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Ecclesiastical prisons were penal institutions maintained by the Catholic Church. At various times, they were used for the incarceration both of clergy accused of various crimes, and of laity accused of specifically ecclesiastical crimes; prisoners were sometimes held in custody while awaiting trial, sometimes as part of an imposed sentence. The use of ecclesiastical prisons began as early as the third or fourth century AD, and remained common through the early modern era.

Monastic prisons

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Some of the earliest uses of imprisonment as a penalty in itself, rather than as a practical means of detaining accused criminals, took place in the context of Christian monastic communities.[1][2] The rules of many religious orders, including the early rule of St. Pachomius (c. 300 AD),[3] the rule of St. Fructuosus,[4] the Dominican Constitutions,[5] the rule of Fontevraud Abbey,[6] and the rules of the Mercedarians,[7] Trinitarians,[7] Augustinians,[8] Norbertines,[9] Carthusians,[10] Carmelites,[10] and Cistercians,[10] prescribed imprisonment as a penalty for various forms of misbehavior among the monks. In the late fourth century, Pope Siricius instructed monasteries to use penal imprisonment in his Directa Decretal, an instruction renewed in 895 at the Council of Tribur and again in 1140 in the Decretum Gratiani.[11] These monastic prisons were referred to with various Latin terms, including murus ("wall"), cella obscura ("hidden cell"), ergastulum ("workhouse"), and carcer ("prison").[12][13][14]

Penal imprisonment was also practiced in similar forms among female religious orders.[15][16] One notable such case was the Nun of Watton, a twelfth-century figure confined in an ecclesiastical prison after her pregnancy was discovered.[17][18]

The use of monastic prisons was not restricted to the monks themselves. Nonmonastic clergy and laymen could be sentenced to detrusio in monasterium (confinement in a monastery), which could consist either of simply living in a monastery or of being incarcerated in a monastic prison.[19][20] Secular European rulers of the fifth through eleventh centuries, who generally lacked facilities of their own for keeping prisoners, also made use of monastic prisons.[21][22] These secular prisoners in monastic prisons were sometimes criminals, but often they were simply political adversaries, such as in the cases of Childeric III (imprisoned by Pepin the Short); Pepin the Hunchback and Tassilo III (imprisoned by Charlemagne); and various political opponents of Louis the Pious and of Henry II.[23][24] Ecclesiastical reforms in the late eleventh century largely suppressed the practice of confining political opponents to monasteries, but secular authorities continued to make use of monastic prisons; in the case of female prisoners, confining them to a convent rather than a secular prison could be a means of avoiding rape.[25][26]

Early monastic imprisonment often simply involved confining the offending monk to his cell, or to some other room temporarily designated as a prison; with the growing use of incarceration as a punishment, however, monasteries increasingly built dedicated prison facilities.[27][28] These were usually purpose-built cells, but in some cases might be free-standing prisons; one of the earliest examples of the latter was built at the Mount Sinai Monastery before the seventh century AD.[29] Some orders, such as the Cistercians and Benedictines, explicitly required that each monastery contain prison cells.[30][31]

Incarceration in monastic prisons was sometimes for periods as short as a day;[32] other sentences lasted indefinitely, or for life.[33] Monastic prisons, unlike secular prisons, typically involved solitary confinement, sometimes mitigated by visits from superiors.[34][35] Inmates in monastic prisons were sometimes kept in chains,[36][17][8] and their sentences often included deprivation of food,[17][37] corporal punishment,[37][38][16] various forms of ritual humiliation,[39] or ecclesiastical penalties such as excommunication.[17]

Some medieval monasteries practiced permanent immurement in prisons called Vade in pace ("go in peace"), so named because inmates were expected to remain in them until death. Peter the Venerable, writing in the early twelfth century, attributed the first Vade in pace to a prior named Matthew of Saint-Martin-des-Champs.[40] The practice spread, being attested in locations including St Albans Abbey,[41] Toulouse,[42] Lespinasse,[43] Lodi,[44] and San Salvatore.[44] John II of France intervened, at the request of the Archbishop of Toulouse, to require the monasteries to allow imprisoned monks weekly visitors.[40]

Jesuits were notable among religious orders for not using imprisonment as a disciplinary tool.[45] The order's founder, Ignatius of Loyola, had himself spent time incarcerated in a monastic prison in Salamanca while being interrogated about his theological teachings.[46] An anecdote tells of Ignatius, asked why the charter of his order did not call for the use of incarceration, answering that it was unnecessary when expulsion from the Society was always available.[47]

Diocesan prisons

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The use of incarceration as an ecclesiastical penalty dates back well before the beginning of the second millennium, with examples attested in the 438 Codex Theodosianus, the canons of the 581 Synod of Mâcon, the 8th-century Gelasian Sacramentary, and the writings of the 8th-century bishop Ecgbert of York.[48] It was not, however, until the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries that ecclesiastical prisons began to grow increasingly common.[49][50][51][52] As part of the codification of canon law in the thirteenth century, Pope Boniface VIII issued his 1298 Liber Sextus, which endorsed the use of imprisonment as a legal penalty.[53][54][55][56] At this point, the already-common practice of ecclesiastical prisons was becoming near-universal, with each bishopric expected to maintain its own prison;[57] for example, Notre Dame built its prison in 1285,[58] and Boniface, the Archbishop of Canterbury, made the practice mandatory in his jurisdiction in 1261.[59]

