At Cambridge the workhouse was also a House of Correction. In 1628 many houses had already been built for the benefit and employment of the poorer sort of people, and in that year Hobson gave the town the site without Barnwell Gate on condition that a more convenient place should be erected. This was soon afterwards begun, and was partially paid for by certain sums, which had been sent to the town for the plague-stricken poor in 1631, and which after that time remained in the hands of the Corporation. In 1675 Hobson's workhouse was still not only a House of Correction but a place where five combers could be employed if they wanted work, and where all the poor people of the town that desired to have work in spinning and weaving were to be provided with employment and to be paid the usual wages[548]. [548] Cooper's _Annals of Cambridge_, Vol. III., pp. 204 seqq. and 569, 570. In these cases the workhouses are all in large towns, but in one country district there were small institutions of the kind in the parishes. The justices responsible for Little Holland in Lincolnshire report in 1635 that in "all our seuerall parishes wee haue a Towne stocke with a workhouse, a master and utensills and that there hath beene aboue two hundred poore people sett on worke and imployed weekly by the officers[549]." [549] _D. S. P._, Chas. I., Vol. 315, No. 99. Workhouses were thus fairly numerous and varied greatly in size. They were not then like a modern workhouse, but were places where people who could work were sent that they might be trained and employed. They were, too, municipal or parochial institutions, whereas Houses of Correction were not parochial, but were either municipal or county undertakings. [Sidenote: 7 _d_. Bridewells.] In the sixteenth century we have seen that the distinction between the two was not very great, but in this period the new Houses of Correction are much more like gaols. This is especially the case with those erected by public funds, those which were privately endowed still retained much of their old character. London, Bristol, Norwich, Gloucester and many other places had organised their Bridewells either before or during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and we have already noticed that there were four Houses of Correction in Devonshire in 1598[550]. If was during the early part of the seventeenth century however that Houses of Correction appear to have been established in every county. They formed a necessary part of the system of the time. You could not provide work and maintenance for everybody unless you had some arrangement for coercing idlers. A great many of these institutions appear to have been established or revived after 1597. In 1598 one was founded at Liverpool, and in 1601 some measures of the same kind were taken in Nottingham and in Kendal, Westmoreland[551].