Richard Bell's recent post showed how a humble garden billhook could a potential tool of violence against prisoners. Keys, doors, locks, and grates could wreak a subtler kind of violence. Barring visitors from a prison could be deadly. "When prisoners are sick," some Newgate debtors told the JPs in 1724, the underkeeper Mr. Perry "won’t let … Continue reading Grates and Keys: Violence in Early Modern Prisons, Part II
Ludgate
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 