[551] _Selections from the Municipal Archives of Liverpool_, Picton, June 24th, 1598. "It was agreed by all the assembly that a house termed a 'House of Correction' shoulde be had and taken for the poore people aforesaid," and it was further arranged that Mr More should let his house at Poole for that purpose at a reasonable rent.
For Nottingham, see _Nottingham Records_, Vol. IV., p. 225. In 1601 it was arranged that John Cooper should remain keeper of St John. He was to take up rogues and punish those committed to him, though at the same time he was to have an allowance for the poor infants and others which were sent to him.
Kendal, A.D. 1601. There is a list of collectors of benevolences for the House of Correction. _Hist. Man. Com. Rep._ X. App. IV., p. 299.
Others were erected shortly after the statute of 1610 was passed: thus in 1614 the City of London consented to help the counties of Middlesex and Surrey to build Houses of Correction: about the same time the Nottingham burgesses furnished and reorganised St John's Hospital for this purpose, and both Preston and Manchester had followed the same example before 1620[552]. In the reports of 1630 to 1639 the existence of Houses of Correction is assumed, since the justices state how many idlers have been sent to them[553]. Sometimes the reports give a few details concerning them; at Hastings the justices tell us they have kept their House of Correction in good repair[554], and from the justices of Edwinstree and Odsey in 1631 we learn that a House of Correction had been long maintained at Buntingford, and that the justices send their prisoners there although there is a more important institution of the kind in the county, fourteen miles distant[555]. The justices' reports thus indicate that Houses of Correction were established in most places before 1635. This impression is confirmed by a letter from the Earl of Pembroke to the justices of South Wiltshire. He complains that there is no place of the kind nearer than Devizes, and he asks the Council to enforce his request that another should be built in Wiltshire[556]. This letter would hardly have been written unless in 1623 it was usual for Houses of Correction to be nearer than Devizes is to South Wiltshire, and seems therefore to show that they were now a general institution.