Medieval Prisons Were Worse Than Death

A wool mitten tied to a length of string drifting down through the air over one of the busiest streets in England. Winter, London, some morning in the 1400s, and anyone walking up Ludgate Hill would have watched it come down the stone face of the city gate and stop at head height, swaying. High above it, behind a barred window, a man nobody on the street could see.

“Drop a farthing in,” and the string went taut, and the mitten rose back up the wall and vanished, and the man inside ate that day. If nobody stopped, he didn’t. That was the whole system. A grown man, a citizen, maybe a shopkeeper who’d had one bad year, fishing for coins above one of the richest thoroughfares in the kingdom, while the meat sellers and the water carriers and the lawyers walked past underneath him.

The man at the top of that string, in the eyes of the law, was not being punished. Legally, officially, on parchment, he was just being held. Medieval law was very clear on this point, and I’ll get into the actual wording in a minute, but the short version is that a prison in the Middle Ages was never supposed to hurt you at all.

A waiting room in the law’s eyes. You waited for your trial, or you waited until you paid your debt, and then you walked out. Nobody was sentenced to suffer in a cell the way we think of prison sentences now. And yet, over the course of this video, I’m going to walk you through starvation deaths counted by coroners in a single building.

Men crushed under stone in a licensed procedure. Prisoners whose legs rotted off inside their own leg irons. A flooded stone funnel in Paris built so a human body could never find rest in it. And a churchman’s prison that the town council next door formally described in writing as hell. All of it inside institutions whose founding principle was that they weren’t allowed to punish anyone.

So that’s where we’re going. Quick pause first for the housekeeping. Welcome in everyone. Whether you’re watching this on a screen or you’ve got it running in your ears while you drive or cook or fold laundry at 2:00 in the morning, I’m glad you’re here. Do me a small favor and let me know in the comments where in the world you’re listening from.

I enjoy scrolling through those. Big thank you as always to the Patreon supporters and the YouTube members who keep this channel alive. If you’d like to join them, all the links to support the channel are down in the description and in the pinned comment. All right, back to the mitten on the string. The legal idea underneath all of this came down from Roman law, and medieval lawyers repeated it like a proverb.

“A prison exists to hold men, not to punish them.” In the Latin they like to quote, $carcer ad continendos homines, non ad punendos haberi debeat$. The great English legal treatise of the 1200s, the one that goes under the name of Britton, took the same position. Gaol was custody. You held a suspected thief until the judges came around. You held a debtor until his creditor was satisfied.

You held a political inconvenience until the king decided what to do with him. The building was a pause button, not a sentence. Now, in practice, that doctrine created something almost worse than honest punishment would have been, and the mechanics of it drive most of what follows. If prison isn’t punishment, then the state doesn’t owe you anything while you’re inside.

No food, no bed, no fire, no doctor. You’re not serving a sentence. You’re just stored. Whatever you need in storage, you buy or someone brings it to you or you go without. And the man storing you, the jailer, isn’t a public servant with a salary. In England, he’s a private businessman who paid good money for the right to run the prison.

And the prisoners are how he earns that money back. Now, put that next to the pace of medieval justice, because the two things together are what killed people. In most of England, the judges who could actually try a felony came around on a circuit. Jail delivery, the sessions were called, and the name is beautifully literal. The judges arrived, the jail was delivered of its prisoners.

Everyone got tried in a burst over a few days, the acquitted walked, the condemned hanged, and the judges rode on to the next county town. For a lot of jails, this happened once a year, twice if you were lucky. So, a man arrested in November on suspicion of stealing cloth, a man who might be completely innocent, sat in irons in a stone room through the whole winter, through Christmas, through Lent, into the summer, waiting for a trial that would take perhaps 15 minutes when it finally happened.

Trials were fast. The waiting was the sentence. And an unheated medieval jail in an English winter with no food except what you could buy or beg was a place a healthy adult could simply fail to survive. We know how often that happened from a wonderfully bleak class of document, the coroner’s rolls.

Any death in prison was supposed to get an inquest, same as a body found in a ditch. The coroner came, looked at the corpse, impanelled a jury, and wrote down a cause. And the causes they wrote down over and over across the 13th and 14th centuries were hunger, cold, want. Sometimes all three in one entry, dead of hunger, thirst, and want.

