译文有感（二九五）：伦敦的新门监狱
2019-01-08 19:44阅读：
伦敦的新门监狱
新门监狱
Newgate Prison
新门监狱位于伦敦市新门街(Newgate Street)和老贝利街(Old
Bailey)的拐角处。原址坐落于伦敦罗马墙上的一个门——新门。
该监狱重建于12世纪，在1904年拆毁。它经过多次的扩建和重修，最终投入使用是从1180年到1902年，长达700多年的时间。
历史
在12世纪初期，亨利二世开始了法律改革(legal
reforms)以此使国王能够更多的对司法的控制。
几十年后的1236年，为了显著扩大监狱，国王改变了监狱的塔楼，当然仍然是一个入口通向监狱，而地下部分和相邻的建筑保持不变长达大学两个世纪。然而，15世纪，新门监狱需要重新修复，许多的犯人死于过度拥挤，猖獗的疾病和糟糕的卫生条件。曾有一年，22人死于发烧。
由于新门监狱情况太过严重，1419年，市政府官员暂停关闭监狱。
后来，一些伦敦人将他们的财产遗赠用以修建监狱。
1406年，专门为女囚犯增添了单独的牢室。
20年后，监狱按性别将犯人分开。
15世纪，新门监狱可以容纳大学300
名囚犯。尽管囚犯住在单独的住处，但是他们相互可以交谈。
监狱毁于1666年的伦敦大火，并于1672年重建，扩展到了街道的南边。
监狱（prison）
新门监狱容纳各式各样的犯人。一些轻微犯罪和盗窃行为的罪犯呆在这里，
如强行进入住宅或者高速公路抢劫，而其他人表现严重如强奸和谋杀等罪行。
重建(reconstruction)
政府划拨50,000英镑，伦敦市提供了一块1,600英尺长50英尺深的地，用以扩大这个监狱，和建造一个新的会议室。
该工程由George
Dance设计，动工于1770年，完成于1780年6月，而此时在Gordon
riots时期刚好爆发了暴乱，因此，这个监狱被大火毁坏，墙体遭受了严重的损坏，而修缮又花去了约30,000英镑。
Dance 的监狱最终在1782年彻底完工。
死刑(executions)
1783年，伦敦的绞刑架由泰伯恩(Tyburn)迁至了新门。即使在监狱外面的公众场合，依然会吸引大量的人群，当然，在获得伦敦市市长或者执行官的允许，也是能够去探望囚犯的。
19世纪期间，这个监狱引起了改革家Elizabeth
Fry的注意，她尤其关注女犯人以及她们孩子的生化状况，后来她向下议院(House of Commons
)提出提议。
1858年，监狱重建，其内部被分为单人的独立单室。
1868年，公众绞刑被停止使用，取而代之的则是在监狱内部行邢。
1868年5月26日，Michael
Barrett 成为新门监狱最后一个公众处死的犯人。
总计1169人在这个监狱被实施死刑。
拆除(demolition)
这个监狱在1902年关闭，并在1904年拆除，如今的中央刑事法庭(the
Central Criminal Court)取代了原址。
文化(culture)
'黑如新门的门环'是一句伦敦人(cockney)用来描述监狱门上的门环。
维基百科中的新门监狱
Newgate Prison
The second Newgate Prison: A West View of Newgate (c. 1810) by
George Shepherd
Newgate Prison was a prison at the corner of Newgate Street
and Old Bailey just inside the City of London, England, originally
at the site of Newgate, a gate in the Roman London Wall. Built in
the 12th century and demolished in 1904, the prison was extended
and rebuilt many times, and remained in use for over 700 years,
from 1188 to 1902.
History
Newgate, the old city gate and prison
In the early 12th century, Henry II instituted legal reforms
that gave the Crown more control over the administration of
justice. As part of his Assize of Clarendon of 1166, he required
the construction of prisons, where the accused would stay while
royal judges debated their innocence or guilt and subsequent
punishment. In 1188, Newgate was the first institution established
to meet that purpose.
A few decades later in 1236, in an effort to significantly
enlarge the prison, the king converted one of the Newgate turrets,
which still functioned as a main gate into the city, into an
extension of the prison. The addition included new dungeons and
adjacent buildings, which would remain unaltered for roughly two
centuries.
By the 15th century, however, Newgate was in need of repair.
The building was collapsing and decaying, and many prisoners were
dying from the close quarters, overcrowding, rampant disease, and
bad sanitary conditions. Indeed, one year, 22 prisoners died from
'gaol fever'. The situation in Newgate was so dire that in 1419,
city officials temporarily shut down the prison.
Some Londoners bequeathed their estates to repair the prison.