Although the practice of keeping ecclesiastical prisons in each diocese was becoming increasingly standard, the specifics of the prisons themselves and their keeping were largely left up to local authorities.[60] The severity of the penalties imposed varied widely: in some cases a brief period of incarceration might serve as a penalty for a cleric lying under oath,[61] while other prisons kept chains, bolts, and gags expressly in order to "terrorize and cause fear" in their young female captives.[62]

Alessandro Farnese, later Pope Paul III, at one time an inmate of the papal prison of Castel Sant'Angelo

In the Papal States, where the civic power of the Catholic Church was uniquely strong, ecclesiastical prisons saw heavy use.[63][64] The Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome served as a papal prison from 1367 to 1870 while under the control of the Papal States.[65][66] Notable figures confined there included:

Another notable ecclesiastical prison in the Papal States was San Michele a Ripa, a juvenile detention facility built in 1703 by Pope Clement XI. Young offenders could be sentenced to San Michele by the courts, and parents or guardians could voluntarily send recalcitrant boys to the prison.[71] Although the young inmates often endured conditions such as corporal punishment and being chained to their desks, San Michele was considered by contemporaries to be a model of an enlightened penal system.[72]

Inquisitorial prisons

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With the twelfth-century founding of the Inquisition, and its eponymous process of inquisitio (inquest), came an increasing need for ecclesiastical prisons to hold suspects during a potentially lengthy investigation.[73] Instead of being incarcerated merely for a brief period of time between arrest and trial, the captives of the Inquisition were routinely held until they confessed to the satisfaction of their interrogators and implicated others; in some cases this process took years, sometimes spent in solitary confinement.[74][75] Imprisonment served as an interrogation technique in itself, sometimes in place of torture;[76] if simple imprisonment (and the expense of being required to pay for it) was insufficient to extract a confession, interrogators had the option of subjecting the prisoner to solitary confinement, inadequate food, physical restraints, or other harsh conditions.[77] Canon law, as set down in the Decretium Gratiani and the Decretals of Gregory IX, also allowed the use of torture; in 1252, Pope Innocent IV specifically licensed the use of torture on Inquisition prisoners, and in 1256 Pope Alexander IV gave permission for inquisitors to absolve each other for violating the tradition against clerical shedding of blood by performing the torture themselves.[78][79][80][81]

This increased incarceration quickly overwhelmed the existing ecclesiastical prisons.[82][83] Inquisitors, being largely members of mendicant orders, generally had no prisons of their own to use.[84] It became necessary to build new prisons especially for the Inquisition, funded partly by local lords, partly by property seized from convicted heretics.[85][86][87] These prisons were often rather loosely run, with most prisoners kept under conditions called murus largus,[88] which allowed them to wander freely within the prison[89] and socialize with their fellow prisoners of both sexes;[90][91] no organized program of work or prayer was imposed,[92] and outside visitors were often unrestricted.[93] Prisoners under a higher degree of suspicion were instead kept in murus strictus, which meant solitary confinement;[88][94] when combined with shackles and a diet of bread and water, this was called strictissimus carceris ("strictest imprisonment").[95] Conversely, those under only minor suspicion were often allowed out on probation, allowed to return home on condition of reporting in on a daily basis.[96][97]

The prison sentences imposed by the Inquisition varied by time, place, the judgement of the inquisitor, and how convincingly a given heretic recanted; some sentences were as short as one year, but most were for life, a sentence which included confiscation of the convict's property.[98][99][100] However, some prisoners sentenced to life imprisonment who demonstrated repentance and cooperation with their captors could hope to be freed on parole,[100][101] and others took advantage of the loosely managed prison system to simply escape.[102]

In the 13th century, the conditions in some inquisitorial prisons, especially those of southern France, were considered inhumane even by contemporaries (although wealthy prisoners were sometimes able to escape the worst of the treatment).[103] The consuls of Carcassonne wrote of the local prison:[104]

We feel ourselves aggrieved in that you, contrary to the use and custom observed by your predecessors in the Inquisition, have made a new prison, called the mur. Truly this could be called with good cause a hell. For in it you have constructed little cells for the purpose of tormenting and torturing people. Some of these cells are dark and airless, so that those lodged there cannot tell if it is day or night, and they are continuously deprived of air and light. In other cells there are kept miserable wretches laden with shackles, some of wood, some of iron. These cannot move, but defecate and urinate on themselves. Nor can they lie down except on the frigid ground. They have endured torments like these day and night for a long time. In other miserable places in the prison, not only is there no light or air, but food is rarely distributed, and that only bread and water.

Many prisoners have been put in similar situations, in which several, because of the severity of their tortures, have lost limbs and have been completely incapacitated. Many, because of the unbearable conditions and their great suffering, have died a most cruel death. In these prisons there is constantly heard an immense wailing, weeping, groaning, and gnashing of teeth. What more can one say? For these prisoners life is a torment and death a comfort. And thus coerced they say that what is false is true, choosing to die once rather than to endure more torture. As a result of these false and coerced confessions not only do those making the confessions perish, but so do the innocent people named by them.