A clerk’s five words standing in for what was probably six weeks of a human being disappearing into himself on a stone floor. One little courtroom scene survives from a jail delivery at Newgate in 1421, and it catches the routine of all this perfectly. The justices are working through the list from the previous session, and they get to a prisoner from a place called Wareham, and they ask the jailer, “Where is this man?” The roll says he was remitted to prison until this session, and the jailer says he died in prison. And the court, rather than just shrugging, asks whether he was buried before the coroner viewed the body, since burying a prisoner unviewed meant a heavy fine for the jailer. And the jailer says, “No, no, he was viewed.” And the coroner is called in, and he produces his book. And the book says, “The man died in the pestilence.” And that’s it. Case closed.

Next prisoner. A man waited months for his day in court, and what arrived at court instead was a line in a ledger confirming the paperwork on his corpse was in order. The system’s concern in that moment extended to whether he’d been inspected properly and no further. Who were these people, though? When you hear medieval prisoner, you probably see a bearded man in rags chained to a wall, some captured knight or condemned murderer.

The reality of the population is stranger and sadder. The single biggest category in London especially was debtors. Ordinary commercial failures. A grocer who couldn’t cover what he owed a wool merchant. A widow behind on rent. Under English law, a creditor could have a debtor locked up until the debt was paid.

And here’s the part that still startles me: with no time limit whatsoever. Some continental cities capped imprisonment for debt at a year. England didn’t bother. You stayed until the money appeared. And if the money never appeared, you stayed. A man could be imprisoned in his 30s over a few pounds and die in the same building as an old man.

His imprisonment cost his creditor nothing and cost him everything. And the pure spite of it was sometimes the point. After the debtors came the people waiting on trial. Accused thieves, accused killers, poachers, brawlers, servants who’d run off with a master’s spoons. Innocent and guilty side by side, indistinguishable, because guilt hadn’t been decided yet.

That was the whole point of the waiting. Then a scatter of everyone else. Prostitutes and curfew breakers swept up by the night watch. Clergy who’d committed crimes and been claimed by the church courts. Heretics waiting to recant. People the king simply wanted somewhere. And threaded through all of them, the prisoners’ families, because wives and children often moved into the prison too. Residents rather than inmates. The alternative was starving alone outside. So they came in, and children were born inside these walls and learned to walk in prison yards. And some of them grew up knowing the begging grate the way farm children knew the pasture.

Every one of those people, the moment the door shut behind them, entered an economy. And I mean that in the most literal way. The medieval prison ran on a price list. And the price list is where we should go next. Because once you understand what was being sold in these buildings and what happened to the customers who couldn’t pay, the rest of this story tells itself.

One more thing before we get there, though, since it hangs over everything. Escape from all this was sitting right next door the entire time in a form that shows exactly how people ranked their options. English law offered a fugitive a strange bargain called abjuring the realm.

If you committed a felony and got yourself into a church before they caught you, you had sanctuary, 40 days of it. And at the end of those 40 days, you could stand at the church door before the coroner, confess your crime out loud, and swear to leave England forever. They’d assign you a port. You’d dress as a penitent, carry a little cross, and walk there along the king’s highway, and then take ship into permanent exile.

Everything you owned, forfeit. Your home gone for life. And thousands of people took that deal. Thousands. Ordinary men chose to confess to crimes, surrender every possession, and walk out of their own country barefoot rather than sit in an English jail waiting for a jury that might well have acquitted them.

They had seen the inside of those buildings or heard enough. Exile was the good option. The people we were about to meet were the ones who didn’t make it to the church door. Newgate is the natural place to start. Everybody’s heard of it, and its records are good enough that we can watch it kill people in something close to real time. The building itself started as exactly what the name says, a new gate, one of the openings in the old Roman wall around London at the western edge of the city near where the Old Bailey stands today. Henry II turned it into a jail in 1188 as part of his big overhaul of English justice, and it stayed a working prison through fires and rebuilds into the 20th century. 700 years of continuous operation. For our purposes, we’re interested in the medieval building, the gatehouse with cells stacked in it and dug under it, traffic passing through the arch below while men rotted in the rooms above and beneath the road.

Administratively, Newgate belonged to the city of London, meaning the two sheriffs elected each year were responsible for it. The sheriffs, being busy merchants who had no intention of personally running a jail, leased the job out. They sold the keepership to a private operator. And I do mean sold. The position changed hands for real money, and it was considered one of the most profitable posts in London.

