ABSTRACT
Of all sufferers the fate of the prisoner is perhaps the most wretched deprived of liberty and rendered totally incapable of relieving himself or doing justice to others, shut in prison, there to pine away in want of the absolute necessaries of life weighed down with anguish and load of woe, he meets death with pleasure. Newgate could comfortably accommodate about 150 prisoners at most, but this capacity was rarely observed and the gaol was chronically overcrowded throughout the eighteenth century. Prisoner autonomy had originated at Ludgate, the City’s other gate-prison, in the mid fifteenth century and had functioned so smoothly there that in 1633 the Court of Aldermen ordered the Newgate prisoners to establish a similar form of government, ‘in much the same manner as at Ludgate’. There seems little doubt that the workings of the prisoners’ government was one of the most notable features of life in Newgate.
