It will be made pretty plain, I think, in subsequent pages, that these wise and righteous regulations were both flagrantly ignored and systematically contravened. The rule against farming out the prison may have been observed, and it may not be clearly proved that the sheriffs ever took toll from the gaoler. But the spirit of the law, if not its letter, was broken by the custom which presently grew general of making the gaolership a purchaseable appointment. The buying and selling of offices, of army commissions, for instance, as we have seen practised within recent years, at one time extended also to the keeperships of gaols. It is recorded in the Calendar of State papers that one Captain Richardson agreed for his place as keeper of Newgate for £3000. A larger sum, viz. £5000, was paid by John Huggins to Lord Clarendon, who “did by his interest” obtain a grant of the office of keeper of the Fleet prison for the life of Huggins and his son. One James Whiston, in a book entitled ‘England’s Calamities Discovered, or Serious Advice to the Common Council of London,’[22] strongly remonstrates against this practice, which he stigmatizes as “bartering justice for gold.” His language is plain and forcible. “Shall the public houses built at the city charges [it appears that at that time Ludgate, Newgate, the Fleet, and the Compters were all put up to the highest bidder] be sold for private lucre?... He that sells a gaoler’s place sells the liberty, the estate, the person, nay, the very lives of the prisoners under his jurisdiction.” “Purchased cruelty,” the right to oppress the prisoners, that is to say, in order to recover the sums spent in buying the place, “is now grown so bold that if a poor man pay not extortionary fees and ruinous chamber-rent, he shall be thrown into holes and common sides to be devoured by famine, lice, and disease. I would fain know,” he asks, “by what surmise of common sense a keeper of a prison can demand a recompense or fee from a prisoner for keeping him in prison?... Can he believe that any person can deserve a recompense for opening the door of misery and destruction?... But now such is the confidence of a purchaser, that to regain his sum expended he sells his tap-house at prodigious rates, ... he farms his sheets to mere harpies, and his great key to such a piece of imperious cruelty (presumably his chief turnkey) as is the worst of mankind.” Following the same line of argument, he says “it will perhaps be thought impertinent to dispute a gaoler’s demands for admitting us into his loathsome den, when even the common hangman, no doubt encouraged by such examples, will scarce give a malefactor a cast of his office without a bribe, demands very formally his fees, forsooth, of the person to be executed, and higgles with him as nicely as if he were going to do him some mighty kindness.” Eventually an act was passed specifically forbidding the sale of such places.