London

by Peter Ackroyd

  By the early seventeenth century the London prisons, like its churches, were celebrated in verse:

  In London and within a mile I weene

  There are of layles or Prisons full eighteene

  And sixty Whipping-posts and Stocks and Cages.

  The first prison mentioned in this sorrowful litany is the “Gatehouse” at Westminster, and it is followed by an encomium upon the Fleet Prison.

  The Fleet was the oldest of them all, older even than Newgate, and had once been known as the “Gaol of London”; it was also one of the first of the medieval city’s stone buildings. It was situated on the east side of the Fleet and surrounded by a moat with “tree clad banks” where now Farringdon Street runs down to the Thames. The lowest “sunken” storey was known as Bartholomew Fair, although the usual reports of brutality, immorality and mortality render it an ironic sobriquet. The prison was, however, most notorious for its “secret” and unlawful marriages performed by “degraded clergymen” for less than a guinea. By the early eighteenth century there were some forty “marrying houses” in taverns of the vicinity, with at least six known as the Hand and Pen. Women, drugged or intoxicated, could be taken there and married for their money; innocent girls could be duped into believing that they were lawfully joined. There was a watch-maker who impersonated a clergyman, calling himself “Dr. Gaynam”—or, perhaps, gain them. He resided in Brick Lane and it was his practice to walk up Fleet Street. Crossing Fleet Bridge “in his silk gown and bands,” he was known for his commanding figure, and a “handsome though significantly rubicund face.” In the locality he was named as the “Bishop of Hell.”

  On several occasions the Fleet Prison was itself consigned to the flames, the last notable fire taking place in 1780 when a mob—led, perhaps appropriately, by a chimney-sweep—mounted an incendiary assault upon it. It was rebuilt in its old form, with many of its more interesting details left intact. Along what is now Farringdon Street, for example, the wall of the gaol had one open grating with bars across it. Here was placed an iron box for alms and, from within, one chosen inmate would call out perpetually “Remember the poor prisoners.” This was the prison in which was incarcerated Samuel Pickwick who, after speaking to those who lay there “forgotten” and “unheeded,” muttered, “I have seen enough … My head aches with these scenes, and my heart too.”

  The Fleet Prison was demolished in 1846, but the site was not cleared for another eighteen years. Where once were walls and cells there emerged “blind alleys” which, even on summer days, were so narrow and crowded that they “are bleak and shadowed.” The atmosphere of the ancient place lingered even after its material destruction.

  It is likely that the Fleet inspired Thomas More’s famous metaphor of the world as a prison, “some bound to a poste … some in the dungeon, some in the upper ward … some wepying, some laughing, some labouring, some playing, some singing, some chiding, some fighting.” More eventually himself became a prisoner, too, but, before that time, as under-sheriff of London, he had sent many hundreds of Londoners to gaol. He consigned some to the Old Compter in Bread Street and others to the Poultry Compter near Buck-lersbury; in 1555 the prison in Bread Street was moved a few yards northward to Wood Street, where one of the inmates might have been echoing the words of Thomas More. He is quoted in Old and New London: “This littel Hole is as a little citty in a commonwealth, for as in a citty there are all kinds of officers, trades and vocations, so there is in this place as we may make a pretty resemblance between them.” The men consigned here were known as “rats,” the women as “mice.” Its underground passages still exist beneath the ground of a small courtyard beside Wood Street; the stones are cold to the touch, and there is a dampness in the air. Once a new prisoner drank from “a bowl full of claret” to toast his new “society,” and now the Compter is on occasions used for banquets and parties.

  The image of the city as prison runs very deep. In his late eighteenth-century novel Caleb Williams, William Godwin described “the doors, the locks, the bolts, the chains, the massy walls and grated windows” of confinement; he affirmed then that “this is society,” the system of prison representing “the whole machine of society.”