Following pressure from reformers who learned that the women's
quarters were too small and did not contain their own latrines,
obliging women to walk through the men's quarters to reach one,
officials added a separate tower and chamber for female prisoners
in 1406.
Two decades later, the executors of Lord Mayor Dick
Whittington were granted a licence to renovate the prison in 1422.
The gate and gaol were pulled down and rebuilt. There was a new
central hall for meals, a new chapel, and the creation of
additional chambers and basement cells with no light or
ventilation. The prison housed both male and female felons and
debtors and separated the prisoners into wards by gender. By the
mid-15th century, Newgate could accommodate roughly 300 prisoners.
Though the prisoners lived in separate quarters, they mixed freely
with each other and visitors to the prison.
There were three main wards—the Master’s side for those could
afford to pay for their own food and accommodations, the Common
side for those who were too poor, and a Press Yard for special
prisoners. The king often used Newgate as a holding place for
heretics, traitors, and rebellious subjects brought to London for
trial.
The prison was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666,
and was rebuilt in 1672 by Sir Christopher Wren, extending into new
buildings on the south side of the street.
Elevation and plan of Newgate Prison published in 1800
In 1770, Parliament having granted £50,000 towards the cost,
the City of London provided a piece of ground 1,600 feet (500 m)
long and 50 feet (15 m) deep to enlarge the site of the prison and
to build a new sessions house. The work followed the designs of
George Dance and was almost finished when it was stormed by a mob
during the Gordon riots in June 1780. The building was gutted by
fire, and the walls badly damaged. The cost of repairs was
estimated at £30,000. Dance’s new prison was finally completed in
1782.
The new prison was constructed to an architecture terrible
design intended to discourage law-breaking. The building was laid
out around a central courtyard, and was divided into two sections:
a 'Common' area for poor prisoners and a 'State area' for those
able to afford more comfortable accommodation. Each section was
further sub-divided to accommodate felons and debtors.
Prison life
Newgate exercise yard, 1872, by Gustave Doré
All manner of criminals stayed at Newgate. Some committed
acts of petty crime and theft, breaking and entering homes or
committing highway robberies, while others performed serious crimes
such as rapes and murders. The number of prisoners in Newgate for
specific types of crime often grew and fell, reflecting public
anxieties of the time. For example, towards the tail end of Edward
I's reign, there was a rise in street robberies. As such, the
punishment for drawing out a dagger was 15 days in Newgate;
injuring someone meant 40 days in the prison.
Upon their arrival in Newgate, prisoners were chained and led
to the appropriate dungeon for their crime. Those who had been
sentenced to death stayed in a cellar beneath the keeper’s house,
essentially an open sewer lined with chains and shackles to
encourage submission. Otherwise, common debtors were sent to the
'stone hall' whereas common felons were taken to the 'stone hold'.
The dungeons were dirty and unlit, so depraved that physicians
would not enter.
The conditions did not improve with time. Prisoners who could
afford to purchase alcohol from the prisoner-run drinking cellar by
the main entrance to Newgate remained perpetually drunk. There were
lice everywhere, and jailers left the prisoners chained to the wall
to languish and starve. The legend of the 'Black Dog', an emaciated
spirit thought to represent the brutal treatment of prisoners, only
served to emphasize the harsh conditions. From 1315 to 1316, 62
deaths in Newgate were under investigation by the coroner, and
prisoners were always desperate to leave the prison.
The cruel treatment from guards did nothing to help the
unfortunate prisoners. According to medieval statute, the prison
was to be managed by two annually elected sheriffs, who in turn
would sublet the administration of the prison to private 'gaolers',
or 'keepers', for a price. These keepers in turn were permitted to
exact payment directly from the inmates, making the position one of
the most profitable in London. Inevitably, often the system offered
incentives for the keepers to exhibit cruelty to the prisoners,
charging them for everything from entering the gaol to having their
chains both put on and taken off. They often began inflicting
punishment on prisoners before their sentences even began. Guards,
whose incomes partially depended on extorting their wards, charged
the prisoners for food, bedding, and to be released from their
shackles. To earn additional money, guards blackmailed and tortured
prisoners. Among the most notorious Keepers in the Middle Ages were
the 14th-century gaolers Edmund Lorimer, who was infamous for
charging inmates four times the legal limit for the removal of
irons, and Hugh De Croydon, who was eventually convicted of
blackmailing prisoners in his care.
Indeed, the list of things that prison guards were not
allowed to do serve as a better indication of the conditions in
Newgate than the list of things that they were allowed to do.
Gaolers were not allowed to take alms intended for prisoners. They
could not monopolize the sale of food, charge excessive fees for
beds, or demand fees for bringing prisoners to the Old Bailey. In
1393, new regulation was added to prevent gaolers from charging for
lamps or beds.
