Sussex crimes and misdemeanours and their punishments do not make the jolliest or the most interesting theme for social study, but they certainly constitute an integral part of the history, if not the beauty, of the county: and while their details may but amuse the superficial mind, the solid facts depicting the various urges, impulses, traits, habits and desperations of human and inhuman nature in the criminal, and gross cruelty and inhumaility in his punishment, make a painful and gruesome, yet a proper subject for the social student and the serious minded antiquary.

A reading of some of the awful injustices, cruelties and neglect practised in the English prisons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries recorded by those special social students and philanthropists John Howard. James Neild, Elizabeth Fry and others, and of the severities of the criminal code up to the beginning of the nineteenth century when Sir Samuel Romilly made his noble attack upon it, must convince anyone that the Sussex criminal and prison records are not, as they might seem without such reading, mere sensational figments.

The improvements effected by these reformers make the state of affairs as they found it in their time, and as it was before their time, difficult in these days to be believed. It is related of the late 'Herbert Spencer, the celebrated philosopher who lived his last years at Brighton, that when shown the statue of George IV there he coldly remarked, " Thanks, I am not interested in criminals,": but Mr George Bernard Shaw, a philosopher of a different kind, assumes quite another attitude in his preface to John Bull's Other Island, where he proudly boasts that one of his great uncles was hanged as a rebel.

Those readers with the Spencerian temperament will not find much entertainment in reading these lines, but a great many of us of Sussex nativity, more inclined to the Shavian attitude, may feel a broader concern in the history of our own county, and though unable perhaps to boast of an executed relative, some of our progenitors have certainly been in and out of Horsham Gaol, and if a few of us cannot rise to the belief that we ourselves deserve to have served, or to serve a term of imprisonment. we can all exercise, if we cannot satisfy, our sense of justice by naming some one or other who certainly ought to do a few years of it.

Besides criminals of all sorts and of both sexes, upon whom Royal hospitality was forced at Horsham, from the execrable (if sane) hag, Ann Cruttenden, of Brightling, who, for the murder of her husband (a crime then called treason-felony) was burnt at the stake on Horsham Common in 1776, to the innocent workhouse boy, George Wren, of Uckfield, who, for alleged arson, was judicially murdered on the gallows in the town in 1835, there were the debtors. Many of these much longer termed, even life tenants of the prison, month by month, year by year, lived or starved a miserable existence, constant and comfortless inmates, of its gloomy walls.

Poverty, not then legally scheduled as a crime, nor as yet under Shavian denunciation as a crime chargable not to the poor but to the rich, was indeed frequently punished, if not more severely yet certainly more lengthily, than were contemporary crimes. Twice a year the itinerant Judges of Assize visited Sussex, and at East Grinstead, Horsham or Lewes, where, at one or other of these places the Assizes were held, cleared the Horsham. Gaol of the felons and alleged felons with but few exceptions.

Those who escaped execution by hanging, burning, or pressing to death, were whipped, pilloried, earcropped, branded, or transported according to their several sentences; or were discharged and were thus again free of the law. But the poor insolvent debtors, victims of their own extravagance, of carelessness, of ignorance, of bad luck, of vindictive enemies, even of artificially created official claims given a legal appearance as of the law itself - these, unable themselves and without friends to purchase their liberty remained in their degradation, many of them abject specimens of forlorn hope whose outlook upon life from the commencement of their incarceration shrank as the years passed to the size of that narrow strip of land, all they would require when, their debts undischarged, their accounts closed, their fate irrevocable. they were taken from the prison ward, their bodies most likely unclaimed and buried in a pauper's grave.

In addition to felons and debtors there was another, a distinct class of prisoners whose offences were quite different from those of the other two classes. The Quakers here referred to suffered their imprisonments as conscientious objectors and voluntarily endured their harsh treatment for the sake of exercising their high principles. Criminals and debtors unfortunately - and Quakers fortunately - remain with us; but we can at least be thankful that most of the old-time punishments (not so very old, some of them) have been removed from the statute book, and we can think of them today, not without shame, but with less uncomfortable feelings than we could have done at close quarters as they were relentlessly inflicted from one hundred to three hundred years ago.

In the Horsham parish church registers from 1541 to 1785 are entries of the burials of many scores of prisoners from Horsham Gaol. The great majority of them give only the date, the name, and laconically " a. prisoner " (variously spelt). In only a comparatively few cases are they classified further, and those seemingly, according to the fancy of the entering clerk, showing death resulting from, or coincident with, imprisonment for debt: i.e. (the first) " John Alleyn, of Kerford, y't dyed in the gayle for debte was buryed the 30th of April, 1597," and (the last) "John glower a prisoner for dept 6th January 1678."

The only other classifications of the prisoners in these entries are those of a few executed prisoners: and condemned prisoners, e.g.: " 29th July, 1606, buried 5 prisoners all executed the same day, viz. Thomas Welsh, Simon Ayres, Margaret Squire, Robert Plaver, and Elizabeth Watermann." On the " 15th August 1699 John Mackrell a condemned prisner": but the great majority of prisoners registered here, it can safely be concluded, were poor insolvent debtors.

