We are delighted to publish this guest post by Esther Brot, who is currently pursuing her PhD in History at King's College London. She is writing her dissertation on the topic of the Corporation of London and the prisons of the City of London in the long eighteenth century. In 1717, the Court of Aldermen … Continue reading A Failure to Communicate: Authority in Eighteenth-Century Newgate
gaolers
Becoming a gaoler II: marriages and mothers-in-law
When it came to his love life, George Reynell had a type: women connected to prison offices. His first wife was the widow of a prison warden, his second the daughter of one. As a result, Reynell spent many years running prisons in London. Following on from my last post about becoming a gaoler in … Continue reading Becoming a gaoler II: marriages and mothers-in-law
Becoming a gaoler I: the City of London
Gaolers are certain to be recurring characters on this blog, and likely to be perennial are questions of why and how individuals became keepers, wardens and marshals of some of early modernity’s most infamous institutions. What led them to take up posts where their income largely consisted of demanding fees from those already so hard-up … Continue reading Becoming a gaoler I: the City of London
Early Modern Prisons 