Newgate Gaol was London's - and probably the world's - most notorious gaol in its heyday.
Prisoners were kept there in extremely squalid conditions. Those awaiting execution at the dreaded Tyburn Triple Tree were imprisoned here.
And crowds gathered at the gaol until as late as the 1860s to witness public executions.
The floor was so covered in lice that a crunching sound could be heard when people walked. And it was still standing in the early 1900s.
A new book tells you all you need to know...
The days when the jailhouse rocked
THE GAOL: THE STORY OF NEWGATE by Kelly Grovier
(John Murray, £25)
By Christopher Hudson
28th July 2008
Daily Mail
The crowds that gather for film premieres are minuscule compared with the massed throngs who, until the mid-19th century, gathered for public hangings.
Squalid conditions: Prisoners in Newgate prison in 1735
Execution days were like rock festivals, except the entertainment was free, the music was provided by the onlookers and the acts lasted no longer than the time it took for the celebrity performer on the scaffold to wriggle and choke until he slumped in death.
Newgate, the theatre staging these performances, was a name that, for 700 years, struck despair in the hearts of those, guilty and innocent alike, who found themselves within its filthy cells and bleak stone corridors clanking with the iron fetters of convicts awaiting their judgment day.
Kelly Grovier, a mild-looking university lecturer, populates this gloomy stage with tales of the more celebrated felons who passed through Newgate since the time of Robin Hood, whose real name, he thinks, may have been Roger Godberd.
Prisoners in these early centuries also probably included Sir Thomas Malory, author of Morte d'Arthur, and the playwright Christopher Marlowe.
These were the years of the peine forte et dure, whereby prisoners who refused to enter a plea, as a way of avoiding trial, were stretched on the ground with a plank on their chest, on to which metal weights were slowly added until either they co-operated or, after appalling suffering, their ribcage collapsed and they died.
The most barbarous punishments were at the behest of religion. Smithfield, the ten-acre 'smooth field' to the north of Newgate, was where many of the big city festivities took place in the 16th century, from royal tournaments to holiday fairs and burnings at the stake.
First, it was Protestants roasting Catholics who refused to recant their beliefs; then, with the accession of Queen Mary, it was Catholics roasting Protestants.
Unlike hangings, the stake offered a range of possibilities: a mercifully quick death from carbon monoxide poisoning before the flames could reach flesh, or a slow agony if the flames were flattened by a stiff breeze, or if the faggots were green and the felon's family were forbidden to add kindling to accelerate the flames.
The most famous Newgate executioner was Jack Ketch. A legendary figure of whom ballads were written and caricatures sold, he was better as a hangman than an axe-man.
He took five strokes to kill one nobleman; another, Lord Russell, was finished off with a saw.
A room in Newgate was set aside to display the heads of executed traitors that were parboiled in Ketch's kettle with bay salt and cumin to delay putrefaction.
Newgate was destroyed in the Great Fire. Rebuilt in 1672, it was more than ever a tomb for the living.
Intended to house 150 felons, it crammed in 500 people. The stench of faeces and disease was as horrifying as the wailing and screeching in the maze of unventilated cells.
The bigger the bribes to warders, the better the conditions. Underground were the dungeons and the Stone Hold into which no glimmer of light entered.
Some cells were reserved for condemned women, all of whom understood their only hope of avoiding execution was to become pregnant before sentencing and have the punishment reduced to transportation or the pillory. By the middle of the 18th century, more than 150 capital offences, ranging from murder to forgery and the theft of five shillings, kept the gibbets in front of Newgate in need of permanent oiling.
Grovier introduces a gallery of rogues and tells their fates with relish. This was an age when pirates, murderers and highwaymen enjoyed the same fascinated attention, under the pretence of moral instruction, as Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse do today, and the trials and executions of men such as Captain Kidd and the thief Jack Sheppard (who escaped five times from Newgate) were public events. After 700 years of avoiding any improvement, Newgate was brought to justice by two reformers.
A visit by the young Charles Dickens in 1825 so appalled the writer that, in essays and novels, he recreated Newgate's terrors for his vast readership. He lived to see his campaign to end public hangings become law.
By sheer force of character, the philanthropist Elizabeth Fry shamed the prison wardens into allowing her to revolutionise the stinking hell-holes of the women's cells into a model prison which caught the imagination of Europe.
