The Fleet: Its Rivers, Prison, and MarriagesAshton, John
History
The Fleet: Its Rivers, Prison, and Marriages
Ashton, John
Fleet Prison (London, England); Fleet, River (England)
the confinement, hard work, and enforced sequestration from society,
largely aided by the good advice of the Chaplain, very seldom fails
to effect its object, and render that lad a decent member of the
commonweal. It just arrests him in his downward path, there is no
publicity, the thing is never chronicled in any Newspaper, as it might
be, supposing no Bridewell existed, and the case was brought before a
police magistrate--it need never be known outside his family circle,
and he escapes the taint of being a gaol bird.
Bridewell seems to have been long associated with apprentices, not all
of them "_Thomas Idles_," I am happy to say; and Hatton in "The New
View of London" (1708) writes, showing the tender care that the City of
London have always had for their poor:
"It is also an Hospital for Indigent Persons, and where 20
Art Masters (as they are called) being decayed Traders as
Shoemakers, Taylors, Flax-dressers, &c., have Houses, and their
Servants, or Apprentices (being about 140 in all) have Cloaths
at the House Charge, and their Masters having the Profit of
their Work do often advance by this means their own Fortunes,
and these Boys, having served their time faithfully, have not
only their Freedom, but also £10 each towards carrying on their
respective Trades, and many have even arrived from nothing to be
Governors."
This arrangement has, of course, had to "march with the times," and in
1860 the Master of the Rolls approved of, and sanctioned, a scheme of
the Charity Commissioners, whereby nearly all the funds appertaining
to Bridewell are utilized by two industrial schools called "King
Edward's Schools," most impartially divided--one at Witley, in Surrey,
affording accommodation for two hundred and forty boys, and another in
St. George's Fields, Lambeth, for two hundred and forty girls; so that,
even in these latter days, Bridewell still exists, and, if the spirits
of its numerous benefactors have the power to see the manner in which
their money is being spent, I fancy they would not grumble.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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