  When Holloway Prison was opened in 1852 its entrance was flanked by two stone griffins which are, of course, also the emblems of the City of London. Its foundation stone carried the inscription “May God preserve the City of London and make this place a terror to evil doers.” It is perhaps suggestive that its architect, James B. Banning, used the same principles of design in his work upon the Coal Exchange and the Metropolitan Cattle Market. There was a visible affinity between some of the great public institutions of the city.

  In the 1970s V.S. Pritchett described London as “this prison-like place of stone” and in 1805 Wordsworth cursed the city as “A prison where he hath been long immured”; in turn Matthew Arnold in 1851 depicted it as this “brazen prison” where the inhabitants are “Dreaming of naught beyond their prison-wall.” In 1884 William Morris added his own note to this vision of incarceration with his account of

  this grim net of London, this prison built stark

  With the greed of all ages

  A mean lodging was his “prison-cell/In the jail of weary London.” Keir Hardie, on returning to his native Ayrshire in 1901, wrote that “London is a place which I remember with a haunting horror, as if I had been confined there.” A report on London prisoners themselves, in London’s Underworld by Thomas Holmes, in the very same period as Keir Hardie’s observations, notes that “the great mass of faces strikes us with dismay, and we feel at once that most of them are handicapped in life, and demand pity rather than vengeance.” The conditions of poverty in the city were such that “the conditions of prison life are better, as they need to be, than the conditions of their own homes.” So they simply moved from one prison to another. But gaol was the place, in Cockney idiom, “where the dogs don’t bite.”

  There were also areas of “sanctuary rights” in London, apparent neighbourhoods of freedom over which the prisons failed to cast their shadows. These areas were once within the domains of great religious institutions, but their charm or power survived long after the monks and nuns had departed. Among them were St. Martin’s le Grand and Whitefriars; they had been respectively the home of secular canons and of the Carmelites, but as sanctuaries from pursuit and arrest became in turn havens “for the lowest sort of people, rogues and ruffians, thieves, felons and murderers.” One of the presumed murderers of the “Princes in the Tower,” Miles Forest, took refuge in St. Martin’s and stayed there “rotting away piecemeal.” “St. Martin’s beads” became a popular expression for counterfeit jewellery. The privileges of St. Martin’s le Grand were abolished at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but the sanctuary of Whitefriars lasted for a longer period. The area became popularly known as “Alsatia” (named after the unhappy frontier of Alsace) because no parish watch or city officials would dare to venture there; if they did so, there was a general cry of “Clubs!” and “Rescue!” before they were seized and beaten. It is the area now marked by Salisbury Square and Hanging-Sword Alley, between Dorset Street and Magpie Alley.

  Two other sanctuaries were connected with the coining of money. They were located by the Mints at Wapping and in Southwark, as if the literal making of money were as sacred as any activity which took place in monastery or chapel. In the mid-1720s legal officers attempted to infiltrate and expel the “Minters” of Wapping but were fought back. One bailiff was “duck’d in a Place in which the Soil of Houses of Office [lavatories] had been empty’d” while another was force-marched before a crowd with “a turd in his mouth.” The connection between money and ordure is here flagrantly revealed.

  Other sanctuaries still clung around the churches, as if the tradition of begging for alms had continued in a more dissipated form. The area which had once been dominated by Blackfriars was a notorious haunt of criminals and beggars. A sanctuary in the neighbourhood of Westminster Abbey
was for centuries “low and disreputable,” and Shire Lane beside the church of St. Clement Danes was known as Rogues’ Lane. Here were houses known as “Cadgers’ Hall,” “The Retreat” and “Smashing Lumber,” the last being a manufactory for counterfeit coin, wherein according to Old and New London “every room had its secret trap or panel … the whole of the coining apparatus and the employés could be conveyed away as by a trick of magic.” In any alternative London topography, sanctuaries, like prisons, become highly specific sites of ill fame. Tread there who dares.