— J. M. Vidal, Un Inquisiteur jugé

After a 1296 uprising in Carcassonne over the conditions of the inquisitorial prison, King Philip IV of France began to fear more such uprisings throughout Languedoc.[105] In 1306, Pope Clement V sent a delegation of cardinals to investigate the conditions in the inquisitorial prisons of southern France. The delegation reported haphazard management, buildings in disrepair, and shocking conditions, and ordered immediate reforms.[106][107] These reforms, once implemented, left inquisitorial prisons among the best-run in Europe, according to historian Edward M. Peters;[108] prisoners convicted on other charges were known to confess to heresy in order to be sent there.[109]

Modern era

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Ecclesiastical prisons remained commonplace through the early modern era. Jean Mabillon, a French monk and scholar, criticized them in his "Reflections on the Prisons of the Monastic Orders", c. 1690, after seeing a young friend sentenced to fifteen years in the prison at Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey suffer severe physical consequences from his treatment there.[110][111] Mont-Saint-Michel continued in use as an ecclesiastical prison until 1791, when, during the French Revolution the abbey was closed and converted entirely into a prison;[112] it was not until 1863 that the prison was closed altogether, so that the building could be restored and, in 1874, declared a monument historique.[113]

During the early modern era, ecclesiastical prisons in many places gradually fell out of use or became secularized. John Howard, an early prison reformer, visited Lisbon's Cadeia do Aljube in 1783;[114] it would become a civil prison in 1808.[115] In the Isle of Man, ecclesiastical prisons were in active use up through the early 19th century, with records of one William Faragher being imprisoned in 1812 for refusing to pay a tithe.[116]

