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from the Cities of London and Westminster, and ten miles
from the same, of all Papists and reputed Papists refusing to
subscribe the declaration ; for disarming Papists and reputed
Papists; for tolerating Protestant Dissenters under certain
restrictions; and for vesting in the two Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge the presentation to benefices belonging
to Papists.
In spite of the severity of the penal laws, crime abounded,
possibly as one result of the judicial system then in force.
Prisons were constructed so as to cause innocent prisoners and
the most depraved criminals to mix indiscriminately. "I
scruple not to affirm," said Howard, the philanthropist,
speaking of the condition of the prisons many years later,
"that half the robberies committed in and about London are
planned in the prisons by that dreadful assemblage of criminals
and the number of idle people who visit them." Of discipline
there was none. We read that at a little later period, a young
offender or innocent prisoner shrinking from the companionship
of hardened criminals was frequently subjected to a mock
trial, at which the oldest thief would preside as judge, a knotted
towel serving for a wig, and other prisoners act as officers of
the sham court. Until the present century, prisoners were
required to cook their own food, or fast. Two hundred years
ago the condition of the prisons was so horrible that gaol
fever, now recognised as typhus, claimed its victims by the
hundred, spreadingits terrible infection among the jurymen, and
the bar, and sometimes attacking the judge himself. Assize
Courts were commonly strewn with aromatic herbs, but this
precaution frequently proved insufficient, and the court was
occasionally brought to a premature close, or removed to
another town. A large number of crimes was punishable by
death, including minor offences such as petty thefts. Another
mode of punishment then in vogue was the barbarous practice
of burning the hand. The prevention of crime or the reform