Bridewell Prison and Workhouse

Challenges of a Growing Surplus Population

Sixteenth-century England was a period of enormous change. The unraveling of feudalism and the emergence of capitalism saw rising food prices, a change in official religions, dissolution of the monasteries, and the disbandment of private armies. These events released agricultural laborers, unemployed soldiers, and redundant monastic servants to seek work in the growing towns and cities. Those who could not find work roamed from town to town as homeless vagabonds; others were forced, by sickness or misfortune, into an impoverished life of debauchery, begging, and theft. In London alone, with a population of 75,000 in 1550, 12,000 desperately poor immigrants from around the country arrived, threatening to envelop the metropolis in vice and crime: “Citizens found themselves besieged in their streets by the leper with his bell, the cripple with his deformities and the rouge with his fraudulent scheme” (O'Donoghue, 1923, p. 137). Concern for the poor soon became mixed with fear of these “savages,” “beasts,” and “incorrigibles.” “Respectable” citizens—and especially the new merchant classes—wanted “to protect themselves from the unscrupulous activities of this vast army of wandering parasites” (Salgado, 1972, p. 10), and demanded that something be done to make the city streets safe for the conduct of business.

Photo 2 The Bridewell concept carried over to the United States. Here Chicago's Bridewell, also known as Cook County Jail, shows men being forced to work in the prison's quarry.

Chicago Daily News.

The Disrespectable Undeserving Poor

Based on ideas in Lutheran writing and models in Flemish Europe, in 1552, the ill-fated Protestant Bishop of London Nicholas Ridley requested that Bridewell Palace be donated to the city for the purpose of housing and transforming the problem of the streets. At Ridley's urging, a committee of city [Page 83]aldermen and commoners distinguished between the respectable deserving poor and the disrespectable undeserving poor. The respectable poor included those suffering from sickness and contagious diseases, wounded soldiers, curable cripples, the blind, fatherless and pauper children, and the aged poor. These people were the responsibility of the more fortunate and would be segregated by their class and condition, given immediate assistance, including shelter, treatment, adequate maintenance, and in the case of the children, education and training, in a variety of houses and hospitals around the city. Such “respectable” citizens were seen as having fallen upon hard times through no moral fault of their own, by reason of failure in business, ill health, or other misfortunes.

In contrast, the disrespectable poor, including vagabonds, tramps, rogues, and a variety of dissolute, “loose” and immoral women, harlots, unfaithful wives, and prostitutes, were thought to be worthless. Most vilified was the “robust beggar,” whose career was seen as a choice for a soft and easy life. Such people were to be punished with imprisonment and whipping, before being trained to honest work in a prison, which should also be a house of work, with opportunities for the amendment of character. The “stubborn and foul” would make nails and to do blacksmith's work; the weaker, the sick, and the crippled might make beds and bedding. The premises would also be used to train poor and resistant children into various trades. According to Ridley, Bridewell was intended “to deal with the poverty and idleness of the streets, not by statute, but by labor. The rogue and the idle vagrant would be sent to the treadmill to grind corn, but the respectable poor—whether young, not very strong, or even crippled—would be taught profitable trades, or useful occupations” (O'Donoghue, 1923, pp. 150–151). Training children for work was thought to be an early form of crime prevention.

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