Article 16 of the Concordat of 1953 between Pope Pius XII and Francisco Franco established a separate ecclesiastical prison system in Spain, where clergy convicted under secular law would serve their sentences in monasteries or other dedicated institutions.[117][118][119] In 1976, revisions to the Concordat removed Article 16.[120]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Spierenburg, Pieter (2007). The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe. Amsterdam Academic Archive: Amsterdam University Press. p. 14. ISBN 9789053569894. It is understandable that religious establishments pioneered the use of imprisonment as a penalty.
  2. ^ Johnston, Norman (29 December 2006). Forms of constraint: a history of prison architecture. University of Illinois Press. p. 17. ISBN 0252074017. The Catholic Church was the first institution to use imprisonment consistently for any avowed purpose other than detention.
  3. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 82. ISBN 9780742552029. Pachomius (292-346) orders different forms of enforced seclusion for those monks who, having been several times admonished by the superior in the format recommended in the Gospels, steadfastly cling to proscribed behavior.
  4. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 85. ISBN 9780742552029. Fructuosus (d. 670) [...] states that the excommunicated brother should be sent alone into a dark cell and fed a diet of bread and water. There he must dwell in silence and separation from the community, conferring with no one save the monk dispatched to counsel him.
  5. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 95. ISBN 9780742552029. The Dominican Constitutions urge priors to "punish freely" their lapsed brothers since the "rigor of incarceration is not the same as banishment since it might incite improvement in the delinquent."
  6. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 145. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. Men were similarly punished: under the rule of Fontevrault, rebellious brothers were imprisoned.
  7. ^ a b Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 95. ISBN 9780742552029. The Mercedarians and Trinitarians, orders founded to raise funds to redeem and care for captives, required that prison facilities be erected in each of their communities."
  8. ^ a b Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 95. ISBN 9780742552029. Each Augustinian priory was to have a facility secure on all sides and equipped with leg irons.
  9. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 95. ISBN 9780742552029. The Norbertines ordered that at least one, if not two, jails be established in every residence.
  10. ^ a b c Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 155. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. By 1206 the Cistercian order had licensed prisons for the enclosure of fugitives and evil-doers among the brothers. By the thirteenth century, Carthusian and Carmelite houses incarcerated those who first ran away and then sought to return to the monastic way of life.
  11. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 28. ISBN 0195061535. The Benedictine Rule does not mention a term for prison, but an earlier canon law source, a letter of Pope Siricius (384-98) to Himerius, bishop of Tarragona, stated that delinquent monks and nuns should be separated from their fellows and confined in an ergastulum, a disciplinary cell within the monastery in which forced labor took place, thus moving the old Roman punitive domestic work cell for slaves and household dependents into the institutional setting of the monastery. The letter of Siricius was reissued in 895 at the Synod of Tribur, and it made its way into Gratian's Decretum in 1140.
  12. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. By the second half of the seventh century, such isolation was being secured in a cella obscura, later called ergastulum.
  13. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 28. ISBN 0195061535. Not all monastic constitutions became part of canon law, but from the sixth century on, a number of them used the Latin term carcer as a designation of penitential confinement.
  14. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 28. ISBN 0195061535. In monastic usage the term murus ("a wall") came to be used as a designation for the room "appropriate for imprisonment" that the Benedictine Rule called for."
  15. ^ Gregory the Great (1895). Schaff, Philip; Wace, Henry; Knight, Kevin (eds.). Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 12. Translated by Barmby, James. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co. Retrieved 25 April 2023. But if any one of them, either through former license, or through an evil custom of impunity, has been seduced, or should in future be led, into the gulph of adulterous lapse, we will that, after enduring the severity of adequate punishment, she be consigned for penance to some other stricter monastery of virgins.
  16. ^ a b Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 96. ISBN 9780742552029. Punishments among nuns were not far different. The Carmelite Constitutions concerning a grave fault such as repeated conversation about "the affairs of the world" mandate nine days of confinement including a "discipline" in the refectory.
  17. ^ a b c d Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 145. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. The nun of Watton in Yorkshire, made pregnant by a young canon, was punished by being shackled as she lay in prison which, if the shackles should be taken literally rather than metaphorically, suggests that nuns were not necessarily accorded gentle treatment.
  18. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 29. ISBN 0195061535. Nor were monks the only religious subject to confinement. The twelfth-century Cistercian writer Ailred of Rievaulx told the story of the nun of Watton, who, around 1160, became pregnant by another religious, was discovered, and was chained by fetters on each leg and placed in a cell with only bread and water to live on.
  19. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 29. ISBN 0195061535. Monastic prisons also served for the confinement of secular clergy under discipline by their bishops. The process was known as detrusio in monasterium ("confinement in a monastery"), and it might entail either living as a monk under normal monastic discipline or being held in a monastic prison.
  20. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 30. ISBN 0195061535. "Criminal sins," as the most severe sins were called, required public exclusion from the church and the sacraments, and they required public penance of various kinds, including penitential confinement, the same detrusio in monasterium that applied to secular clergy. For some particularly offensive criminal sins -- incest, magic, divination -- several eighth- and ninth-century councils insisted on actual punitive incarceration.
  21. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 30. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. Aristocratic dwellings of the early tenth century, especially those in northern Europe, were not designed to be solid and lasting. The great families were itinerant, stopping in turn at their estates spread over vast tracts of land. [...] Only bishops, charged with the defence of their walled diocesan towns, could occasionally offer places suitable for detention.
  22. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. Among the Franks of the Merovingian and Carolingian periods, the prison within the monastic walls slowly spread its shadow. Monasteries came to be perceived by powerful laymen as suitable places in which to detain political prisoners too important to be done to death.
