There are a number of excellent general histories of imprisonment in England. Ralph B. Pugh dealt with the early years in his Imprisonment in Medieval England—in which he mentioned that Bedford has had a jail continuously since 1165—whilst Sidney and Beatrice Webb in their classic English Prisons under Local Government concentrated on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. R. S. E. Hinde discussed much the same period as the Webbs in his useful book The British Penal System, 1773-1950, whilst Giles Playfair based his work, The Punitive Obsession, largely on the rich source of nineteenth-century Parliamentary Papers. What all these admirable works lack is a detailed picture of the prison at work. Whilst it is possible to obtain an idea of the desperate plight of the prisoner from the general accounts, it is much more difficult to see the problems of the jailer and his family. So too, very little emerges of the struggles of the reforming justices trying to persuade their colleagues at quarter sessions to agree to new measures. The Webbs were highly critical of the justices generally, and perhaps did less than justice to those magistrates who did their utmost to effect improvements. The general works also inevitably fail to show how the surveyors and architects struggled in the new field of prison architecture to implement new ideas without exceeding their budgets; how the Inspectors constantly pressed for changes; and how the Home Secretaries exerted pressure on quarter sessions.

What the writer sought to do in the course of the research for the present work was to study the documents relating to Bedford prison to see whether a more detailed picture could be obtained of a prison at work, and also whether one could trace the development of the penal system as a whole. The period selected was one of a little over two centuries from the date of the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, that is, roughly the years considered by the Webbs. The year 1660 has been used as a point of departure for two reasons.