At the end of the year 1586 is the entry

" the prysners y't dyed In the Gaole at Horsham this yeare and buryed in ye Churchyarde were not made knowen unto the vicar and therefore not here entered."

These, however, are not the only omissions in the registers. There are many contemporary statements of the burials of executed felons and alleged felons in the Horsham churchyard, entries of which do not appear in the church registers, and if the registers gave a complete record of the burials at. Horsham they would not by a great many give a complete list of the deaths of the prisoners in and from the Gaol, for, in addition to the burials registered at Horsham there are all those who died in the Gaol or were executed, who had friends well enough off to claim the bodies for conveyance to their native parishes.

In this category may be placed the four Quakers, James Albery of Kirdford, Henry Dixon of Steyning, Edward Hamper of Midhurst, and another (unnamed), all of whom, as conscientious objectors, died in the Gaol. Altogether, hundreds of human beings as felons or debtors, a few as conscientious objectors, and even some innocent children of prisoners, went .straight from the Gaol to the grave.

More astonishing to the reader perhaps than this record of the large number of deaths will be that of the smaller number of births that took place in the Gaol. Whether these unfortunate cilildren were the offspring of felons or debtors, or both, is not recorded, but that a large proportion of them are entered in the baptismal register as "baseborn," i.e., illegitimate, will come as no surprise to those who have read of the indescriminate herding together in the common wards, of the prisoners male and female; young and old: strong and weak; healthy and sick: felons and debtors; innocent and guilty; gentlemen and vagabonds; and of the awful conditions generally that prevailed in the county gaols nearly up to the end of the eighteenth century, and in same cases later.

As John Howard aptly remarked, " a prison, pays no debts and mends no morals." Still more astonishing is the fact that marriages of prisoners have also taken place in the Gaol. Of these however we have the record of only two, viz., those of Ambrose Rigge married to Mary Luxford, and James Winslett married to Ann Hampden: but a greater contrast between two weddings than these furnish could hardly be found in the annals of matrimony.

Ambrose Rigge the famous Quaker - that stern, fearless, uncompromising religious zealot, yet loving and faithful Friend, to his devoted young wife, his constant help," married " in 1664," he says, " on the sixth day of the seventh month in the prison at Horsham after I was praemunired two years and kept there close prisoner because for conscience sake I could not swear," John Winslett and Samuel Winslett of the parish of Kirdford, labourers, " for pulling down. and destroying several pales of the paddock and chasing and stealing two fat bucks value £10 the property of Lord Winterton " were sentenced to death at ths Lewes Assizes on the 3rd of August, 1765.

Afterwards, they with others were reprieved and sentenced to seven years transporation each. Ann Hampden of the parish of Farnham, Surrey, was a middle-aged widow evidently an adventuress, who, " being very much in debt, and fleeing from her duns " came to Horsham. Here she took a fancy to one of these brother deerstalkers, John Winslett.

Cupid, however, must not be held responsible for this questionable little romance. It has much more the appearance of the work of the smart lawyer. According to the law of that time a woman with debts upon marriage, ipso facto placed them upon her husband's shoulders; and a reprieved felon under sentence of transportation had to find sureties before one or two Justices of the Peace for his own transportation within nine months, failing which he was still liable to execution.

This precious pair, John Winslett and Ann Hampden, following the good example in one respect only of Ambrose Rigge and Mary Luxford, were married in Horsham Gaol by Francis Osgood, curate of Horsham, by licence on the seventeenth of August, 1765, " with the bridegroom still in his prison irons." By this matrimonial strategem Ann Hampden, in danger of imprisonment as a debtor, became Ann Winslett who, in her new freedom from her duns, could laugh through her wedding ring at her late creditors; and John Winslett, presumably without a penny, having taken over the financial liabilities of his spouse and obtained from her or her friends enougn cash to transport himself to any part of the globe," now free of his irons and of his fear of the gallows, could scoff at the hangman from the tip of his nose to the full extent of his ten fingers and thumbs.

This properly officialized marriage without any pretence of love or sympathy was followed by a lightning divorce without the decree of any law court; but the unofficial and unsanctified marriage of Ambrose Rigge and Mary Luxford, contracted simply by the taking of each other's hand in the presence of Friends endured, " And as the Lord by His immediate Hand brought us together, He did preserve us together for the space of four and twenty years in much Love and Unity." " And at the end of the tenth month 1688,9 she was taken sick and departed this Life Like a Lamb in my Arms and went to her eternal Rest in the Bosom of the Fathers Love." Thus from the cradle to the grave, at births, marriages, and deaths did the County Gaol serve unfortunate humanity in its rough and ready way.

Its children denied the elements of home decency; its manhood and womanhood bound in shame and distress; and its veterans premature, thankless and hopeless in their ignominy.

By William Albery, 1932

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