nne's time, were sinks of misery, disease, cruelty,
and extortion, from which debtors suffered most, on account of their
poverty. Women contributed to the total loathsomeness and suffered from
it. The Marshalsea prison was "an infected pest house all the year
long." There were customs by which jailers and chaplains extorted fees
from the miserable prisoners. In the country the prisons were worse than
in London. Pictures are said to exist in which debtor prisoners are
shown catching mice for food, dying of starvation and malaria, covered
with boils and blains, assaulted by jailers, imprisoned in underground
dungeons, living with hogs, with clogs on their legs, tortured with
thumbscrews, etc. "Nobody ever seems to have bothered their heads about
it. It was not their business." In 1702 the House of Commons ordered a
bill to be brought in for regulating the king's bench and fleet prisons,
"but nobody took sufficient interest in it, and it never became an
act."[1841] If the grade and kind of humanity which the case required
did not exist in the mores of the time, there would be no response. It
was on the humanitarian wave of the latter half of the century that
Howard succeeded in bringing about a reform. The prisons in the American
colonies were of the same kind as those in the old country. The Tories,
in the revolution, suffered most from their badness. It is not known
that personal abuse was perpetrated in them.

+575. Wars of factions. Penalties of defeat.+ Political factions and
religious sects have always far surpassed the criminal law in the
ferocity of their penalties against each other. Neither the offenses nor
the penalties are defined in advance. As Lea says,[1842] the treatment
of Alberico, brother of Ezzelino da Romano, and his family (1259) shows
the ferocity of the age. Ezzelino showed the same in many cases, and the
hatred heaped up against him is easily understood, but the gratification
of it was beastly and demonic.[1843] Great persons, after winning
positions of power, used all their resources to crush old rivals or
opponents (Clement V, John XXII) and to exult over the suffering they
could inflict.[1844] In the case of Wullenweber, at Lubeck,[1845]
burgesses of cities manifested the same ferocity in faction fights. The
history of city after city contains similar episodes. At Ghent, in 1530,
the handicraftsmen got the upper hand for a time and used it like
savages.[1846] All parties fought out social antagon