  23. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. So Charlemagne forced his cousin Duke Tassilo of Bavaria to accept the tonsure and retire to a monastery, he treated his rebellious son Pepin the Hunchback likewise, and Louis the Pious followed the same policy with a number of opponents. The practice was continued by the Ottonians. For example, Thietmar of Merseberg, describing the treatment meted out to three men who had plotted against Henry II, recorded that one escaped from custody, the second was sent to the great monastery of Fulda, and the third was held for a long time in a castle.
  24. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 85. ISBN 9780742552029. Pepin the Short, in 751, locked up the last Merovingian king in a monastery. Charlemagne ordered his son, Pepin the Hunchback, as well as his cousin, the Duke of Tassilo, to accept the tonsure and live out their days as monks. Louis the Pious followed a similar course of action with those who had become a political liability. A church council in Rome in 826 stated that entry into a monastery should be voluntary, except in the case of those being punished for a crime.
  25. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. Because the practice of forcing defeated political opponents to become monks was disapproved of by the ecclesiastical reformers of the later eleventh century, it died out fairly rapidly.
  26. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 118. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. In thirteenth-century Venice, where male debtors were sent to prison, female ones were commended to monasteries or nunneries to persuade them to pay up, a sign that the city authorities did not wish to be involved in allegations of rape.
  27. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 86. ISBN 9780742552029. In many instances, notably the early Benedictine foundations, the monks slept in cubicles and so various types of rooms, often makeshift ones, were utilized for this specific purpose. We already saw in the case of Pachomius that the sullen and malicious gossip was to be locked up in the infirmary. However, with the widespread employment of imprisonment as a disciplinary and reformative technique, individual prison cells were created in monasteries for this specific purpose.
  28. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 30. ISBN 0195061535. By the late twelfth century each monastery was expected to contain a prison of one sort or another.
  29. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 86. ISBN 9780742552029. With the widespread employment of imprisonment as a disciplinary and reformative technique, individual prison cells were created in monasteries for this specific purpose. A directive in 1229 to the Cistercian monasteries in France ordered the placement of a "solid and secure prison" in each; normally this would have been a room with a barred window under the stairs leading from the cloister to the dormitory. The annals of the monastery at Durham, England, reveal the following entry: "Within the infirmary underneath the master of the infirmary's chamber, was the strong prison called the 'Lying House' which was ordained for such as were great offenders." One history of the Benedictines notes the following: "If one were to visit one of the larger and older English monasteries ... the first building encountered would probably be a rectangular gatehouse set in the boundary wall and having a wide passage leading from the world outside into the monastic precinct ... [T]he gatehouse sometimes had a prisoner's cell." In certain instances, particularly if the monastery was large, an entire prison would be erected for its captives. St. John Climacus (579-649) describes what may have been one of the first prisons of this type at his monastery in Egypt: "At a distance of a mile from the great monastery was a place deprived of every comfort ... Here the pastor shut up, without permission to go out, those who fell into sin after entering the brotherhood; and not all together, but each in a separate and special cell ... And he kept them there until the Lord gave him assurance of the amendment of each one." The monastery at Iona in Ireland had a dwelling for its wayward brothers, as did the Carthusian abbey at Mount Grace, the latter a two-story house with a covered walk along one wall and a garden.
  30. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 86. ISBN 9780742552029. A directive in 1229 to the Cistercian monasteries in France ordered the placement of a "solid and secure prison" in each.
  31. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 86. ISBN 9780742552029. Dom Jean Mabillon, the seventeenth-century Benedictine historian and reformer, reveals that the priors of the Benedictine order gathered at Aix-la-Chapelle in 817 to discuss a response to the frightening abuses of prisoners that had occurred within several of their abbeys. The priors used the opportunity not only to offer guidelines for prisons within the various communities, but also to mandate that facilities conforming to those guidelines be constructed in each foundation.
  32. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 145. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. In one case, that of a monk accused of conspiring against the abbot's authority, excommunication was followed by chaining for a whole day and night in the infirmary. In the text, the severity of this sentence was drawn to the reader's attention, suggesting that most instances of imprisonment were even shorter; it was apparently little more than a symbolic reinforcement of the real punishment, excommunication.
  33. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 28. ISBN 0195061535. Most [monastic constitutions] agreed that such confinement might continue solely at the discretion of the abbot, in the most severe cases entailing confinement for life.
  34. ^ Mabillon, Jean (1724). "Reflections on the prisons of the monastic orders". Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. 17 (4). Translated by Sellin, Thorsten: 586. No care is taken to console them in their prison, which is much harder than that of the laymen, because in the latter, people have usually the liberty to see each other at certain hours and even to receive visits from friends or other charitable persons. Usually they can hear Holy Mass every day. They are often given sermons and exhortations in common, or individually in the case of those kept in deep dungeons. But the prisoners of some monastic orders have none of that. Few or no visits or consolations, rarely a mass, never an exhortation; in other words, a perpetual solitude and seclusion without promenades in the open, without movement, without amelioration, briefly, without consolation.
  35. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 84. ISBN 9780742552029. First, Benedict orders that the continually defiant brother must bear the pain of isolation: "Let him work alone at what he is told to do, maintaining all the while a penitential sorrow ... He must take his meals alone ... No one passing by should bless him, nor food given him." He then complements the stern penal order with a pastoral injunction that intuits much of what we have discussed with regard to the sacral dimension of both confinement and the confined: "The abbot should focus all his attention on the care of the wayward brother, for it is not the healthy but the sick who need a physician. Thus he should use all the means that a wise physician would." Benedict also recommends that respected "elderly brothers who know how to comfort the wavering brother" be sent to "console him so that he be not devoured by too much sorrow." He further adds a quote from St. Paul: "[L]et love for him be reaffirmed and let everyone pray for him." Finally, Benedict charges the abbot to imitate Christ, the good shepherd, who "left the ninety nine sheep ... looking for the one who had strayed ... placed it on his sacred shoulders and carried it back to the flock."
  36. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 29. ISBN 0195061535. Other abbots imposed chains and fetters on imprisoned monks.
