London’s Bridewell Hospital was founded in 1553 for the relief of vagrants and the punishment of the idle poor. Set up as a charity by the city authorities, it quickly became one of London’s most feared and notorious prisons. The archives of this ‘hospital’ shed invaluable light on everyday life in early modern England. This paper outlines women’s experience in the prison. It gives details of a number of women who found themselves prosecuted and detained mainly for sexual offences. Some of these women became desperate and attempted suicide. Others resisted and either tried to escape, or to manipulate the regime as best they could. Many were detained and simply disappeared from the records. The paper focuses on the lives of the following women: Thomasine Breame, Mary Dornelly, Alice Furres, Elizabeth Evans, Anne Levens, Black Luce, Rose Flower, Francis Hudson and — perhaps the most unruly woman of all in Elizabethan London — Jane Trosse.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 