Oldal 148 [148]
126 THE CITY GOVERNMENT
a coffin on the table before them. In Rowlandson’s view, drawn in
1809, there are eleven convicts, two of them women. In 1817 some
attempt was made to classify the prisoners, and about the same date
the coffin was no longer placed on the chapel table.
The unhealthiness of prisoners must, in part at least, account for
the severity of the criminal law. There was no alternative. A man
condemned to long imprisonment was as surely condemned to death as
if he had been sent straight to the gallows. Gaol fever soon made the
sentences equal. Unfortunately innocent people often suffered with the
guilty, and in 1750 the Lord Mayor, two of the judges, and some sixty
other persons, caught infection at the Sessions and died of it. Three
years later Lord George Gordon, whose followers had destroyed the
old prison, died of this distemper in the new one.
There were several other gaols in and round the city. Howard in
his famous book describes some of them. Bridewell, which has given
its name to so many country houses of detention, stood near St.
Bride’s Church, and actually on the spot part of which is now covered
by the vicarage of St. Bride’s (designed by Mr. Basil Champneys). It
| was of the nature
of a workhouse;
but the second¬
aries —who are
the deputies of
the sheriffs, an¬
swering in some
respects to the
sub-sheriffs — of
counties — had
each a ‘‘com p¬
’
ter’ or " counter’