Even in the earlier years of the war there were doubtless many of the prisoners who would adopt teaching as their work, and who would, among the 1,500 who shared their quadrangle, find pupils willing to pay for lessons, which would relieve the monotony of their existence. There would be fencing masters, who would fence with sticks, for any who had clandestinely obtained or manufactured weapons dared not let them be seen; there were many traders who made money legitimately, acting as middlemen between the market at the gate and the prisoners in the enclosure; and there were, the curse of the prison, those illicit traders and usurers who bought the rations and clothes of their fellow prisoners and reduced them to starvation, the unfortunate victims being, as a rule, the slaves to the vice of gambling. The moral degradation of the gambler was, from the first, a source of trouble to the authorities, and it was the wretched condition of this vicious class which was the foundation for many of the complaints made by the French agents. Both the usurious traders and their victims were liable to punishment, as were also the manufacturers of, and dealers in, contraband articles. These last were assisted by persons outside, who are best described as smugglers, their part in the proceedings being to convey from this foreign community to the British subjects outside, goods which, either from their intrinsic character or from their liability to duty, could not be sold legitimately. In the reports of the Commissioners of the Transport Board, given in full in Nos. 29 and 30 of the correspondence published in the Appendix to the Parliamentary Report already referred to, it is stated that “the prisoners in all the depots in the country are at full liberty to exercise their industry within the prisons, in manufacturing and selling any articles they may think proper excepting those which would affect the Revenue in opposition to the Laws, obscene toys and drawings, or articles made either from their clothing or the prison stores, and by means of this privilege some of them have been known to carry off upon their release more than 100 guineas each.” At some of the depots, special restrictions had to be made, on account of objections raised in the neighbourhood on the ground that the prisoners, supported out of the revenue provided by the taxes which people had to pay, were allowed to undersell the inhabitants in their own local industries. Thus at Penryn the Frenchmen were stopped from making pastry and confectionery, and the prohibition of the manufacture of straw plait at Norman Cross was supposed to be based on the same grounds, combined with the fact that it was thrown on the market duty-free. This point will be dealt with later.