London’s Bridewell was a revolutionary institution. Established in 1553 to aid London’s vagrants, beggars and disorderly poor, it laid the foundations for the Victorian workhouse and played a crucial role in the history of British penal practice. The aim of the institution was to both punish and reform the so called idle poor: in other words, imprisonment was used in an attempt to control and transform people. This made Bridewell an oddity among early modern prisons (in fact, Bridewell was not always classified as a prison and was variously called a prison, a hospital and a house of occupations). As A.L. Beier highlights, Bridewell’s regimen pre-empted developments in penal practice that Foucault places in the eighteenth century: Bridewell’s Governors and officers used confinement, labour, uniforms and regulation of diet in an attempt to impose order on to the bodies of London’s poor.
In reality, the application of this discipline was far from uniform. This paper will examine the gap between the lofty ideals of the institution’s founders and the day-to-day experiences of the vagrants imprisoned and punished within Bridewell’s walls. Using Statutes, Bridewell’s Charter and ‘Rules and Ordinances’, and the extensive court books I will examine how these ideals were applied to the messy reality of policing sixteenth century London.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 