Snowy. Tim Harris
going to a rabbit snare which was set. He approached witness within 5 or 6 yards, and witness spoke to him, whereupon he ran away. He had a rabbit in each hand, which he threw away. Each rabbit had a snare on its neck. Witness called out to him, and he said: “As long as you know it is me it is no use my running away.” He then returned and took a snare out of his pocket.
Defendant was fined 10/- and 13/- costs, and in default he was sent to Norwich castle for 14 days.
Grimston Petty Sessions, 6 November 1882, report from the Lynn Advertiser.
The Docking Divisional Court records and prison entries show that Prisoner 8901 Frederick Rolfe served his time with hard labour in lieu of payment of a fine of £1 15s 6d, which is at variance with the press report. If the second figure is correct, then his fine and costs would have amounted to about three and a half week’s wages. Fred’s education was listed as Imp., presumably meaning it was imperfect; he was 5 ft 4½ in tall, with brown eyes and his religion was entered as Church of England. He was released on 19 November 1882.
More importantly, this shows that Fred was 20 when he first went to prison. The court record (1882) shows he had no previous offences. Devotees of I Walked by Night will know this is much older than he led them to believe; in the book, Fred refers to himself as a lad and a boy, but in fact does not give his age. However, the blurb on the back of some editions states that he went to prison for the first time at the age of 12. How and when this inaccuracy came about is uncertain, but it has until now gone down as fact and is regularly quoted in historical records, books and academic papers as an example of the treatment of child prisoners.
An entire chapter of I Walked by Night is devoted to Fred’s time in prison and the daily routine and food are described in great detail:
Then came diner, wich was one pint and a half of stirabout, composed of one pint of oatmeal, and half a pint of maze meal put in the oven and baked.
He also recalls the system of rewards-marks for which prisoners could earn money and the very hard work of being on the treadmill from 9am to 12 noon and from 1pm to 4pm. Incidentally, the word ‘Screw’ (meaning a prison warder) comes from how tightly the screw was turned on the treadmill; the tighter it was, the harder the prisoner had to push as he walked on endlessly. Following this, oakum was picked until bed at 8 pm. Fred states that food improved after the first fortnight. This may well be an inaccurate recollection because he says that he was inside for a month when in fact it was only fourteen days. The fear and feeling of humiliation were certainly seared into his memory and he remembers much of the detail, including his cell, the suit covered all over with a broad arrow, the kindness of his turnkey (prison warder) and the role of the Church in trying to reform prisoners. In Fred’s case, prison did not reform him for he came to hate authority and made a vow that he would be as black as they painted him.
Norwich Castle is on a site that has housed prisoners since 1165. From the fourteenth century, its importance as a military building declined and prisoners were kept in the increasingly tumbledown keep. By 1698, there were complaints about the bad state of repair, which made it easy for prisoners to escape. Repairs costing £1,303 0s 1d were put in hand in 1707, the battlements being removed to provide stone for the repairs. The money to finance this was raised from the rates of the Norfolk Hundreds.
Originally, groups of people were literally gathered in hundreds and formed into administrative areas with their own court; even today we still have administrative areas known as ‘Hundreds’. By the latter part of the eighteenth century, a brick building was built within the four walls of the castle for felons and debtors. This included a bathhouse, a hospital and a chapel with a pump house in the yard for the prisoners’ use.
Over the next 160 years, in keeping with society’s changing ideas, various reformers tried to make prisons more humane. During this period the head gaoler paid the County to hold the post; he then earned his living by selling provisions, including wine, to inmates. Families of prisoners were allowed to bring food in, which was fine for those with loved ones and money to support them, but others less fortunate were reduced to begging at the gates and living on donated scraps. The expression ‘life on a shoe string’ came about because debtors used to beg from upper windows by lowering their boots by the laces for people to put coins in. Additional money could be earned from various tasks, such as making laces, garters, purses, nets, etc. At one stage spinning wheels were provided for the prisoners, and gaolers shared any resulting profits. Gaolers also made money from the discharge fee required from those on remand who were found not guilty. They required a fee to release them from irons, so some innocents remained until the money could be raised to pay for their freedom. Gaolers also charged a fee for the curious to go and peer at condemned men and women.
During the nineteenth century prisoners began to be kept by the State, thus they no longer needed daily access to their families and isolation was considered a suitable way for them to reflect on their wrongdoing and to improve discipline. In some prisons this was taken to extremes with prisoners not being allowed to see or speak to each other. However, this was in part stopped when prisoners started to deteriorate mentally.
With the introduction of the treadmill some advocated that the very pointlessness of the task was to make the prisoners reflect, but at Norwich the treadmill ground flour for a local miller, who paid for this service. After 1844, no women or children under 14 were allowed to go on the treadmill, when it was found that pregnant women were miscarrying while walking the endless steps. It is said that the maximum height a prisoner could climb on the treadmill in one day was 12,000 feet, almost the equivalent of the Matterhorn. Prisoners who could not, or would not do this, were given bread and water and kept in their cells, but it was found they were better nourished than those being fed regular meals and then stepping ever onward for six hours a day.
During this period, improvements to all gaols were carried out, but Norwich Castle posed particular problems because of the constraints of the castle building itself. In 1832, the women were moved to Wymondham. Until then both sexes were housed together, which was found difficult to police. In 1887, it was found that whatever alterations were made at the castle, they were still inadequate to house prisoners in humane conditions and the New Prison was subsequently built on Mousehold Heath.
Many years later, Fred wrote:
It is a long time since those days but many is the time I have walked through the Beautifful rooms of Norwich Castle, now that it is a Museum and thought of the weeks I spent there in Prisson, and all of the missery and sufferen that have been endured inside the Walls of that Historick Building.
How amazed he would have been to find that a tape recording plays in the castle of someone reading his description of his time there, using it as an illustration of how cruelly children were treated in those days, even though the museum have not authenticated his true age. The experience certainly left an indelible message and embittered him.
Fred also remembered that on his return to Pentney he was shown no kindness or pity. Had that happened, life might have turned out very differently; instead, villagers gave him dark looks and jeered at him. He recalls meeting John Broad, the same vicar who had encouraged him earlier, on the road soon after he was released:
He stopped me and wanted to know how I liked Prisson. It seamed to me he asked it with a sneer, any how I knew I cut him off pretty quick, and I never entered his Church again.
He also found it difficult to get work:
. . . they wisper to a Master ‘He have been in Prisson’ and blite all his good resilutions.
On Fred’s release from prison, exasperated by his feckless behaviour and the shame he had brought on the family, his father threw him out. As a good churchman, John had relentlessly drilled right from wrong into Fred, or so he thought. Fred took a cottage of his own. It is no longer there, but rubble and brick showing through the soil when the field is ploughed clearly indicate where it stood. Set back a little from the main street, it has, as Fred describes in his book, easy access to the fields and footpaths leading away from the village.
Throughout this time Fred was poaching and while his father may have disapproved, others in the village did not. ‘Hollow meat’ is