The King's Bench Prison of Micawber's time stood in the Borough Road. It was much more roomy and endurable than the Marshalsea, and much less wretched than the Fleet. It was enclosed by a wall thirty-five feet high, garnished with the usual chevaux-de-frise, and was entered through a stone lodge three stories in height. The jail buildings themselves carried four stories, and were broken up into nearly 250 rooms, with a chapel, and out-buildings for officials and for cookery and other necessities. The courtyard was comparatively spacious, and was especially famous for its racket games. Some champion scores of the day were scored by the collegians at the King's Bench, who certainly had time enough for practice to perfect themselves in the sport. Like the Fleet and the Marshalsea, the King's Bench had its tap-room and its coffee-room, its poor side and its pay side, and its club, which nightly, over a pipe and pot, forgot for a few hours that the jail yard was not all out-of-doors. The prison derived its title from the fact that it was the gaol of the High Court of Justice, over which royalty was supposed to sit as supreme judge. So it became the Queen's Bench when England was ruled by a queen, and under the Commonwealth, when royalty was not recognized, bore the name of the Upper Bench Prison. The original King's Bench Prison was situated in Southwark as early as the reign of Richard II. It was broken into and sacked by the Kentish rebels under Wat Tyler, who, on this occasion, performed a similar service to the old Marshalsea close at hand. It was to the King's Bench that Chief Justice Gascoigne so intrepidly committed the Prince of Wales, afterward Henry V; and down to the time of Oldys the room in which the wild young crony of Sir John Falstaff spent his term in gaol, was known as the Prince of Wales's Chamber. The old King's Bench seems to have been a decidedly easy-going jail. In 1579 we learn from the chronicles that the prisoners used to eat in a little low parlor next the street, and that they always had an audience staring at them through the barred windows, such as nowadays honors the repasts of the wild beasts in the zoo. During this year the prisoners petitioned for an enlargement of the prison and for a chapel, both of which requests seem to have been granted. Defoe, who sampled the King's Bench as well as Newgate and the Fleet, describes it as "not near so good" as the latter little prison, and complained that "to a man who had money the Bench was only the name of a prison." Indeed, the license of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries in the King's Bench would be hardly credible to persons accustomed only to the rigid discipline of modern jail management. In all the debtors' gaols of this period, the gambler and the swindler, the pickpocket, and even the footpads, who robbed by violence, plied their trades. Drunkenness was universal, and the commitment of loose women and the freedom of entry from without made