What was a life like for a medieval prisoner?

Answer 1

Nothing like you see in Hollywood pictures or on television; furthermore, prison could mean several different things.

One common (and fairly mild) form of imprisonment was to be confined in a castle. This is what happened to the Saxon monks of Canterbury who initially refused to accept a Norman Abbot, and later to the first group of Franciscan friars to arrive at Dover. It meant no more than being confined within the walls of the castle, otherwise prisoners could walk around the castle, enjoy the fresh air and even join in with meals and entertainment. Occasionally they were restricted to the "keep" or donjon - hence the modern expression "thrown into a dungeon", but it did not mean being kept in a cell.

Most early castles had no cells or prison, so confinement within all or part of the castle was really the only option. Later castles might include a much more serious form of "jail" - an oubliette (literally a place to forget people). This was a stone-lined pit shaped a bit like an onion, with the only entrance a covered hatchway at the narrow top end. This pit would widen out at the bottom, but the only way in or out was by ladder. Here prisoners would be left to starve to death and forgotten about (such cases are very rare until after the medieval period).

Castles were often converted into prisons after the medieval period (as at Canterbury in Kent and the Bastille in Paris), giving some people today the false idea that this is how they always operated.

Answer 2

There were not many prisons in the middle ages. Punishments for crimes often included fines. In some places, corporal punishment was used, such as cutting off the hand of a thief, but the impression I have is that fines were much more common. I have read of public shaming, such as making a man who abused his wife wear a mask constructed from the face of a pig for a period of time. But I have not come across much in the way of punishments consisting of time in prison, the one exception being people who were important enough that the ruler of a country considered them threats, but did not want to execute them. For such people, prison might be the Tower of London, with accommodations ranging from dismal to comfortable.

There is a book that has just appeared, The Medieval Prison: A Social History, by G. Geltner. I have not read it, but there is an interesting passage appeared in a review, saying that the medieval prison typically was in a city, and consisted of a prescribed part of the city where the prisoner was required to be at all times, living a much more supervised life than other people might. If this is true, then it would be very worth studying.

I would be very suspicious of most material found online about medieval prisons, unless it can be shown to be carefully documented. For example, in one online encyclopedia article on Prison, the history section has a rather innocuous looking short paragraph on medieval prisons. The single reference on this turned out to be an expired web page. The content of the paragraph consisted of what I might call popular knowledge, and in my experience, popular knowledge of anything having to do with the Middle Ages is more probably wrong than true.

Answer 3

Its was very harsh because if the had the death sentence in prison there was some very bad ways they would kill them like The breast ripper, Inpalment, choker, Head crusher and many more

Answer 4

Yes there were. Most prisons were in dungeons or towers to make it more difficult for the prisoners to escape.