A Monthly Publication

By Jim Welham

In the early days, when communities were obliged to deal with their own criminals, punishment had to be acceptable, swift and cheap and the penalty would usually be a fine, mutilation or death. Most local executions took place in the Tuesday Market Place, Kings Lynn, when the condemned would be hanged, burnt, or in at least one case, boiled to death. The only remaining indication of such horrors is of a dubious nature. Above the upper floor window between numbers 15 and 16 at the north side of the Tuesday Market Place, is a carving of a heart, said to show the spot hit by a woman’s heart after it flew out of her body as she was being burnt as a witch. The self-proclaimed Witch Finder General, Matthew Hopkins identified and caused the execution of 200 elderly females in East Anglia. In August 1646 he visited Norfolk and was responsible for 16 witches being hanged at Great Yarmouth, but only 2 in Kings Lynn.

By 1717 a cheap method of reducing the population of the filthy, overcrowded prisons was found by transporting about 36,000 criminals ‘beyond the seas’ to America, mostly to work on the tobacco plantations in West Virginia. This ended in 1775 due to the American Declaration of Independence. That same year the magistrates of King’s Lynn found another, even less expensive solution to dealing with criminals. During a riot, they were incensed at being stoned by a mob, and arranged for a Press Gang to impress into the Royal Navy 60 of the persons suspected of being involved. The tax payers of the town were delighted at being freed of so many of those who had been an expense to them, and boasted that the ‘sweepings of Lynn had been deposited at Spithead.’ 

In 1787 it was the turn of Australia to be used as England’s dumping ground and 160,000 convicts were transported there until that country refused to take any more in 1857. 

Prisons came to be used not only for the convicted, but also for those awaiting trial, and for debtors. The sick were not segregated from the healthy, nor males from females and young petty criminals mixed with those who had committed the most serious of offences.

The Borough Prison of Kings Lynn is now the Old Gaol House Museum, and still features above its entrance various instruments for restraining prisoners. The prison could accommodate 50 inmates, but in dreadful conditions. The passageways were in almost total darkness.  Any light and air that was admitted to the cells came through loopholes in the walls measuring 18 inches by 12 inches. In the summer the heat in the cells was overpowering and in the winter the prisoners were paralysed with cold as no fires were allowed.

There were also houses of correction or bridewells.  The closest ones to Hunstanton were at Swaffham and Little Walsingham.  Swaffham was known for its harsh discipline, and inadequate diet. Most of the prisoners suffered from scurvy which caused many to lose their teeth. The cells set aside for vagrants were never cleaned and were unbelievably disgusting.  Each prisoner was allowed 2 pounds of bread a day, but if they were serving less than a month, the bread allowance was reduced by half a pound a day. Those serving more than 3 months were given half a pound of meat a week and a pint of gruel each night.  All prisoners were provided with 2 blankets and a rug or mat, jacket, trousers, waistcoat, shirt, stockings, shoes and cap. Eight and a half hours of work was required a day; the males alternated the treadwheel with shoe making and the females did all the washing.  Silence was enforced day and night. One prisoner was recorded as insane.

When the prison reformer John Howard visited the Walsingham Bridewell in 1779 he found it to be an insecure thatched building with the prisoners chained to the walls and lying on straw-covered brick floors. The prison was rebuilt to his design within 10 years. He was a strong believer in the value of fresh air and the cell windows remained open even in the depths of winter. In 1841 a surgeon at Walsingham said that the prisoners were chiefly of the agricultural class, and to place them in a cell without any exercise caused them to quickly become so unhealthy that they preferred to be placed on the wheel. He also asked for the prisoners to be given a pint of milk a day, but that had been changed to a pint of gruel for reasons of economy. The hours of labour were from 6 am to 6 pm with 2 hours for meals.  There were 11 females in detention, but female officers had never been employed.  3 prisoners were excused labour because 2 were ruptured and one was an idiot.  2 men were in irons for attempting to escape, and others were being punished with a short diet for talking, insolent, idle and riotous conduct, irritating and threatening fellow prisoners and turnkeys, and one for pretending to be crazy.

There were two main strategies for dealing with prison inmates. The separate system was solitary confinement with rations at starvation point. Prison chaplains believed that the prisoners would spend their sentence reflecting on the error of their ways. As the only voice they would hear would be that of the prison chapel on a Sunday, the preacher’s voice would sound ‘like the singing of an angel,’ and this would lead the prisoners to think of religion with particular gratification.

The Chaplains Service was horrified that only a small number of prisoners could read a verse of the Bible or recite the Lord’s Prayer, and also asked that the execution of murderers should not be hurried, but the condemned men should be given as much time as possible to reflect on the horror of their fate.

Inspectors of prisons took a more sympathetic view.  ‘Prisoners in solitary confinement are placed in a dark, small and imperfectly ventilated cell where they can neither receive nor acquire that moral or religious instruction which this seclusion was intended to foster.’ 

