The rations of food were equally meagre. In some prisons indeed nothing was given; in others, the prisoners subsisted on water-soup--“bread boiled in mere water.” The poor debtors were the worst off. For the felon, thief, murderer, or highwayman there was a grant either in money or in kind--a pennyworth of bread per diem, or a shilling’s worth per week, or a certain weight of bread. But the debtors, who formed three-fourths of the permanent prison population, and whose liabilities on an average did not exceed ten or fifteen pounds a piece, were almost starved to death. The bequests of charitable people, especially intended for their support, were devoted to other uses; creditors seldom if ever paid the “groat,” or fourpence per diem for subsistence required by the Act. Any alms collected within the prison by direct mendicancy were commonly intercepted by the ruffians who ruled the roost. When gaolers applied to the magistrates for food for the debtors the answer was, “Let them work or starve”; yet the former was forbidden, lest the tools they used might fall into the hands of criminal prisoners, and furnish means of escape. At Exeter the prisoners were marched about the city soliciting charity in the streets. One Christmas-tide, so Howard says, the person who conducted them broke open the box and absconded with the contents. The debtors’ ward in this gaol was called the “shew,” because the debtors begged by letting down a _shoe_ from the window. Prison buildings were mostly inconvenient, ill-planned, and but little adapted for the purposes of incarceration. Many of them were ancient strongholds--the gate of some fortified city, the keep or castle or embattled residence of a great personage. Some lords, spiritual and temporal, with peculiar powers in their own districts, once had their prisons, so to speak, under their own roof. The prisons lingered long after the power lapsed, and in Howard’s time many of the worst prisons were the private property of individuals,[175] who protected the keepers, their lessees, and pocketed the gains wrung from the wretched lodgers. The Duke of Portland was the proprietor of Chesterfield gaol, which consisted of one room with a cellar under it. For this accommodation, and the privilege it conferred upon him of demanding gaol fees, the keeper paid the Duke an annual rent of eighteen guineas. “The cellar,” Howard says, “had not been cleaned for months, nor the prison door opened for several weeks.” Another disgraceful prison was that owned by the Bishop of Ely. One bishop had been compelled to rebuild it in part fourteen years before Howard’s visit, but it was still bad. It had been so insecure that the keeper resorted to a most cruel contrivance in order to ensure safe custody. Prisoners were “chained down upon their backs upon a floor, across which were several iron bars, with an iron collar with spikes about their necks, and a heavy iron bar over their legs.” This barbarous treatment formed the