George Fox,[144] the Quaker, agreed with the keeper and his wife for meat and drink, chamber, and other accommodation at a certain rate. But he refers to one of their party being put “down in the Doomesdale[145] amongst the felons,” and this, it appears, was a “noysome, filthy, stinking hole, where was a puddle of ... and filth over their shoes and the ... of the felons, and straw almost broken to chaffe with their long lying thereon and full of vermin, wherein is neither chimney nor easing house.” Confirmatory evidence as to how felons fared in 1667 may be deduced out of a Statute of Charles II.[146] “Whereas,” it says, “there is not yet any sufficient provision made for the relief and setting to work of poor and needy persons committed to the common gaol for felony and other misdemeanours, who many times perish before their trial, and the poor there living idly and unemployed become debauched and come forth instructed in the practice of thievery and lewdness,” etc. The excellent plan was proposed that the profits of the prisoners’ labour should be placed to their relief. But to find useful labour within prison walls has always been a most difficult problem, and the world outside was always far too busy to see to it. The prisons of the eighteenth century were very much like those that had been before, but perhaps we know more about them through the great work of John Howard, _The State of the Prisons_. It is a matter of history how that grim, conscientious Puritan went where the ruling classes neither cared nor dared to venture.[147] For, besides the dreadful stench which stuck to his notes and garments, deep in the windowless (window tax), airless rooms and dungeons through which he went, down in the stale, cramped yards[148]—when there were any—without space or sun, and in which even the supply of water was mostly beyond the bounds and so inaccessible,[149] rising amidst the putrefaction of those places, there lurked the dreaded typhus or gaol fever. It had always been about since prisons were used, and sometimes proved the Nemesis of neglect.[150] In 1522, at the assize in the castle at Cambridge,[151] many of the knights and gentlemen attending caught the infection from the “sauor of the prisoners or the filthe of the house.” Writing of the year 1577, we read in _Baker’s Chronicle_:[152] “About this time when the judges sate at the Assize in Oxford, and one Rowland Jenks, a bookseller, was questioned for speaking opprobrious words against the queen, suddenly they were surprised with a pestilent savour, whether rising from the noisome smell of the prisoners or from the damp of the ground is uncertain; but all that were present, almost every one, within forty hours died.” Much the same happened at Exeter in 1586[153] and at Taunton in 1730, and some hundreds perished at both these places.