Sit with that for a second. Running a building full of destitute, accused criminals was a coveted business opportunity. The keeper had paid upfront, sometimes borrowed to do it, and everything he made back, he made out of the prisoners. So here is what it costs to be locked up in medieval Newgate.

You paid a fee at the door for the privilege of being admitted to the prison. Admitted like a hotel. You paid the clerk who entered your name in the register. If the keeper decided you needed irons, and for anyone poor, he generally did, you paid to have them riveted on, and then you paid a second larger fee to have them taken off.

Removing them was called easement of irons, and it was the keeper’s most reliable earner, since the alternative to paying was living day and night in fetters. You paid for a bed, you paid for a candle, you paid for firewood in winter. Food and ale were sold inside the walls at whatever markup the keeper liked since he controlled the door, and no competitor was walking in.

Down in the cellar, the keepers of later centuries ran what was basically a private tavern for the prisoners, and drinking your misery away in the dark became its own little revenue stream. And at the far end of it all, when your trial finally came and the jury said not guilty, you paid a discharge fee before the door opened.

Men found innocent by a court of law were dragged back from the courtroom and held in the cells until they’d settled the keeper’s bill. Acquittal was a legal event. Release was a financial one. We even have the price of some of this. In 1431, Newgate charged prisoners four pence a week toward the lamps. In 1488, a bed with sheets, a blanket, and a coverlet ran a penny a week.

Those sound like small numbers, and for a merchant they were. For a laborer who earned maybe three or four pence for a full day’s work when he was free and who now couldn’t work at all, they were a slow-motion catastrophe. Every week inside made you poorer, and being poorer made every week inside worse, and the spiral only pointed one direction.

The keepers themselves show up in the records mostly when they got caught, and a couple of them deserve to be named. A 14th-century keeper called Edmund Lestraunge became notorious for charging four times the legal limit for easement of irons. And the existence of a legal limit is its own evidence.

Cities didn’t cap the price of something nobody was gouging on. Another keeper, Hugh Duddeley, was eventually convicted of blackmailing the prisoners in his custody. Blackmail inside a prison is an ugly business when you think through the mechanics of it, because a keeper had endless leverage. He decided which ward you slept in, whether your irons were light or crippling, whether your wife’s food parcel reached you, whether you got dragged into a punishment cell on some invented infraction.

“Pay, or things get worse.” And things could always get worse. Actually, the cleanest way to see medieval Newgate is to look at the rules the city kept issuing to the keepers. Because every rule is a photograph of the crime it was written against. Keepers were ordered not to seize the alms that charitable Londoners sent in for the prisoners.

So they’d been stealing the prisoners’ charity food. They were ordered not to monopolize the sale of food and drink at extortionate prices. So they had been. They were forbidden from charging prisoners a fee for the service of bringing them to their own trials. Men were being billed for transportation to their own hearings.

And the ones who couldn’t pay presumably just didn’t get produced in court and sat through another year until the next session. In 1393, the city banned charging for lamps and beds. And we’ve already seen the 1431 lamp fee, so you can judge how well that ban held. The regulations kept coming for two centuries.

Each one an admission that the last batch had been ignored. Inside the walls, the building sorted people by money and by fate. Debtors of the ordinary sort went to a common ward called the Stone Hall. Accused felons went to the Stonehold, and the Stonehold was the bad one, an unlit chamber where the poorest prisoners lay together in their fetters on the floor.

A description that survives of the felon’s quarters says the wards were so foul, so dark, and so depraved that physicians would not go in. Doctors in a century that thought nothing of plague houses and battlefield surgery drew the line at Newgate’s lower rooms. And underneath even that, below the keeper’s own house, sat the hold for the condemned.

And the surviving description of that one is short and terrible: an open sewer fitted with chains. Men in their last days before hanging lay shackled in a cellar with the city’s waste running through it, and the smell coming up through the floorboards was presumably part of the keeper’s domestic life, and he lived with it because the condemned paid fees, too.

Women were in Newgate this whole time, by the way. Accused women, debtor women, and until 1406 they had no separate quarters worth the name. And one detail finally shamed the city into building some: to reach the one privy available to them, the women had to walk through the men’s wards. Every trip, past men chained in the dark, many of them awaiting trial for violent crimes, all of them bored and desperate.

