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.
