Before the establishment of imprisonment as a regular form of punishment, the majority of long term prisoners in early modern England were held not as a result of criminal activity whether of conscience or otherwise, but as a consequence of debts they owed. John Howard found in the 1770s and 80s that half of all prisoners across the country were debtors, which was probably a reduction on earlier decades. Many prisons, from York to London, were purpose built in the early modern period (or rebuilt) with large debtor populations in mind, dividing sites through architectural design between felons and debtors and, as has often been overlooked, by gender. Previous work has tended to dismiss the regularity of female debtors often placing an upper limit of c.5% (Condon 1964, Innes 1980, Haagen 1986, Finn 2003). However, research that will be presented here on the Fleet prison and Woodstreet Compter’s commitment registers (1712-1803) show women to have been regular inhabitants of confined space. While they never constituted the majority and their proportion decreased significantly at the end of the century, in some decades female populations ranged between 15-30% of occupants. This paper, beginning with the new quantitative data on female prison population, will then examine literary descriptions of prisons (both fictional and memoirs of those who inhabited them), visual depictions where available, and architectural designs to explore how delineated female space was constructed both by occupants and forced upon them by designers of their confinement.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 