  37. ^ a b Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 29. ISBN 0195061535. Monastic imprisonment was used in conjunction with other disciplinary measures, including restricted diet and beating with rods.
  38. ^ Mabillon, Jean (1724). "Reflections on the prisons of the monastic orders". Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. 17 (4). Translated by Sellin, Thorsten: 584. All the priors of the [Benedictine] order, assembled at Aix-la-Chapelle, in 817 [...] forbade the exposure of these poor creatures in a naked state, to be whipped before the rest of the monks, as had previously been the practice.
  39. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 145. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. Ritual humiliation and temporary loss of influence in the abbey were apparently of the essence of these terrible-sounding punishments.
  40. ^ a b Mabillon, Jean (1724). "Reflections on the prisons of the monastic orders". Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. 17 (4). Translated by Sellin, Thorsten: 585. In the course of time, a frightful kind of prison, where daylight never entered, was invented, and since it was designed for those who should finish their lives in it, it received the name Vade in pace. It appears that the first person to invent this horrible form of torture was Matthew, Prior of Saint Martin des Champs, according to the story of Peter the Venerable, who informs us that this superior, a good man otherwise, but extremely severe against those who committed some error, caused the construction of a subterranean cave in the form of a grave where he placed, for the rest of his days, a miserable wretch who seemed incorrigible to him. [...] other superiors, less charitable than zealous, did not fail to use it with respect to guilty monks, and this harshness, inhuman as it appears, went so far and became so common that it caused Etienne, Archbishop of Toulouse, to lodge a complaint, through his grand vicar, with King John. [...] The king was horrified by this inhumanity. Touched by compassion for these wretches, he ordered priors and superiors to visit them twice a month and to give, in addition, their permission to two monks of their choice to visit them twice a month [...] This we learn from the Registers of the Parliament of Languedoc in the year 1350.
  41. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 101. ISBN 9780742552029. Mabillon writes that "a frightful kind of prison, where daylight never entered, was invented, and since it was designed for those who would finish their lives in it, it received the name Vade in pace [go in peace]." A similar fate in a prison with the same title awaited a monk of St. Alban's who was "solitarily imprisoned in fetters, and dying was buried in them."
  42. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 29. ISBN 0195061535. In fourteenth-century Toulouse, monks lodged a protest against a monastic prison called Vade in pace ("Go in peace"), which seems to have been far more severe than the usual place of monastic confinement.
  43. ^ Lea, Henry Charles (1887). A History of The Inquisition of The Middle Ages; volume I. New York: Harper & Brothers. p. 487. Retrieved 26 April 2023. In the case of Jeanne, widow of B. de la Tour, a nun of Lespenasse, in 1246, who had committed acts of both Catharan and Waldensian heresy, and had prevaricated in her confession, the sentence was confinement in a separate cell in her own convent, where no one was to enter or see her, her food being pushed in through an opening left for the purpose—in fact, the living tomb known as the "in pace."
  44. ^ a b Medioli, Francesca (1 September 2001). "Dimensions of the Cloister". In Schutte, Anne Jacobson; Kuehn, Thomas; Menchi, Silvana Seidel (eds.). Time, Space, and Women's Lives in Early Modern Europe. Truman State University Press. pp. 170–171. At Lodi in 1662 Sister Antonia Margherita Limera stood trial for having introduced a man into her cell and entertained him for a few days; she was sentenced to be walled in alive on a diet of bread and water. In the same year, the trial for breach of enclosure and sexual intercourse against the cleric Domenico Cagianella and Sister Vincenza Intanti of the convent of San Salvatore in Ariano had an identical outcome.
  45. ^ Anderson, George M. (September 1995). "Jesuits in Jail, Ignatius to the Present". Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits. 27 (4). St. Louis, MO: Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality: 4. By the fourteenth century, virtually all religious orders had facilities of one kind or another in which to incarcerate troublemakers [...] The Constitutions of Ignatius therefore were a notable exception to those of other religious orders in that they did not include such provisions.
  46. ^ Anderson, George M. (September 1995). "Jesuits in Jail, Ignatius to the Present". Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits. 27 (4). St. Louis, MO: Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality: 3. His second incarceration took place in Salamanca. A Dominican confessor invited him to dinner, though he warned him that the prior would question him and Calixto, his companion, about their preaching. After the meal, the two were confined to the Dominican monastery for three days. Transferred then to the Salamanca jail, they were kept chained to a post in the middle of the building. Four ecclesiastical judges examined Ignatius's copy of the Spiritual Exercises and questioned him on a variety of theological issues. The only fault they found was his inadequate preparation, as they thought, to treat the difference between venial and mortal sin. Having warned him to speak of the matter no more until he had studied theology for four more years, they released him from jail after twenty-two days.
  47. ^ Anderson, George M. (September 1995). "Jesuits in Jail, Ignatius to the Present". Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits. 27 (4). St. Louis, MO: Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality: 4. According to one anecdote, when Ignatius sought approval for the Formula of the Institute, the first sketch of what would eventually become the Constitutions of the Society, he was asked why it included no provisions for confinement. Ignatius, it is said, replied that none were necessary because there was always the door, that is, expulsion from the Society.
  48. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 89. ISBN 9780742552029. Some early examples of ecclesiastical imprisonment can be found in the laws of Theodosius, where one finds a ruling that clerical deserters were to be arrested and placed in church custody. A decree from the first Council of Matison (581) rules that senior clergy charged with indecency or carrying weapons must be incarcerated for thirty days on a diet of bread and water. In the Gelasian Sacramentary (early eighth century), there is a prescription that penitents are to be confined during Lent, beginning on Ash Wednesday, and kept in custody until Holy Thursday. An eighth-century collection of canons written by the Archbishop of York contains a warning that those who question the church's authority to both baptize and forgive sins shall 'feel the pain of excommunication, or long bear the confinement of a gaol.'
  49. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 145. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. The one sphere within the Church in which imprisonment was an accepted punishment by 1000 was in monasteries. [...] In the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, resort to imprisonment grew commoner.
  50. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 151. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. In the course of the thirteenth century, they tended to favour punitive imprisonment for serious offences by the clergy.
