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Originally a pagan temple, built by the Catieuchlans for the Mogons,
ancient English gods, it became a palace for Ethelwolf and a fortress
for Edward the Confessor; then it was elevated to the dignity of a
prison, in 1199, by John Lackland. Such was Southwark Jail. This jail,
at first intersected by a street, like Chenonceaux by a river, had been
for a century or two a gate--that is to say, the gate of the suburb; the
passage had then been walled up. There remain in England some prisons
of this nature. In London, Newgate; at Canterbury, Westgate; at
Edinburgh, Canongate. In France the Bastile was originally a gate.
Almost all the jails of England present the same appearance--a high wall
without and a hive of cells within. Nothing could be more funereal than
the appearance of those prisons, where spiders and justice spread their
webs, and where John Howard, that ray of light, had not yet penetrated.
Like the old Gehenna of Brussels, they might well have been designated
Treurenberg--the house of tears.
Men felt before such buildings, at once so savage and inhospitable, the
same distress that the ancient navigators suffered before the hell of
slaves mentioned by Plautus, islands of creaking chains,
ferricrepiditæ insulæ, when they passed near enough to hear the
clank of the fetters.
Southwark Jail, an old place of exorcisms and torture, was originally
used solely for the imprisonment of sorcerers, as was proved by two
verses engraved on a defaced stone at the foot of the wicket,--
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