens House Museum one of its windows.London Footprints.

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<section id="45299" fatherid="45291" title="Location of the prison remains" lv="" priority="8" level="3">
The surviving wall is identified by English Heritage as the southern boundary of the prison,The English Heritage National Monuments Record describes the remains as:
Angel Place (see ) lies between Southwark's Local Studies Library at 211 Borough High Street, Southwark, London SE1 and the small public garden that was formerly St George's churchyard. It is just north of the junction of Borough High Street and Tabard Street. It can be reached by bus (numbers 21, 35, 40, 133, and C10), by underground on the Northern line getting off at Borough tube station, or by train to London Bridge.

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<section id="45300" fatherid="0" title="See also" lv="" priority="-4" level="1">
|200px|alt=Plaque headed "Marshalsea Prison", saying "Beyond this old wall is the site of the old Marshalsea Prison, closed in 1842. This sign is attached to a remnant of the prison wall. Charles Dickens, whose father had been imprisoned here for debt in 1824, used that experience as the Marshalsea setting for his novel Little Dorrit." "HISTORIC SOUTHWARK" is at bottom.
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<section id="45301" fatherid="0" title="Notes" lv="" priority="-5" level="1">
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<section id="45302" fatherid="0" title="References" lv="" priority="-6" level="1">
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<section id="45303" fatherid="0" title="External links and further reading" lv="" priority="-7" level="1">
Category:British monarchy
Category:Charles Dickens
Category:Defunct prisons in London
Category:English architecture
Category:English law
Category:Former buildings and structures of Southwark
Category:Grade II listed buildings in London
Category:History of Southwark
Category:Debtors' prisons

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