  51. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. The historian of the years 1000–1300 cannot afford so easily to pigeonhole prisons under the heading 'penal system'. This is not because imprisonment was never in that period imposed as a judicial punishment; as we shall see, it had always been used punitively at least occasionally; it became a commoner sentence in the ecclesiastical courts during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and towards 1300 lay courts were increasingly imitating this.
  52. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 90. ISBN 9780742552029. Ecclesiastical prisons as the formal apparatus for dealing with serious 'crimes' make their appearance in the thirteenth century.
  53. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 90. ISBN 9780742552029. The decisive pronouncement, however, was issued in 1298 by Pope Boniface VIII within the 'Liber Sextus,' a document that was appended to the first code of canon law. The directive states: 'In regard to the detention of the guilty, prison should be primary understood not as punishment. At the same time we do not reject prison for clerics ... if they have been convicted of crimes. Taking the nature of their crimes and their persons and other circumstances into prudent consideration, such malefactors could either be confined for a time or for life as you may judge appropriate.'
  54. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 29. ISBN 0195061535. The episcopal use of imprisonment as punishment was regularized in an executive order entitled 'Quamvis' and issued by Pope Boniface VIII in his lawbook, the Liber Sextus, in 1298.
  55. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 161. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. In 1298 Boniface VIII formally introduced imprisonment into canon law as a fitting punishment: 'Although it is evident that the use of prison is authorized for the prisoner's custody and not for punishment, we have no objection if you send members of the clergy who are under your discipline, after a confession of crime or a conviction, to prison for the performance of penitence.'
  56. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 52. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0.
  57. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 29. ISBN 0195061535. During the twelfth century, bishops were expected to have their own diocesan prisons for the punishment of criminal clergy.
  58. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 43. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. Unwillingness to cooperate with the prévot of Paris almost certainly explained the decision of the chapter of Notre Dame cathedral to build prisons in its cloister, as it had by 1285.
  59. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 90. ISBN 9780742552029. In 1261, Boniface, the Archbishop of Canterbury, decreed the following: 'We do with special injunction ordain that every bishop have one or two prisons in his bishopric (he is to take care of the sufficient largeness and security thereof) for the safekeeping of clerks according to canonical censure.'
  60. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 93. ISBN 9780742552029. The pontifical and synodal decrees demanding the construction of prisons in each diocese provided no guidelines as to how they were to be constructed.
  61. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 152. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. In practice, by 1298 brief incarceration was already well established also for a small number of minor clerical offences. For example, clerics whose testimony in a court of law had proved to be mendacious might find themselves in jail for a short period, as a forceful expression of the court's anger.
  62. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 102. ISBN 9780742552029. Rulings, such as the one enacted at the Council of Rheims (1157) that those young women swayed by the influence of a heretical Manichaean group were to be put to the ordeal of the hot iron and, if found guilty, branded on the forehead and cheek and then banished, were by no means rare. The warden of a house of detention for women wrote that there must be chains, bolts, gags, and various sorts of discipline because if the jail is meant to terrorize and cause fear then it stands to reason that it should be rigorous.
  63. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 147. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. Papal rectors were lavish in their use of imprisonment, often causing trouble thereby.
  64. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 52. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. The records of papal courts sitting in Avignon in the fourteenth century indicate that papal judges not infrequently used imprisonment as a form of punishment.
  65. ^ a b Terenzi, Marcello (1986). "The Fortress of Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome" (PDF). Fasciculi Archaelogicae Historicae: 71–75. Retrieved 8 June 2023.
  66. ^ a b Anderson, George M. (September 1995). "Jesuits in Jail, Ignatius to the Present". Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits. 27 (4). St. Louis, MO: Seminar on Jesuit Spirituality: 4. Perhaps the most famous ecclesiastical prison to be used by the Roman Catholic Church itself was the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome. It was there that Clement XIV, under political pressure from the Bourbons and other enemies of the Society, ordered the incarceration of the general, Lorenzo Ricci, after the promulgation of Dominus ac Redemptor, the bull that dissolved the Jesuit order. Ricci was seventy years old. His advanced age, coupled with the harsh circumstances of his confinement, undoubtedly hastened his death in Castel Sant'Angelo two years later.
  67. ^ Gallucci, Margaret (20 August 2003). Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 8. ISBN 978-1-4039-6107-5. In 1539 Clement's successor Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese, ruled 1534–49) imprisoned Cellini in Castel Sant'Angelo on charges of stealing jewels from the papal coffers during the Sack of Rome a decade earlier. The artist escaped but was caught and incarcerated again. The Pope finally released him in 1540, thanks, in part, to the intervention of the French King Francis I.
  68. ^ Dick, Steven J. (12 May 2020). "The Consolations of Astronomy and the Cosmic Perspective". Space, Time, and Aliens. Springer Nature. p. 761. ISBN 978-3-030-41613-3. After a career of wandering Europe and writing books, Bruno was imprisoned by the Inquisition in 1592, first in Venice then in Rome, and burned at the stake in 1600 [...] By the time of his imprisonment Bruno's books had already been written, and as he languished in prison at Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome and elsewhere for 8 years, one wonders what occupied his fertile mind.
  69. ^ Bracewell, C. W. (1984). "Marc'Antonio de Dominis: the Making of a Reformer". Slovene Studies. 6 (1): 167. Yet soon after Gregory's death De Dominis was seized, confined to the Castle Sant'Angelo, and died in the course of the Inquisition's investigation.
  70. ^ Koenig, Duane (1945). "Count Cagliostro, Grand Cophta of the Enlightment". The Social Studies. 36 (8): 362. doi:10.1080/00220973.1937.11017111. The result was that on the evening of December 27, 1789, the couple was arrested by the Inquisition for attempting to found an Egyptian lodge. Cagliostro was accused of impiety and heresy. [...] The convicted heretic was kept first in the Castel Sant' Angelo, the Roman citadel, and then moved to the gloomy fortress of St. Leo in the territory of Urbino. There he remained until his death on August 28, 1795.
