According to the strict letter of the law it was a constable's duty, immediately after making an arrest, to deliver his prisoner to the sheriff; but, as a matter of fact, this was seldom done, and the sheriff had little or nothing to do with accused persons until after their conviction. In the absence of proper lock-ups the village stocks were commonly used by the parish constable to secure his man until he could conveniently bring him before a magistrate but, as time went on, confinement in the stocks became the normal mode of punishment for minor offences, and it was no rare thing for a constable to keep a troublesome parishioner in this uncomfortable custody for a space, on his own initiative and responsibility. Prisons had existed in some form or other from the earliest times. The first dungeon was doubtless coeval with the first fortress, and London's great jail at Newgate dated back to the twelfth century. But it was not then a penal establishment in our sense of the term, in so far that imprisonment was hardly as yet the recognised punishment for the ordinary run of criminals; such places were rather convenient strongholds in which to confine debtors till they paid their dues, suspected persons till they confessed their crimes, Jews till they disgorged their wealth, and generally for the safe-guarding of political opponents or private enemies whom it was desirable to keep under lock and key. It was not until the fifteenth century that we find a regularly graduated connection between punishment by imprisonment and punishment by fine; the penalty for drawing a sword in the City of London, for example, was then half a mark or fifteen days, for inflicting a wound with the same, twenty shillings or forty days, and so on. The pillory was a more serious affair, and its pains were beyond the power of a constable to inflict; it was generally resorted to in cases where the offender had been guilty of practices which rendered him particularly obnoxious to the people, so that the punishment he received at their hands was nicely proportioned to the degree of unpopularity he had earned for himself. The baker who gave short weight, or the dairyman who watered his milk, received such a lesson at the hands of his customers that he was little likely to repeat his offence. It was customary, moreover, in sentencing a man to the pillory, to make the punishment fit the crime as much as possible, and to compel the culprit to advertise his guilt in some personally unpleasant fashion; thus, the man who had stolen a cart was forced to pull it through the streets to the place of punishment, and an offending vintner had to drink a full draught of the sour wine that had disagreed with the frequenters of his shop.