"I found the outer front court-yard, often mentioned here, metamorphosed into a butter shop; and I then almost gave up every brick of the gaol for lost. Wandering, however, down a certain adjacent 'Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey,' I came to 'Marshalsea Place,' the houses in which I recognized; not only the great block of the former prison, but as preserving the rooms that arose in my mind's eye when I became Little Dorrit's biographer. A little further on, I found the older and smaller wall, which used to inclose the pent-up inner prison, where nobody was put except for ceremony. But whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turned out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving stones of the extinct Marshalsea Gaol; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered, if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; and will stand among the crowding ghosts of many years."
The Marshalsea has a history nearly as ancient as the Fleet. Stow tells us that it was so called as "pertaining to the Marshalls of England." In it were confined all manners of marauders, with a special tendency towards persons who had been guilty of piracy and other offenses on the high seas. Some authorities place its foundation as far back as the Twelfth Century. It was a prison of considerable extent in 1377, when a mob of sailors broke into it and murdered a gentleman who had been incarcerated there for killing one of their comrades in a pot-house brawl. Three years later, Wat Tyler, in the course of his rebellion, seized and hanged the Marshal of the Marshalsea. The official title of the Warden of the prison was, by the way, Marshal. When Bishop Bonner was deprived of his see of London for his adherence to the Church of Rome, he was sent to the Marshalsea. He lived there ten years, and there dying, in 1569, he was buried at midnight in St. George's Church hard by. This ancient prison occupied another site on the same street as the later structure. Under Henry VIII, Mary, and Elizabeth, it was the second prison in importance in London, being inferior only to the Tower. Here Christopher Brooke, the poet, was confined for being concerned in the wedding of Dr. Donne, and here George Wither was a prisoner for one of his satires against the Government aggressions and the abuse of the royal prerogative. The Nonconformist confessors were divided up among the Southwark prisons, and the Marshalsea received its share of them. John Udall, the Puritan martyr, fell a victim to its gaol fever. Its blight extended through many generations, and the shadow of its walls darkened many useful lives for no crime worse than the accident of failure that may come to any man. A false system ground its abject shabbiness, its haggard anxiety, and hopeless stupor of energies, into natures that might, but for it, have triumphed over care, and converted the defeat of to-day into the victory of to-morrow. "Changeless and barren, looking ignorantly at all seasons with its fixed, pinched face of poverty and care, the prison had not a touch of any of these beauties in it. Blossom what would, its bricks and bars bore uniformly the same dead crop."
