In Jail with Charles Dickens by Alfred Trumble

Author:Alfred Trumble [Trumble, Alfred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781500880385
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: CreateSpace Publishing
Published: 2014-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

The Fleet Prison was staggering along on its last legs, like some gouty monster whose swollen joints were rotting asunder of internal corruption, when Dickens gave it a place in the fiction of picturesque fact. But it had a long history behind it, a history dating from the time when the Fleet creek, now a noisome sewer under the foundations of the jail, was a pretty little river, winding down from a verdant and fertile country. When the town had grown toward and around it, the Fleet river had become silted and clogged up into a foul and sluggish stream, and was such a nuisance that it was arched over, and a market built upon the arches. But below the market it still remained an open stream, where colliers’ barges unloaded their cargoes at Sea-Coal lane, and what is now Bridge street was a sluggish, polluted canal, whose reek infected the air. The gaol took its name from the stream upon whose banks it was built. The exact date of its foundation is unknown, but by various records it was formerly held in conjunction with the Manor of Leveland, in Kent, and with “the King’s House at 93 Westminster,” the whole being a part of the ancient possessions of the See of Canterbury, traceable in a grant from the Archbishop Lanfranc, soon after the accession of William the Conqueror. The wardenship or sergeantcy of the prison was anciently held by several eminent personages, who also had custody of the king’s palace at Westminster. It was “a place,” in the worst sense of the phrase, for, as long ago as 1586, the persons to whom the warden had underlet it were guilty of cruelty and extortion, crimes, however, quite characteristic of the Court of Star Chamber, of which the Fleet was at this time the prison. Up to this period its history is little better than a sealed book, the burning of the prison by the followers of Wat Tyler seeming to have been the only very noticeable event during the above interval. In the reigns of Edward VI and of Mary, the Fleet was tenanted by several victims of religious bigotry. One of the most venerated of British martyrs, Bishop Hopper, was twice committed to the Fleet, which he only quitted in 1555 for the stake and the fire, in the chief town in his diocese, Gloucester. His captivity was truly wretched; he slept upon “a 94 little pad of straw” with a rotten covering; “his chamber was vile and stinking,” just as it might have been had he been a poor debtor in 1825.

The fees belonging to the warden of the Fleet and his officers, in the reign of Elizabeth, were very heavy. An archbishop, duke or duchess had to pay for a commitment fee and the first week’s “dyett,” £21 10s.; a lord, spiritual or temporal, £10 5s. 10d.; a knight, £5; an esquire, £3 6s. 8d.; and even a poor man in the wards, “that hath a part at the box, to pay for his fee, having no dyett, 7s.

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