The Jail - John Irwin

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in England, Ralph Pugh notes: “There is no doubt that the Normans found a number of prisons in the England that they invaded, particularly upon royal manors in the south, and, in effect, they added to their number. This they did by building many castles in which both king and barons shut up their powerful adversaries and during the Anarchy very many of the common people also.”9

      The jail, however, was a new institution in medieval England. It was a special structure, erected and administered by the local authority, the sheriff, for the sole purpose of holding persons to be delivered to the royal courts for judgment. Sheriffs began establishing jails in the early eleventh century or slightly before.10 By 1166, Henry II, the powerful Norman king, “enjoined all sheriffs to ensure that in all counties where no gaols existed gaols should now be built.”11

      

      The need for this new institution arose from a great increase in the number of detached persons. At this time, England, along with all of Europe, was moving out of feudalism with its isolated, mostly autonomous fiefdoms. By the late eleventh century Muslim control of the Mediterranean had ended, and trade once again began to connect European populations and to result in the cultivation of urban centers.12 New towns appeared, and towns grew into cities. European kings began reestablishing and extending their hegemonies. After having remained stable for centuries, the population in most parts of Europe was increasing. At the same time, the feudal system was unraveling. More and more persons were cut loose from the land and from the two basic social organizations of the agricultural society, the family and the tribe.13 Henri Pirenne, in tracing the development of the merchant class, describes this well. Speaking of the increase in population, he writes:

      It had as a result the detaching from the land [of] an increasingly important number of individuals and committing them to the roving and hazardous existence which, in every agricultural civilization, is the lot of those who no longer find themselves with their roots in the soil. It multiplied the crowd of vagabonds drifting about all through society, living from day to day by alms from the monasteries, hiring themselves out at harvest-time, enlisting in the armies in time of war and holding back from neither rapine nor pillage when occasion presented.14

      Some of the newly uprooted found more or less legitimate means to survive within the changing social order. As feudalism gave way to mercantilism, some new jobs appeared. The ongoing wars, and especially the Crusades, occupied (and killed) many; mendicant religious orders absorbed some; and the recurring plagues eliminated many thousands. Nevertheless, a large portion of the displaced became part of the rabble. Outlaws who lived by robbing, plundering, poaching, and smuggling abounded in the forests and countryside. (The legend of Robin Hood comes from these times.) Disreputable persons filled the towns and the cities. As Urban Tigner Holmes reports:

      The ribauz, or good-for-nothings, were always on the edge of a crowd. They begged and plundered at the slightest provocation. They hung around outside the door of the banquet hall when a large feast was held. The king of England had three hundred bailiffs whose duty it was—though not all at one time—to keep these people back as food was moved from the kitchens to the hall, and to see that guests were not disturbed. Frequently in twelfth-century romances a beautiful damsel is threatened with the awful fate of being turned over to the ribauz. Nothing more horrible can be imagined. These people accompanied armies on their expeditions, helping in menial tasks and plundering what was left by the knights and other fighting men.15

      The growth of the rabble had two important influences on the social-control efforts of English rulers. In the first place, it presented them with new social problems to which they responded with increasingly punitive measures, which reached their peak at the end of the eighteenth century with the notorious Grand Assizes and the excessive use of the death penalty.16 In the second place, it made necessary a drastic increase in the use of imprisonment for detention before trial. Historically, before the number of detached persons grew troublesome, it was considered unnecessary to hold a person before judgment had been passed. With few exceptions, persons were trusted because they were firmly connected to the church, guild, tribe, community, or town; only the occasional unattached person charged with an offense might need some special provision. For example, Alfred the Great, the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon king who stabilized England after the Danish invasions, attempted to ensure the appearance of displaced suspects by attaching them to local citizens:

      If such a stranger, merchant, or wayfaring man, came to be suspected of any crime and could not be found, he whose guest he had last been was summoned to account for him. If he had not entertained the stranger for more than two nights, he might clear himself by oath; but if the stranger had lodged with him three nights, he was bound to produce him, or answer, and pay “weregild,” or “wite,” for him, as for one of his own family.17

      The increasing threat attributed to the rabble may be seen in a later statute that prescribes death for “ruffians” who a second time “shall wander, loiter, or idle use themselves and play vagabond.”19 In the sixteenth century, England introduced the less blatantly cruel and punitive workhouses, called bridewells, to manage and reform the poor.20 By the middle of the eighteenth century, in many counties the “county gaol [was] also a bridewell” and many of the prisoners sentenced to houses of correction, to be engaged in hard labor in order to reform them, were actually idle and were treated the same as the felons and debtors held in the jails.21 By the nineteenth century, the bridewells, as well as the poorhouses, had been completely amalgamated with the jails.22

      English colonists brought the tradition of the jail with them to America, but in their first half-century in the New World they did not rely on it very heavily.23 The early settlers were mostly respectable people—middle class and religious—and the few rabble among them were manageable by expulsion, which was feasible in North America with its vast areas between towns and cities and its open frontier. The few nonrabble offenders were released on bail until adjudication and then fined, publicly shamed, whipped, banished, or, in a few cases, executed. Incarceration was not used.24 During the eighteenth century, however, members of other social classes, including thousands of transported disreputables, many of them convicts, poured in. Many towns and all cities constructed jails. Still, the threat of the rabble was not as great as it was in England, and so these early jails were small and much more humanely managed than England’s. They were patterned after rooming houses, and the prisoners suffered no restrictions other than the confinement.25

      At the end of the eighteenth century the problem of managing the growing urban rabble increased, and several eastern cities—notably Philadelphia, New York, and Boston—constructed larger jails, such as Newgate in New York and the Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia. The disreputability and the increased number of prisoners are suggested in the following description of the Walnut Street jail shortly after the Revolutionary War:

      It is represented as a scene of promiscuous and unrestricted intercourse, and universal riot and debauchery. There was no separation of color, age or sex, by day or by night; the prisoners lying promiscuously on the floor, most of them without

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