Page 148 [148]
OCR
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 secondaries —who are the deputies of the sheriffs, answering in some respects to the sub-sheriffs — of counties — had each a ‘‘com p’ ter’ or " counter’