What happened to those women on those walks mostly didn’t get written down, and that absence from the record is its own testimony. In 1406, London built the women a tower of their own with their own latrine. And the fact that it took over 200 years to think of it says plenty about where female prisoners ranked in anyone’s concerns.

Even the air in the building was a killer, and Londoners knew it. The gatehouse sat directly over one of the city’s main roads, and the stench rolling out of it was famous. People rerouted processions to avoid passing under the arch. By 1419, conditions inside had gotten so lethal—the records talk about the fetid and corrupt atmosphere of the place—that the city took the extraordinary step of shutting Newgate down entirely.

The prison was killing people faster than the courts could process them. What saved it, oddly enough, was a dead mayor’s money. Richard Whittington, the real man behind the Dick Whittington of the pantomimes, the cat and all that, died in 1423 and left a fortune to charity, and his executors spent part of it demolishing and completely rebuilding Newgate.

For generations afterward, prisoners called the building the Whittington with something almost like affection, the way you’d nickname a cruel old relative. The rebuilt prison was cleaner for a while. The fee system moved into the new building intact because the fee system was never about the architecture. One more fixture of the place and then we’ll follow the money out into the rest of the country.

Directly across the street from the gate stood the church of St. Sepulchre, and St. Sepulchre’s bell rang for Newgate’s condemned. On execution mornings the carts came out of the gate and turned toward the gallows, and the great bell tolled them out of the city. Later on, a merchant’s bequest formalized an even more intimate ritual.

A handbell rung in the night outside the condemned cell itself, with a recited verse telling the prisoners inside to repent while time remained. But the pairing of that church and that prison was already ancient by then. For the men in the hold under the keeper’s house, lying in the sewage with their wrists chained, the sound of St. Sepulchre’s bell through the wall was the calendar. Every time it rang for a cart of the condemned, the men still waiting knew the sessions had come and gone once more, and counted forward to their own turn.

Now for what a bad year inside those walls looked like. 1315, the year the outside world’s food ran out. The great famine hit northern Europe that year like nothing in living memory. The rain started in the spring and barely stopped. The harvest drowned in the fields, drowned a second time in 1316, and grain prices went vertical. A London chronicler recorded wheat selling at 38 and 40 shillings the quarter, seven or eight times its normal price, and salt at prices nobody had ever heard of. And villagers walking into the city looking for food that wasn’t there either.

People without number, the chronicle says, died of hunger. In the hungry years that followed, 52 Londoners were crushed to death in a single stampede when alms were handed out at a religious house and the crowds surged. That was life outside the prison walls. Free people with legs to carry them anywhere in the city, dying in the streets.

Now think about what those two years did inside Newgate. Every prisoner in that building ate through one of three channels: money, family, or charity. The famine burned down all three at once. Prices inside the jail tracked prices outside, except worse, because the keeper set them. So a prisoner’s savings that might have bought six months of bread now bought six weeks.

Families who might have carried in a loaf twice a week were suddenly starving themselves. And a wife choosing between her children outside and her husband inside doesn’t really have a choice at all. And the charity, the alms baskets, the coins through the grate dried to nothing, since a Londoner watching his own neighbors drop in the road had nothing to spare for strangers behind a wall.

The prisoners were at the absolute end of the food chain, locked in place, forbidden to forage or work or beg beyond arms reach of a barred window. The coroner’s numbers from those two years are as close as we get to a body count. Between 1315 and 1316, 62 deaths in Newgate alone came under the coroner’s investigation.

62 in one building in roughly a year, in a prison whose whole population might have been a couple of hundred souls. And separate from the famine deaths, one year’s records show 22 Newgate prisoners dying of jail fever. Jail fever gets its turn in a minute. First, though, dying of hunger, the phrase the coroners kept writing.

Two short words doing a lot of polite work. Starvation is slow and it is methodical. The body denied food starts eating itself in a fixed order. The fat goes first over the early weeks, and prisoners who’d come in well-fed watched their own bodies deflate, then the muscle. The body breaks down its own tissue for fuel, and a man’s arms and thighs visibly waste.

