Debt Imprisonment and the City

Abstract

When the Cornish recusant gentleman Francis Tregian the Younger entered the Fleet debtors’ prison during the early seventeenth century, he being ‘desirous of more ease than ordinary’ persuaded the warden to let him lodge in ‘one of the fairest chambers in the Fleet and to have three other rooms next adjoining to the same for the sole use of himself and his retinue’. For five years he lived in there with his two sisters and his and their attendants, converting some of the space to ‘a library of eleven hundred books and for stowing many wind instruments chests of viols lutes and other musick for the recreation of the said Francis, his friends and familiars’. Just over one hundred years later another musician, John Baptist Grano, found himself confined in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison. Though he did write some music, multiple chambers for a single prisoner were not an option. The Marshalsea was at the less classy end of the spectrum of debtors’ prisons. The Fleet was the designated prison for those who owed large debts to the Crown, which meant it held wealthy gentlemen (particularly wealthy recusants). By contrast, prisoners were committed to the Marshalsea by the Marshalsea and Palace Courts, which had jurisdiction over cases involving only small sums; the plaintiffs and defendants alike were poorer. Whereas wealthier debtors confined to the Fleet and King’s Bench prisons could, for a price, dwell in the ‘rules’ of the prison, an area outside the prison’s physical walls that was still considered to be part of the prison, Marshalsea prisoners had no such opportunity. Any Marshalsea prisoner who could afford to do so quickly obtained a writ of habeas corpus to have himself or herself moved to the Fleet or the King’s Bench. Conversely, the Marshalsea was (along with Newgate) a place to which a warden of another prison might transfer a troublesome prisoner as a punishment. The punitive edge to Marshalsea confinement was perhaps underlined by the fact that, as in the case of Newgate, the debtors there occasionally shared space with criminals awaiting trial or punishment. When the old Surrey county gaol at the White Lyon fell into disrepair the felons were placed in the Marshalsea. The Admiralty, too, used the Marshalsea to detain prisoners accused of crimes at sea, including pirates.