Not a half century later, in 1431, city administrators met to
discuss other potential areas of reform. Proposed regulations
included separating freemen and freewomen into the north and south
chambers, respectively, and keeping the rest of the prisoners in
underground holding cells. Good prisoners who had not been accused
of serious crimes would be allowed to use the chapel and recreation
rooms at no additional fees. Meanwhile, debtors whose burden did
not meet a minimum threshold would not be required to wear
shackles. Prison officials were barred from selling food, charcoal,
and candles. The prison was supposed to have yearly inspections,
but whether or not they actually occurred is unknown. Other reforms
attempted to reduce the waiting time between jail deliveries to the
Old Bailey, with the aim of reducing suffering, but these efforts
had little effect.
Over the centuries, Newgate was used for a number of purposes
including imprisoning people awaiting execution, although it was
not always secure: burglarJack Sheppard twice escaped from the
prison before he went to the gallows at Tyburn in 1724. Prison
chaplain Paul Lorrain achieved some fame in the early 18th century
for his sometimes dubious publication of Confessions of the
condemned.
Executions
An execution taking place at Newgate
In 1783, the site of London's gallows was moved from Tyburn
to Newgate. Public executions outside the prison – by this time,
London's main prison – continued to draw large crowds. It was also
possible to visit the prison by obtaining a permit from the Lord
Mayor of the City of London or a sheriff. The condemned were kept
in narrow sombre cells separated from Newgate Street by a thick
wall and receiving only a dim light from the inner courtyard. The
gallows were constructed outside a door in Newgate Street. Until
the 20th century, future British executioners were trained at
Newgate; one of the last was John Ellis in 1901.
During the early 19th century the prison attracted the
attention of the social reformer Elizabeth Fry. She was
particularly concerned at the conditions in which female prisoners
(and their children) were held. After she presented evidence to the
House of Commons improvements were made. In 1858, the interior was
rebuilt with individual cells.
In November 1835 James Pratt and John Smith were the last two
men to be executed for sodomy. From 1868, public executions were
discontinued and executions were carried out on gallows inside
Newgate, in a shed built in an inner yard. Dead Man's Walk was a
long stone-flagged passageway, partly open to the sky and roofed
with iron mesh (thus also known as Birdcage Walk). Executed
criminals were buried beneath its flagstones and their initials
engraved into the stone wall above. Online photographs of a
passageway of brick arches within the Old Bailey site purporting to
be Dead Man's Walk are not: it was demolished when Newgate was
demolished in 1904. Michael Barrett was the last man to be hanged
in public outside Newgate Prison (and the last person to be
publicly executed in Great Britain) on 26 May 1868. George Woolfe
was the last man hanged in Newgate's shed, on 6 May 1902. In total
(publicly or otherwise), 1,169 people were executed at the
prison.
Demolition
A cell and the galleries at Newgate in 1896
The prison closed in 1902, and was demolished in 1904. The
Central Criminal Court (also known as the Old Bailey after the
street on which it stands) now stands upon its site.
The original door from a prison cell used to house St. Oliver
Plunkett in 1681 is on display at St. Peter's Church in Drogheda,
Ireland. The original iron gate leading to the gallows was used for
decades in an alleyway in Buffalo, New York, USA and is currently
housed in that city at Canisius College.
Notable prisoners
Newgate Execution bell; in the church of St
Sepulchre-without-Newgate
Other famous prisoners at Newgate include:
Thomas Bambridge – former warden of Fleet Prison
George Barrington – Irish pickpocket
John Bellingham – assassin of the Prime Minister Spencer
Perceval
John Bernardi, Jacobite conspirator, imprisoned at Newgate
for forty years without trial
Robert Blackbourn, Jacobite, imprisoned in Newgate for fifty
years
John Bradford (1510–1555) – religious reformer
John Cooke – English Prosecutor of Charles I, regicide
executed in 1660
Giacomo Casanova – Venetian libertine, imprisoned for alleged
bigamy
Ellis Casper, who helped to perpetrate the 1839 Gold Dust
Robbery held in Newgate before being transported to Van Diemen's
Land in 1841.
Elizabeth Cellier – also known as the 'Popish Midwife':
incarcerated in 1679 for her alleged part in the 'Meal-Tub
Plot'
William Chaloner – currency counterfeiter and con
artist
William Cobbett – Parliamentary reformer and
agrarian
Thomas Neill Cream – prominent doctor who was tried and
convicted for poisoning several of his patients, claimed to be
notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper while on the
gallows.