His face collapses inward around the skull. His skin hangs loose and then stretches drumtight over bone. Strange things happen along the way. The starving often swell, their bellies and ankles ballooning with fluid as the blood loses the proteins that hold water in the vessels. So the dying man in the corner of the ward looks bloated even as he’s vanishing.

Fine downy hair grows on the skin as the body’s last insulation. The heart, being muscle, wastes with everything else and shrinks and slows. The mind goes strange, apathetic, then confused, and men in the last stage stop responding to their own names. Cold finishes most of them. A starving body can’t generate heat. And English stone in January pulls warmth out of flesh hour after hour.

So the coroner’s formula, dead of hunger and cold, describes a genuine partnership. The hunger dismantled them and the cold took the remainder. Six weeks, eight weeks, sometimes longer if scraps came in, lying in a room full of other people doing the same thing at their own individual speeds. And the ones with irons on had it worst.

Iron fetters on a starving body do damage on their own. The metal sits on skin over bone, ankle, and wrist, and rubs, and the skin breaks. And in a room flawed with waste, those wounds do what wounds in filth do. They fester. Prisoners’ petitions and later prison inquiries describe irons riveted so tight and worn so long that the flesh beneath them mortified.

Mortified is the old word for gangrene. Rotted while the man was alive and wearing them. Legs turned black below the fetters, and the keeper’s fee for removing the irons stayed on the books the whole time. So a man watched his own ankles die inside metal that a few pence would have opened, and either found the pence or didn’t.

Alongside the hunger, the other great killer worked the crowded wards. And this one didn’t care whether you could pay for food. Jail fever, the medieval English called it. And it stalked prisons for five centuries before anybody understood it. We know it now as epidemic typhus. And we know the mechanism.

And the mechanism explains everything about why prisons of all places bred it. Typhus travels in body lice. Lice live in clothing, in seams and folds, and they thrive where people wear the same unwashed clothes for months and sleep pressed together for warmth. A medieval common ward, straw floor, shared blankets, no washing, bodies packed side by side through the winter, was very nearly a purpose-built lice farm.

The infected louse bites, the man scratches, and the scratching rubs the louse’s droppings into the broken skin. And roughly 12 days later, the disease announces itself. And when it announces itself, it does so loudly: sudden crushing headache, fever spiking high and staying there, pains through the muscles. And then around the fifth day, the rash, dark mottled spots spreading from the trunk out across the body.

The Elizabethans called typhus the spotted death. The mind goes early and hard. Delirium is a signature of the disease. The very name typhus comes from a Greek word for smoke or stupor. And the wards of a stricken jail filled with men raving, shouting at people who weren’t in the room, climbing over their neighbors in the dark, untreated in a malnourished population. It killed maybe one man in three or four, sometimes worse, and it killed in about two weeks. And in a locked building where everyone shared lice, one case became 40 with the efficiency of fire moving through thatch.

The disease was so at home in English jails that it developed a habit that terrified the entire legal profession. And this might be the most darkly fitting turn in the whole story. Prisoners were the sick ones, but prisoners got taken to court, marched from the cells, lice riding along in their rags, and stood in a packed indoor courtroom, judges and jurors and lawyers and spectators shoulder-to-shoulder with the accused for hours.

In the summer of 1577 at the Assizes held in Oxford Castle, the fever came up out of the jail with the prisoners and swept the courtroom, and within about 40 days some 300 people connected with those sessions were dead. Dead among them, the Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, Sir Robert Bell, one of the most senior judges in England, and the high sheriff of the county. The event became known as the Black Assize, and it repeated.

Exeter Assizes in 1586 did the same thing. And centuries later in 1750, with the medieval buildings still in use, the fever crossed from Newgate into the adjoining courtroom and killed 60 men, including the Lord Mayor of London and two judges. Those later dates fall past our period, I know. But the buildings and the filth were straight-line inheritances from the medieval prison, and the outbreaks are the strongest evidence we have of what the air in those wards carried. The judges who sent men to the jails died of the jails. The prisoners couldn’t reach their judges with a knife or a petition half the time, but the lice managed it.

Take one ordinary Newgate prisoner of the 1300s and stand in his ward with him. He’s in the stonehold in irons he can’t afford to remove in the dark, eating when charity or family manages to get bread past a keeper who steals alms. Winter is stripping the heat out of him. The man chained next to him has the fever and is raving.

