Stafford’s Gaol has been a grim home for a wide range of miscreants and unfortunates over several centuries. Many prisoners have breathed their last within its walls and others suffered terrible conditions for the extent of their sentences.
When it comes to the seedier moments in the town's history, many of the stories have a connection with Stafford Gaol. Indeed, a significant number end there, at the end of a hangman's noose. The present building was constructed in 1794, making it one of the oldest prisons in the country in current use. However there had been a permanent court in Stafford since the fourteenth century, with the earliest mention of a gaol found in a document dated 1185.
Of course punishment and sentencing today is ludicrously lenient compared with those faced by earlier criminals. The list of crimes punished by hanging in a single year included burglary, horse-stealing, house-breaking, counterfeiting, highway robbery, assault and robbery, sheep-stealing, arson, forgery, uttering forged notes (ie passing counterfeit money), stealing cattle, bestiality, rape, attempted murder, and administering arsenic. This amounted to 107 hangings, of which only four were women.
Not only was the death sentence carried out here - when the scaffold was erected outside the prison it was a hugely popular spectacle attracting thousands every time - but within the walls executioners supplemented their income by meting out a variety of punishments including the flogging post and the crank.
Even without punishment life was hard. Fifty to sixty steps per minute were required on the treadmill, grinding corn or moving water for 40 minutes in every hour. Solitary confinement in a darkened cell on a diet of bread and water was meted out to those who failed to reach the standard. And all this after the prisoner was first admitted and clothed in prison attire following the dreaded bath which was akin to being half-drowned in freezing cold water whilst being scrubbed with the stiffest bristled brushes.
During the nineteenth century significant steps were taken to remedy the dire conditions the prisoners faced. Public hangings were stopped and moved inside the prison walls. Numbers sharing a cell were regulated, their treatment more humane, their diet now approaching the minimum necessary to remain in reasonable health.
Yet no amount of regulations would stop the crimes perpetrated outside the walls. The stories of some of these macabre events are covered within the pages of Bloody British History: Stafford.