Daniel Defoe – author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders
(whose protagonist is born and imprisoned in Newgate
Prison)
Claude Du Vall – highwayman, held in Newgate from December
1669 until his execution in January 1670
Amelia Dyer (1837–1896), known as the 'Reading baby farmer' –
serial killer, hanged 10 June 1896
Daniel Eaton – the subject of the defence offered by Percy
Bysshe Shelley in his essay, A Letter to Lord
Ellenborough
John Frith – Protestant priest and martyr
Mary Frith, alias Moll Cutpurse – pickpocket and
fence
Lord George Gordon – UK politician after whom the Gordon
Riots are named
Ben Jonson – playwright and poet, imprisoned for the 22
September 1598 killing of his fellow actor Gabriel Spenser in a
duel. Freed by pleading benefit of clergy.
Jørgen Jørgensen (1780–1841) – a Danish adventurer, who was
on board one of the ships that established the first settlement in
Tasmania in 1801; governor of Iceland for two months in 1809; a
British spy; and transported to Tasmania in 1825
William Kidd, known as 'Captain Kidd' – pirate and privateer:
hanged at Execution Dock, Wapping in 1701
John Law – economist
Thomas Lloyd (stenographer) – first stenographer of the U.S.
Congress
James MacLaine, known as the 'gentleman highwayman' –
notorious robber
Sir Thomas Malory – highwayman, probable author of Le Morte
d'Arthur
Catherine Murphy – counterfeiter; the last woman to be
officially executed by burning in Great Britain in
1789
Titus Oates – anti-Catholic conspirator
William Penn – the Quaker who founded the state of
Pennsylvania
Miles Prance – alleged witness to the murder of Edmund Berry
Godfrey
John Rogers (1505–1555) – Bible translator and religious
reformer, burnt at the stake 4 February 1555
Jack Sheppard – thief, escapee
Ikey Solomon – successful and infamous fence of the late 18th
and early 19th centuries
Robert Southwell – English Jesuit priest, poet and martyr,
hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in 1595
Owen Suffolk – Australian bush-ranger
Jane Voss (alias Jane Roberts) – highwaywoman and thief,
executed in 1684
Mary Wade – youngest female convict transported to
Australia
Edward Gibbon Wakefield – British politician, the driving
force behind much of the early colonization of South Australia, and
later New Zealand
Joseph Wall, a colonial administrator who was hanged for
having a British soldier flogged to death
John Walter Sr. – founder of The Times, for libel on the Duke
of York
Catherine Wilson – nurse and suspected serial killer: last
woman hanged publicly in London
In literature
A door from the prison in the Museum of London
A record of executions conducted at the prison, together with
commentary, was published as The Newgate Calendar, which inspired a
genre of Victorian literature known as the Newgate
novel.
The prison appears in a number of novels by Charles Dickens,
including Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale
of the Riots of 'Eighty and Great Expectations, and is the subject
of an entire essay in his work Sketches by Boz.
The prison is also depicted in:
Geoffrey Chaucer's anthology The Canterbury Tales (The Cook's
Tale)
Daniel Defoe's novel Moll Flanders
William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams
Michael Crichton's novel The Great Train Robbery
Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle
Leon Garfield's novel Smith
Joseph O'Connor's novel Star of the Sea – where one section
concerns a character's imprisonment and subsequent escape from
Newgate
Louis L'Amour's novel To The Far Blue Mountains – where the
main character Barnabas Sackett is first imprisoned and later
escapes from Newgate
Bernard Cornwell's novel Gallows Thief
David Liss's novel A Conspiracy of Paper, and its sequel, A
Spectacle of Corruption
John Gay's ballad opera The Beggar's Opera
Richard Zacks's novel The Pirate Hunter (The True Story of
Captain Kidd)
The Wachowskis' film V For Vendetta
George MacDonald Fraser's novel Flashman's Lady
Jonathan Barnes' The Somnambulist
Marguerite Henry's novel King of the Wind
C. J. Sansom's novel Dark Fire
Jackie French's novel Tom Appleby, Convict Boy
Coventry Patmore's poem A London Fete
James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff's novel Botany
Bay
Kathleen Winsor's novel Forever Amber
Donald Thomas's short story 'The Execution of Sherlock
Holmes'.
Robert McCammon's novel Speaks the Nightbird Volume 2: Evil
Unveiled
T. C. Boyle's novel Water Music
Erica Jong's novel Fanny: Being the True History of the
Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones
Keith Miles's novel Frost Fair under the pseudonym of Edward
Marston
Rachel Florence Roberts's novel The Medea
Complex
Michelle Lowe's novel Cherished Thief
Robert McCammon's novel Freedom of the Mask
L. A. Meyer's novel The Wake of the Lorelei Lee
The film Plunkett & Macleane
Referenced in the online interactive novel game 'Fallen
London'
William Gibson's novel ‘’The Peripheral’’
In popular culture
The phrase '[as] black as Newgate's knocker' is a Cockney
reference to the door knocker on the front of the
prison.