The other system obliged prisoners to undertake hard, boring work, but still in total silence. This often involved tasks such as picking oakum, which was pulling at pieces of old and tarry rope until it was separated into fibres which could be used to caulk the planks of wooden ships, hence the saying ‘money for old rope.’ The prisoners were described as ‘sitting in large rooms covered in dust, twisting, rolling, rubbing rope until their soft thievish fingers grew cut and blistered from their contact with the stiff lumps of tarry rope.’ 

This often alternated with another soul destroying method of filling the convict’s time, namely the treadwheel. This was an invention of Sir William Cubitt, an engineer born at Dilham, North Norfolk. A 16-foot wide hollow cylinder was attached to a wall of a prison building and up to 40 prisoners, each separated from his neighbour by a wooden screen, would endlessly ascend the outside of the wheel. Each complete revolution required 24 steps to be mounted, each of which was 8 inches high. Prisoners were exposed to extremes of weather, either hot or cold, and on average lost about 4 pounds in weight every month. As well as the harshness of the labour there was an inequality, as the wheel punished the old and infirm more than the young and robust, and tall men more than short men. In addition the degree of punishment differed widely from prison to prison. Some required a minimum ascent of 44,100 steps each day and a maximum of 50,400, others a mere minimum of 2,520 steps and a maximum of 4,200. Eventually labour on the wheels was reduced from 10 hours to 8 hours. During rest periods prisoners were not allowed to sit but were compelled to spend that time walking in a circle.

There were two other forms of hard labour – turning a capstan or turning a crank. The crank was a handle set into a wall which had to be turned until a dial registered a daily total of 10,000 revolutions, which would require about 20 turns each minute. The convict was given no food until he reached the required total, and if he became difficult, the crank could be tightened in order to make the handle harder to turn. In one inspectors’ report the comment was made, “The prisons of Norfolk do little honour to the Magistrates and gentry of the county. The Buxtons and Gurneys are friends of the blacks and in their anxieties to put an end to the atrocities suffered in the barracoons of Africa appear to have lost sight of the sufferings of their white brethren in the pestilent prisons of their immediate vicinity” .

As society developed, the numbers of crimes carrying the death penalty increased to about 220, but surprisingly few people were executed.  In 1819 the Norfolk banker Daniel Gurney said that he and his fellow bankers were reluctant to prosecute in cases of forgery as they were in dread of being instrumental in the death of a fellow human being. Prosecutors were also reluctant to ask for the ultimate penalty knowing that juries would seldom convict prisoners of relatively minor offences. From 1735 to 1799, 446 death sentences were passed in Norfolk, but only 114 prisoners were executed, 5 of whom were in Kings Lynn. The body was then often encased in chains and hug in a gibbet, thereby being suspended between heaven and hell.

Recorded crime in Norfolk in 1838 appears miniscule compared with modern times.  That year 588 people were charged with criminal offences.  Of those, 31 were charged with assault, 33 were charged with offences against property involving violence, and 495 with offences against property not involving violence, 3 with malicious offences, 6 with forgery or circulating counterfeit coins and 20 for miscellaneous offences.  515 were male and 73 female.  4 had a superior education, 82 could read and write, 270 could read and not write, 220 could neither read nor write and 7 had not had their educational qualifications ascertained. Of those who were convicted, one was transported for life, one was declared insane, 36 were transported for periods less than life, 236 were imprisoned for periods from 6 months to 2 years and 10 were fined.

From 1835 to 1951 all the executions in Norfolk were for murder or attempted murder. Until 1867 these hangings were carried out in front of the Norwich Castle gates.  If the offender was a resident of the city, he was executed at the bottom of the ditch; if he was from the county, at the top. The event would be watched by huge drunken crowds, many of whom would have travelled from afar, often by special trains. Those who disapproved of public executions said that the immense crowds ‘were a vast moral desert made up of the lowest, coarsest most depraved of mankind, and no respectable person would allow his servants to be present.’  Others complained that the hangman should be restrained from unseemly briskness, and also should refrain from jokes, oaths, and drinking brandy. When the condemned was led out, there would be a cry of ‘Hats off,’ not out of respect, but so those at the back of the crowd could see what was happening. After the execution the area outside the castle, now occupied by the Castle Mall, became an area of entertainment filled with musicians and street vendors, turning what the authorities hoped would be a warning into a festivity. There was general disapproval when in 1868 executions were carried out within the comparative privacy of the prison walls. It was thought to deprive the public of a spectacle, and the condemned man of the right to be at the head of a procession

On 16^th July 1887 a new purpose-built prison was opened on Mousehold Heath, Norwich and all further executions were held there. The final 2 were for domestic murders and were both carried out on 19^th July 1951.  The last executions in England were in 1964. Capital Punishment was abolished completely in 1969.