The sixteenth century showed no advance in the matter of humanity.[126] Torture, which, legally or illegally, has always been a ready trick of statesmen, developed after 1468,[127] and under the Tudor sovereigns the rack was ever creaking to extort confessions. The “common” criminals were treated with the utmost severity; in 1530 an Act was passed by which all poisoners were to be boiled alive.[128] Burning was the penalty appointed for heresy, high and petty treason[129] (_i.e._ murder of a husband by a wife, murder of a master or mistress by a servant,[130] and several offences against the coin), and, unlike the punishment of boiling, continued legal until 1790.[131] The right hand might be taken off before hanging for aggravated murder, or a man might be hung in chains and left to perish.[132] There was the drawing and quartering in some executions, and ordinary hangings were exceedingly numerous.[133] Men lost their hands for exporting sheep and for libel,[134] and there was branding, etc., for perjury, and sometimes for persistent vagrancy.[135] A picture of the prisons has been left us in a work of 1545. “I see,” observes the monk whose complaint[136] is given, “also a pytyful abuse for presoners. O Lord God, their lodging is to bad for hoggys, and as for their meat it is euil enough for doggys, and yet, the Lord knoweth, thei haue not enough thereof. Consyder, all ye that be kyngs and lordys of presons, that inasmoch as ye shut up any man from his meate, ye be bound to giue him sufficyant fode for a man and not for a dogge.” He further declares that the charges were greater than any at the “dearest inn in Ingland,” and says that men lay six and seven years in prison before the oncoming of their case. About the year 1552 the City authorities selected what had been a palace at Bridewell[137] (given by Edward VI.) for (among other purposes) locking up, employing, and (as heretofore, according to Holinshed) whipping beggars, prostitutes, and night-walkers of all sorts.[138] Later on similar detention places were also called Bridewells, after the first one at Blackfriars just alluded to. In 1597 they planned Houses of Correction,[139] and in 1609 it was ordered that they should be builded in every county.[140] Though they became, in practice, one with the common gaols, they lasted at least in name till 1865.[141] But to resume our survey of ordinary prisons. The seventeenth century affords the usual evidence of what walls can hide. The gaolers, as of old, appear to have been all powerful;[142] sometimes friendly, often the reverse, always extortionate. John Bunyan, during his twelve years’ incarceration, was allowed to work for his family—for a large part of the time in tolerable surroundings; but while in the Gate House prison he was charged huge fees.[143] The prisoners hung collecting bags out of their windows on Sunday mornings.