  CHAPTER 27

  A Rogues Gallery

  If the places of crime and punishment do not necessarily change, but leave a steady mark, there may also be continuity among the criminals of London. We read of fourteenth-century forgers and blackmailers, and the coroners’ inquests of 1340 reveal a long tally of “bawdy-house keepers, night-walkers, robbers, women of ill fame.” The city was even then so filled with thieves that in this period the right of “in-fangthief” was given to the city authorities; it permitted them “to hang thieves caught redhanded (cum manu opere)” without trial by jury.

  It was not until the sixteenth century, however, that the literature of London crime becomes extensive. The works of Robert Greene and Thomas Dekker, in particular, reveal an underworld of thieves and imposters which remains as old and as new as the city itself. Certainly the argot or cant of the thieves had very ancient roots, while some of its more expressive phrases endured well into the nineteenth century. “And bing we to Rome-vill, to nip a bung” can be translated as “Now let us travel to London, to cut a purse.” How London acquired the name of “Rome-vill,” long before it was ever compared to that imperial city, is something of a mystery. “Yonder dwelleth a queer cuffin. It were beneship to mill him” (“There lives a difficult and churlish man. It would be a very good thing to rob him”).

  The individuals, as well as their words, come to life in the pages of these old catalogues of crime—“John Stradling with the shaking head … Henry Smyth who drawls when he speaks … John Browne, the stammerer”—each of them engaged in some kind of fifteenth-century cheating trade. That trade, too, has survived. The game of cups, in which the spectator must choose which one conceals the ball, is still played on the streets of London in the twenty-first century; the fraud has now existed for over a thousand years in the capital.

  In their record of “abraham men” (who pretended to be mad), “clapper dodgers” (who fished for goods from open windows) and “priggers of prancers” (horse thieves), Dekker and Greene may on occasions be guilty of over-emphasis; the streets of sixteenth-century London might not have been quite as violent or as perilous as they suggest. Nevertheless real criminality could be found in many specific areas. The neighbourhood of Chick Lane and Field Lane in Clerkenwell, for example, was always notorious. In Chick Lane itself there was a dwelling, once known as the Red Lion inn, which upon its demolition in the eighteenth century was discovered to be three centuries old; C.W. Heckethorn, in London Souvenirs, reveals that it contained “dark closets, trap-doors, sliding panels and secret recesses.” One of these trap-doors opened upon the Fleet Ditch, and “afforded easy means of getting rid of the bodies.” There was a morass of lanes off Ratcliffe Highway, with names like Hog Yard and Black Dog Alley, Money Bag Alley and Harebrain Court, which were known for “moral degradation.” There was also a dwelling near Water Lane, off Fleet Street, known as “Blood Bowl house” named “from the various scenes of blood that were almost daily exhibited, and where there seldom passed a month without the commission of a murder.”

  In perhaps less sensational a context, a city recorder of the seventeenth century gave evidence of a raid upon Watton’s alehouse at Smart’s Key beside Billingsgate. The tavern was in reality a school “set upp to learne younge boys to cutt purses.” Pockets and purses were hung upon a line with “hawkes bells” or “sacring bells” attached to them; if a child could remove a coin or counter without setting off the bell “he was adjudged a judiciall Nypper.” During the following century there was another such school in Smithfield, where a tavern-keeper taught children how to pick pockets, to pilfer from shops by crawling through their wooden hatches, and to break into buildings by a simple expedient: they pretended to be asleep against the wall while all the time they were actively chipping away at the bricks and mortar until a hole had been breached.

  It is curious, in this description of crime, that the criminals themselves adopted the terminology of “law.” “Cheating law” was the term for playing with false dice, “versing law” the art of passing counterfeit coin and “tigging law” that of cutting purses. It was the alternative law of “low” London.

