Prisons as places of detention are very ancient institutions. As soon as men had learned the way to build, in stone, as in Egypt, or with bricks, as in Mesopotamia, when kings had many-towered fortresses, and the great barons castles on the crags, there would be cells and dungeons in the citadels. [1] But prisons as places for the reception of “ordinary” (as distinct from state or political) criminals for definite terms only evolved in England many centuries afterwards [2] ; whilst imprisonment

So far we have endeavoured to trace the course of the usual punishments inflicted in various ages on the “common” criminals when they were brought up charged with the graver crimes. There were, however, ways of escape open, which are sufficiently general and important to be dealt with separately. The Ordeals. —The invocation of miraculous guidance, to determine the guilt or innocence of a person accused, has been resorted to from time immemorial by all manner of methods throughout the four conti

The Christians had always been an exclusive body of people, at first from fear, and afterwards from fanaticism. They excommunicated all offending members, thus not only cutting them off from fellowship, but also depriving them of those rites which in their creed were necessary for salvation. This custom of excluding from communion was from the first a formidable spiritual weapon among believers; what it became when the Christians could also wield the sword of temporal power we shall see in the c

Since the poor human body has always been sensitive, so at the promptings of the revenge instinct it has always been assailable and most readily beaten. Naturally enough the Duke of Gloster exclaims—in that most subtle second act of Henry VI. —“Have you not beadles in your town and things called whips?” Of course they had. The serf, the varlet, the vagabond, the lunatic, and the petty offender were all whipped with uncertain severity; [485] most likely until the victim was bloody and until the o

Towards the middle of the seventeenth century there lived at Manningtree a certain Matthew Hopkins, whose name deserves perhaps to be recorded. Not that he stands by any means apart, a veritable Lucifer among the devils. Sprenger in Germany, Torquemada in Spain, Grillandus in Italy, de l’Ancre in France, and other persecutors over Christendom, were better known and had killed more people. But Hopkins went to work on English ground. The people were then professing the same creed that the majority

As the abnormal and the rationally eccentric were considered witches, and held to have been disciples of the devil, so the more obviously sense-bereft were thought to be controlled by the fiends within them. Both witches and lunatics were held to be beneath the sway of infernal powers, but the former as willing agents of the devil, and the latter as involuntary victims, who were deemed to be possessed. In ancient Egypt, by the Temple of Saturn, [612] in classic Greece with the Asclepieia, and by