The keepers of Newgate had always been notorious for their violence and intemperance. In 1447 James Manning left the body of one of his prisoners in the thoroughfare “causing a nuisance and great danger to the King who was passing there”; when he refused to remove it after several warnings, and after his wife had spoken “shameful words,” they were both taken to the compter. Two years later his successor was also imprisoned for “a dreadful assault” upon a female prisoner. So the keepers snuffed up the contagion of brutality as well as that of gaol fever. Perhaps the most famous of these gaolers, in the years before the Fire, was Andrew Alexander who in the reign of Mary I hurried his Protestant inmates to the fires of Smithfield with the words “Rid my prison! Rid my prison!” One favoured prisoner who played the lute for Alexander and his wife, who “do love music very well,” was granted the best lodgings in the prison. But the conditions of the gaol could not be escaped- the “evil savours … threw the poor gentleman into a burning ague.” Alexander offered to keep him in his own parlour “but it was near the kitchen, and the smell of the meat was disagreeable.” The smell is pre-eminent in these accounts from The Chronicles of Newgate while, in the dungeons themselves, “there was turbulence, rioting, disorders.”
Those who could afford liquor were continually drunk on “sherry sack … amber-coloured canary or liquorish Ipocras” while those imprisoned for their religious or political beliefs raved amid their shackles. “There are seditious preachings by fifth monarch men at Newgate,” according to the records “and prayers for all righteous blood,” while the prison was so overcrowded that the majority of prisoners had “an infectious malignant fever.” It was “a place of infamy and great distress” where lice were the prisoners’ “constant companions.” One inmate was forced to lie in a coffin for a bed, while another spent fourteen days “without light or fire, living on half penny worth of bread a day.” Here in 1537 eleven Catholic monks “were left, standing and chained to pillars, to die of starvation.”
It was in this period that there first emerged the legend of the “Black Dog”-“a walking spirit in the likenesse of a blacke Dog, gliding up and down the streets a little before the time of Execution, and in the night whilst the Sessions continued.” Some believed the creature to be an emanation of the miseries of twelfth-century Newgate, when famine compelled certain prisoners to cannibalism. Others surmised that it was a being which walked “in the Name of Service and Office”; that it was, in other words, a phantom created by the wickedness of the gaolers. By the early eighteenth century, however, “Making The Black Dog Walk” was the phrase used to designate “the prisoners’ brutal treatment of new inmates.” The present ivy-covered wall at the bottom of Amen Court, close to the old Sessions House yard, is supposed still to be the haunt of this malign spirit.
In the sixteenth century, however, the Black Dog was only one of the many terrors of Newgate. An underground dungeon, known as “Limbo,” was described as being “full of horrors, without light and swarming with vermin and creeping things.” This was the condemned hold beneath the gates which was “a most fearful, sad, deplorable place … They lie like swine upon the ground, one upon another, howling and roaring-it was more terrible to me than death.” This is the constant refrain of those who had entered Newgate-“being more full of horror than death”-which of course marked one of the entrances to London itself. When one prisoner, imprisoned for his religious beliefs, cried out: “I would not change my chain for my Lord Mayor’s great chain” he was in his agony making the connection between the sufferings of Newgate and the oppression of the city.
An anonymous drama of the early seventeenth century, Dick of Devonshire, contains the plea of a man as “loaden with gyves shackles amp; fetters” as any thief that lay in Newgate, confirming the notion that it was a prison from which it was impossible to escape. But it also became a symbol of brotherhood among thieves-“bothe shakeled in a fetter”-or, as Bardolph says to Falstaff, “Two and two, Newgate fashion” and, in Dekker’s Satiro-mastix:
we’ll walk arme in arme
As tho’ we were leading one another to Newgate.
It is in part a symbol of defiance under oppression and the prospect of death. That is why one cry of the rogue or thief was “Newgate or Victory!” The prison becomes the central token of authority and thus, as we shall see, the first object of London rioters who were determined to destroy the order of the city. In that capacity, too, it has often been the object of fire and flame, with the Great Fire itself as a notable token of wrath or vengeance.
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So it rose again in 1670, embellished and decorated in a manner appropriate to one of the city’s greatest public monuments. There was even a bas-relief model of Richard Whittington’s cat, and for a while the prison was known popularly as “the Whit”; no more lucid demonstration could be given of its intimate connection with London. It rose five storeys, spanning the entry to Newgate Street from Giltspur Street and the steep incline of Snow Hill. There were now five “sides” for various felons and debtors, together with a newly designed press room (the object of “pressing to death” was to extort confessions), condemned holds, a chapel and “Jack Ketch’s kitchen.”
On arrival the prisoners were fettered and “ironed,” passing under the gate to be led to their appropriate dungeon; they passed, on the left, the keeper’s house beneath which was the “hold” for those condemned to hang. A prisoner confined in this subterranean area, which did not perhaps differ very much from the dungeon before the Fire, is quoted in Anthony Babington’s The English Bastille as saying that there were “some glimmerings of light … by which you may know that you are in a dark, opaque, wild room.” Entered by a hatch, it was entirely constructed of stone with an “open sewer running through the middle” which diffused a “stench” that entered every corner. Fastened into the stone floor itself were hooks and chains to castigate and confine those who were “stubborn and unruly.”
Immediately to the right of the gate was the drinking cellar. This was run by a prisoner who was allowed a profit on sales. Since it was also below ground it was lit by candles “placed in pyramidal candlesticks made of clay”; those inmates who could afford the prices were allowed to drink themselves into senselessness day or night, with gin variously known as “Cock-my-Cap,” “Kill-Grief,” “Comfort,” “Meat-and-Drink” or “Washing-and-Lodging.” One prisoner recalled that “such wretchedness abounds there that the place has the exact aspect of hell itself.” Beyond this cellar tap-room, going along Newgate Street, were located a “stone hall” for common debtors and a “stone hold” for common felons. These were “virtually unlighted dungeons” strewn with “unutterable filth.” “Trampling on the floor, the lice crawling under their feet made such a noise as walking on shells which are strewn over garden walks.” The rest of the prison rose upward, for “master” prisoners and female prisoners.