Two others in the ward have already died this month, and their bodies lay among the living for a day or so until the coroner could view them, since burying a prisoner unviewed cost the jailer money, and nothing in that building happened at a cost to the jailer. His trial for a theft he may or may not have committed is five months away.

If the jury acquits him, he owes fees before he can leave, and the fees are growing weekly, and the law the whole time holds as a matter of settled principle that this man is not being punished. Executions in this same world took a morning. The cart and the rope done before dinner. I don’t think medieval people were confused about which fate was worse.

And the ones who fled to the church door and swore away their whole country rather than await trial were showing us their answer. Everything I’ve described so far was London, but the fee system ran the length of England, and the country jails left us actual price lists. So, we can talk about this like the business it was.

The fee for taking a prisoner’s irons off had its own name in the trade, the “sowet,” and the going rate varied wildly by county and by the appetite of the individual keeper. At Winchester in 1358, the jailkeeper charged a flat 5 pence to strike a man’s fetters. Coventry’s prison code a bit later set 2 pence as the acceptable figure.

The keeper of the county jail in Somerset preferred a subscription model, a shilling a week, every week, for the privilege of staying out of irons. And if you ever missed a payment, the metal went back on. And at the ugly end of the scale sits a petition from a man named Thomas Aspund complaining that the sheriff of Cambridge had demanded £10 for the removal of his irons. £10.

A skilled craftsman might see £10 pass through his hands in two or three years. A fee that size is a ransom with paperwork. And when a prisoner couldn’t pay or wouldn’t, the irons became the instrument, and one surviving petition walks us through exactly how that went.

A chaplain from Hereford, a churchman named William Heming, put his complaint in writing toward the end of the 1400s, and his own account of his treatment runs like this: His captor set on him a pair of great fetters and bolts of iron too heavy to bear, then bolted his arms apart, fixed a yard from each other, so the man couldn’t feed himself, couldn’t cover himself, couldn’t wipe his own face, then laid him in stocks in a deep pit, then hoisted him so he hung suspended off the ground in the whole apparatus and kept him from meat, from drink, and from his friends until he agreed to pay a fine of £10, 6 shillings and 8 pence for his deliverance.

Heming paid or promised to, and then he and the friends who’d guaranteed the money were made to sign a bond, swearing never to sue or trouble the man who’d done it to him. A priest hung up in irons in a hole and starved into signing away his own right to complain. His petition survives in the Chancery files in among hundreds of others.

Prisoners describing themselves lying in irons at the point of death, eaten by vermin, praying the king’s grace for a hearing. Each strip of parchment standing for a man who had somehow scraped together a clerk’s fee from inside a cell where he couldn’t afford bread. Most of those petitions have no recorded answer.

You wrote your suffering onto a strip of parchment, paid a clerk to carry it upstream toward the crown, and waited in the dark to find out if anyone official ever looked at it. Set against all that extraction, the only thing keeping the poorest prisoners alive was organized pity, and medieval England, to its credit, organized quite a lot of it.

Feeding prisoners was one of the seven works of mercy every Christian heard preached right there, alongside feeding the hungry and burying the dead. And visiting the imprisoned was understood as something Christ himself had commanded. So the charity flowed through a dozen channels. Basket men made rounds of the cook shops and wealthy houses collecting leftovers, scraps and trenchers and day-old loaves, and carried the baskets to the jails.

Parishes took collections. Guilds earmarked funds for imprisoned members, and Londoners put the prisons in their wills in enormous numbers on the same page as their parish church and the hospitals. Turn through the enrolled wills of medieval London, and the phrase keeps surfacing: bequests to the prisoners of Newgate, of Ludgate, of the Fleet and the Marshalsea, and the Compters. A few shillings here, a fixed annual sum there, sometimes bread specified by the loaf.

A marshal of London who died in 1359 left money to the city’s hospitals and its prisons in the same breath. People wrote those clauses with their eyes open. Everyone in that city had walked past the grates. Everyone knew with total precision what a bequest to the prisoners was for. It was for keeping specific human beings currently audible from the street from dying of hunger inside the wall.

The grates were the interface between the two worlds, and they shaped daily life on both sides of the bars. A prison that depended on begging built begging into the architecture: barred openings at street level where prisoners could stand and call to the passing city. At the Fleet, the grate was—