Without its theatre of death, Newgate shrivelled. Its last performance was a sale of mementoes as its grim walls were finally pulled down.
dailymail.co.uk
Prisoners were kept there in extremely squalid conditions. Those awaiting execution at the dreaded Tyburn Triple Tree were imprisoned here.
And crowds gathered at the gaol until as late as the 1860s to witness public executions.
The floor was so covered in lice that a crunching sound could be heard when people walked. And it was still standing in the early 1900s.
A new book tells you all you need to know...
The days when the jailhouse rocked
THE GAOL: THE STORY OF NEWGATE by Kelly Grovier
(John Murray, £25)
By Christopher Hudson
28th July 2008
Daily Mail
The crowds that gather for film premieres are minuscule compared with the massed throngs who, until the mid-19th century, gathered for public hangings.
Squalid conditions: Prisoners in Newgate prison in 1735
Execution days were like rock festivals, except the entertainment was free, the music was provided by the onlookers and the acts lasted no longer than the time it took for the celebrity performer on the scaffold to wriggle and choke until he slumped in death.
Newgate, the theatre staging these performances, was a name that, for 700 years, struck despair in the hearts of those, guilty and innocent alike, who found themselves within its filthy cells and bleak stone corridors clanking with the iron fetters of convicts awaiting their judgment day.
Kelly Grovier, a mild-looking university lecturer, populates this gloomy stage with tales of the more celebrated felons who passed through Newgate since the time of Robin Hood, whose real name, he thinks, may have been Roger Godberd.
Prisoners in these early centuries also probably included Sir Thomas Malory, author of Morte d'Arthur, and the playwright Christopher Marlowe.
These were the years of the peine forte et dure, whereby prisoners who refused to enter a plea, as a way of avoiding trial, were stretched on the ground with a plank on their chest, on to which metal weights were slowly added until either they co-operated or, after appalling suffering, their ribcage collapsed and they died.
The most barbarous punishments were at the behest of religion. Smithfield, the ten-acre 'smooth field' to the north of Newgate, was where many of the big city festivities took place in the 16th century, from royal tournaments to holiday fairs and burnings at the stake.
First, it was Protestants roasting Catholics who refused to recant their beliefs; then, with the accession of Queen Mary, it was Catholics roasting Protestants.
Unlike hangings, the stake offered a range of possibilities: a mercifully quick death from carbon monoxide poisoning before the flames could reach flesh, or a slow agony if the flames were flattened by a stiff breeze, or if the faggots were green and the felon's family were forbidden to add kindling to accelerate the flames.
The most famous Newgate executioner was Jack Ketch. A legendary figure of whom ballads were written and caricatures sold, he was better as a hangman than an axe-man.
He took five strokes to kill one nobleman; another, Lord Russell, was finished off with a saw.
A room in Newgate was set aside to display the heads of executed traitors that were parboiled in Ketch's kettle with bay salt and cumin to delay putrefaction.
Newgate was destroyed in the Great Fire. Rebuilt in 1672, it was more than ever a tomb for the living.
Intended to house 150 felons, it crammed in 500 people. The stench of faeces and disease was as horrifying as the wailing and screeching in the maze of unventilated cells.
The bigger the bribes to warders, the better the conditions. Underground were the dungeons and the Stone Hold into which no glimmer of light entered.
Some cells were reserved for condemned women, all of whom understood their only hope of avoiding execution was to become pregnant before sentencing and have the punishment reduced to transportation or the pillory. By the middle of the 18th century, more than 150 capital offences, ranging from murder to forgery and the theft of five shillings, kept the gibbets in front of Newgate in need of permanent oiling.
Grovier introduces a gallery of rogues and tells their fates with relish. This was an age when pirates, murderers and highwaymen enjoyed the same fascinated attention, under the pretence of moral instruction, as Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse do today, and the trials and executions of men such as Captain Kidd and the thief Jack Sheppard (who escaped five times from Newgate) were public events. After 700 years of avoiding any improvement, Newgate was brought to justice by two reformers.
A visit by the young Charles Dickens in 1825 so appalled the writer that, in essays and novels, he recreated Newgate's terrors for his vast readership. He lived to see his campaign to end public hangings become law.
By sheer force of character, the philanthropist Elizabeth Fry shamed the prison wardens into allowing her to revolutionise the stinking hell-holes of the women's cells into a model prison which caught the imagination of Europe.
Without its theatre of death, Newgate shrivelled. Its last performance was a sale of mementoes as its grim walls were finally pulled down.
dailymail.co.uk