  Yet new crimes could also evolve. In the seventeenth century, for example, highway robbery became known as “high law.” The age of coaches meant also the age of coach theft, and in the last days of 1699 John Evelyn wrote: “This week robberies were committed between the many lights which were fixed between London and Kensington on both sides, and while coaches and travellers were passing.” Between flaring lights along the high road, there was at night absolute darkness where the robbers could easily strike. We may even hear them talking in the pages of The London Hanged. One drover, Edward Smith, suggested to a companion that they “go upon the Accompt” (take up highway robbery). “Let us enter into Articles to have no others than ourselves concerned for the future.” And if they were caught? There is an account of one thief taken and led back to London—“he was very unruly, pulling the horse about, making Motions with his Hands at every Body that came near him, as if he was firing a Pistol, crying Phoo!” Hounslow Heath and Turnham Green, Marylebone and Tottenham Court Road, were particular areas of danger for the unwary. These were the places for footpad robberies, known to the criminal fraternity as “low Tobies.” It became customary in the early eighteenth century for travellers into London to gather in bands for mutual protection, beginning their perilous journey only on the sounding of a bell; at night they would also be accompanied by link-boys carrying lights.

  The same flaring torches were necessary for journeys within the city itself. “A gentleman was stopt in Holborn about twelve at night by two footpads, who on the gentleman’s making resistance shot him dead and then robbed him … One Richard Watson, tollman of Marybone turnpike, was found barbarously murdered in his toll-house.” A female who served in a public house in Marylebone is quoted in Charles Knight’s London as having “often wondered why I have escaped without wounds or blows from the gentlemen of the pad, who are numerous and frequent in their evening patroles through these fields; and my march extended as far as Long Acre, by which means I was obliged to pass through the thickest of them.” A commentator in the same volume has remarked that the citizens of London “looked upon the worshipful company of thieves much in the same way that settlers in a new country regard the wild beasts prowling in the forests around them.”

  The “judiciall Nyppers” of one period had migrated into another, and it was reported that eighteenth-century London “swarms with pick-pockets, as daring as they are subtile and cunning.” They stole under the very gibbet from which they might one day be suspended and “there never is any execution without handkerchiefs and other articles being stolen.” If they were caught in the act, by Londoners themselves, they were dragged to the nearest well or fountain “and dipped in the water till nearly drowned.” If they were taken up by the authorities, a more severe penalty was imposed. By the middle of the eighteenth century the number of offences, for which men and women could be hanged had risen from 80 to over 350. Yet this may not have been a powerful deterrent. A few years later, in a Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, it was reported that “115,000 persons in London were regularly engaged in criminal pursuits.” This would amount to one-seventh of the population. So, in 1774, it was recorded by the Gentleman’s Magazine that “The papers are filled with robberies and breaking of houses, and with the recital of the cruelties committed by the robbers, greater than ever before
.” We may surmise, therefore, that in a period of affluence and “conspicuous” wealth, crimes against property were as numerous as crimes against people—and this despite the fact that the larger the sum involved in theft or cheat, the greater the possibility of being hanged.

  Peter Linebaugh has scrutinised the statistics for hanging all through the eighteenth century, and has arrived at interesting conclusions. Those born in London tended to hang in their early twenties, an earlier age than that of immigrants to the city. The main trades of those who reached the scaffold were butchers, weavers and shoe-makers. There was a pronounced association between butchers and highway robbers (Dick Turpin himself had been apprentice to a butcher). Cultural and sociological interpretations of this correspondence have been made, but, in general terms, the butchers of the city were always known for their boisterous, individualistic and sometimes violent nature. Certainly they were the most prominent of all London tradesmen, and one foreign visitor to London reported that it was “a marvel to see such quantities of butchers shops in all the parishes, the streets being full of them in every direction.” They were often the leaders of their little communities, too; those of Clare Market, for example, worked and dwelled among the patent theatres of the area and were described as “the arbiters of the galleries, the leaders of theatrical rows, the musicians at actresses’ marriages, the chief mourners at players’ funerals.” They were also leaders of the community in times of scarcity and disorder. It was reported of one violent assault, for example, that “The Buttchers have begun the way to all the rest, for within this toe days they all did rise upon the exise man.” It is not inconsistent, then, that they or their apprentices should be at the very forefront of adventurous or desperate crime.