Bridewells

In Tudor times it was unusual to imprison people convicted of committing serious crime as many offences were punishable by death. Common punishments for lesser offences included whipping, public humiliation and branding with hot irons. However, petty criminals, vagrants, prostitutes and the destitute were often locked up in bridewells.

These early houses of correction were named after Bridewell, a London jail established in 1555 in a converted royal palace. Located near St Bride’s Well off Fleet Street, Bridewell housed mainly petty criminals and beggars.

Later bridewells sprang up around the country, often located in barns, alehouses and outbuildings. [Ignatieff]

Bridewell inmates were forced to work - usually carrying out spinning or weaving. Justices of the Peace could sentence anyone they considered to be "idle" to a stint in a bridewell to "learn the virtues of hard work". [The National Archives]

Cambridgeshire bridewells

Throughout Cambridgeshire a number of buildings were used as local prisons, mainly for people who had committed petty offences.

For example, archives from the Huntingdonshire Quarter Sessions Court show that in 1802, one offender was sentenced to be whipped and spend six months inside a bridewell for stealing from an outhouse. Two others were transported for the same offence.

Parish records from St Botolph Church in Cambridge show that in 1780, a Trumpington apprentice by the name of Mary Taylor was committed to a bridewell for "misbehaviour". [Cambridgeshire Archives]

The old Cambridge Castle off Castle Hill had been used as a jail since at least the mid-Fourteenth Century. Before 1601 the old castle barracks were made into a bridewell. Gallows stood in the castle courtyard. [Cambridgeshire County Council]


The site of the old Cambridge Castle


An illustration of Cambridge Castle in the 17th Century.

The Spinning House

Another bridewell was located at the Spinning House in St Andrew’s Street, Cambridge, established in 1628 by Thomas Hobson, the man behind the phrase “Hobson’s choice”.

The Spinning House was run as a house of correction for the University of Cambridge and the old Cambridge Borough. It was mainly used to imprison petty offenders and “such lewd women as the Proctors apprehended in houses of ill fame,” according to historians Ronald Gray and Derek Stubbings. Prostitutes, referred to as “ladies of pleasure”, were often punished by the town crier, who would discipline them with his whip. [Gray and Stubbings]

In 1852 the northern part of the Spinning House was used as the university vice-chancellor’s prison while the southern part served as a lock-up and police station.

British philanthropist and prison reformer John Howard carried out a series of inspections of British jails and bridewells in the 1770s.

In his memoirs, he recorded seeing 17 women confined to a tiny workroom in the Spinning House. The room’s “extreme offensiveness occasioned a sickness, which so alarmed the vice-chancellor that he ordered them all to be discharged. Two or three of them died, however, within a few days after their release.” Howard recalled seeing five cages “about seven feet square” inside one room later added to the Spinning House. [Baldwin Brown]

The demise of bridewells

Overcrowding and a lack of solitary cells led to the building of the County Gaol on the Cambridge Castle site in 1802 to 1807. Bridewells across the country were merged with county gaols as a result of the Prisons Act 1865. The Spinning House was handed over to the Borough in 1897 and destroyed in 1901 [Cambridgeshire County Council].

Cambridge City Council offices are now situated on the Spinning House site.

Sources

 

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