by prisoners, the examination of the prisoners themselves at uncertain times; above all, the intimate acquaintance which those in authority should have of the movements and doings of their charges at all seasons--these are the best safeguards against escapes. In early days attempts to break prison were generally rude and imperfect. Now and again a rescue was accomplished by force, at risk, however, of a levée of the citizens in vindication of the law. This was the case in 1439, when Phillip Malpas and Robert Marshall, the sheriffs of London, recovered a prisoner who had been snatched from their officers’ hands.[131] Sometimes the escape followed a riotous upheaval of the inmates of Newgate, as when two of the Percies and Lord Egremond were committed to Newgate for an affray in the North Country between them and Lord Salisbury’s sons. Soon after their committal these turbulent aristocrats “broke out of prison and went to the king; the other prisoners took to the leads of the gate, and defended it a long while against the sheriffs and all their officers,” till eventually the aid of the citizens had to be called in. In 1520 a prisoner who was so weak and ill that he had to be let down out of Newgate in a basket broke through the people in the Sessions Hall, and took sanctuary in Grey Friars Church. The rest of the story, as told by Holinshed, states that after staying six or seven days in the church, before the sheriffs could speak with him, “because he would not abjure (the country) and ask a crowner, with violence they took him hence, and cast him again into prison, but the law served not to hang him.” In the ‘Calendar of State Papers,’ under date 1593, there is a reference to a more ingenious method of compassing the enlargement of a prisoner. The scheme was to convey a living body out of Newgate in a coffin, instead of the dead one for which it had been prepared. The prisoner was a member of a congregation or secret conventicle, and the coffin had been made by subscription of the whole society, at a cost of four-and-eightpence. The State Papers give the examination of one Christopher Bowman, a goldsmith, on the subject, but unfortunately gives few details as to the meditated escape. The idea was to write a wrong name on the coffin-lid, and no doubt to trust to a corrupt officer within the prison for the substitution of the bodies. I find another curious but brief reference to escapes in the State Papers about this date. It is the endorsement of “the examination of Robert Bellamy, of the manner of his escape from Newgate, from thence to Scotland, and then over to Hamburgh. His arrest in the Palsgrave’s country, and his conveyance to Duke Casimir.”