  71. ^ Finzsch, Norbert; Jütte, Robert, eds. (1996). Institutions of Confinement: Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in Western Europe and North America, 1500-1950. Cambridge University Press. p. 313. ISBN 0-521-56070-5. The Casa di Correzione, which was one of the first buildings to be added to the original complex, was designed to accommodate two categories of young boys: juvenile offenders who were sent by Roman courts or during hearings or because they were sentenced to the galleys; and disobedient boys who were put away at the request of their father or guardian.
  72. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 94. ISBN 9780742552029. Arguably, the most notable of the numerous ecclesiastical penal facilities was St. Michael's in Rome. It opened in 1703 under the aegis of Pope Clement XI and became a revered system of enlightened penal practice. [...] It was a house of detention exclusively focused on seeking the reform of troubled adolescents. Parents or guardians of the young people petitioned the pope directly to have them confined there. [...] The young men were chained to their desks. The daily regimen at St. Michael's was marked by prayer, work, and, frequently, corporal punishment.
  73. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 149. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. By the second half of the twelfth century, as the inquisitorial process of enquiry became normal in the church courts, a delay between the arrest of a cleric and his trial became necessary, in serious cases at least, in order to find witnesses and permit all appropriate enquiries to be conducted by the judge appointed to the case. In the meantime, the accused could not be allowed to escape. The church, possessing few prisons and even fewer guards, often found itself unequal to the task of detaining him or her.
  74. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 154. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. Because the chief aim of inquisitors was to extort confessions from those suspected of heresy, a necessary preliminary to reconciling them (where possible) with the community of the faithful, they took it for granted that arrested suspects against whom there was circumstantial evidence would need to be held, preferably in isolation, while awaiting the proper forms of interrogation, and that those who under interrogation did not at once confess and perform penance would be held until they did. The patient interrogation over several months of captured Cathar perfecti demanded lengthy imprisonment; Pierre Autier, the last of the great Cathar missionaries, was kept for a whole year before being burned in April 1310, so that as much as possible could be established about the beliefs he had been propagating and the various people who had assisted him. Lesser men, once confessed, recanted and restored to communion with the church, were not freed from jail until they had implicated others with whom they had allegedly shared their heretical views.
  75. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 52. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. When in 1306 one of the cardinals charged by Pope Clement V to investigate the complaints of the people of Albi inspected the mur at Carcassonne, he discovered that many prisoners whose trials had not yet been completed were being kept shackled and housed in 'narrow and very dark prisons.' Some had apparently endured these conditions for five years and more. Evidently shocked by what he found, the cardinal ordered that the prisoners should be held under less harsh conditions.
  76. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 54. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. Languedocian inquisitors only rarely used torture to extract confessions. Instead, uncooperative witnesses were simply locked away for long periods of time to think things over.
  77. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. pp. 54–55. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0.
  78. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 102. ISBN 9780742552029. Nor should we forget that, in 1256, despite the ancient tradition condemning the shedding of blood by clerics, inquisitors were permitted to absolve each other of sin if they participated in torturing their prisoners.
  79. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 153. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. In 1252 Innocent IV licensed the use of torture to obtain evidence from suspects; by 1256 inquisitors were allowed to absolve each other if they used the instruments of torture themselves, rather than relying on lay agents for the purpose.
  80. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 100. ISBN 9780742552029. Despite the prohibition against the shedding of blood by clerics, exceptions in defense of torture are found in the Corpus Iuris Canonici both in the decretals of Gratian and in the 'Liber Extra' of Pope Gregory IX.
  81. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 194. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. When the inquisitors imposed a penance entailing the confiscation of property, that property passed into the hands of the condemned person's lord. In turn, the lords were expected to use the revenues from these confiscations to defray the inquisitors' expenses. Even the prisons used by the Dominican inquisitors were built at royal expense and the prisoners lodged there supported out of the royal coffers.
  82. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 31. ISBN 0195061535. The new work of the inquisitors at first greatly overloaded the capacity of existing prisons.
  83. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 98. ISBN 9780742552029. Particularly in France and Spain, the large number of prisoners overwhelmed monastic and ecclesiastical centers of detention.
  84. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 154. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. But the mendicant friars who from 1231 until 1311 comprised the main body of inquisitors, had never previously had need of such amenities; nor could their houses supply them.
  85. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 31. ISBN 0195061535. From the mid-thirteenth century on, both the confiscated property of convicted heretics and grants from the royal treasury, especially in France and Sicily, led to the construction of special inquisitorial prisons.
  86. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 98. ISBN 9780742552029. By the middle of the thirteenth century, there were inquisitorial prisons in France at Carcassone, Bezier, and Toulouse.
  87. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 154. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. The only alternative available was the construction of inquisitorial prisons solely for the custody of alleged heretics. These began to appear in the south of France in the second half of the thirteenth century.
  88. ^ a b Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 99. ISBN 9780742552029. There were two classes of inquisitorial prisons, what were termed murus largus and murus strictus. The former, patterned on monastic life, established a precisely regulated daily regimen within the penal enclosure. The latter called for a much more severe confinement in a single cell.
  89. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 31. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. This cooperation earned Adhemar the relatively lenient, in the circumstances, sentence of imprisonment ad murum largum in Toulouse. Under the terms of such a sentence, prisoners enjoyed a large degree of freedom, often being allowed to wander around the mur rather as they wished.
  90. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 62. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. For the most part, suspects were apparently not kept under lock and key or isolated from one another. Instead, they were allowed to wander around, almost at pleasure, within the walls of the prison. Just as little was normally done to keep prisoners separate from one another, so was little effort made to isolate them from outsiders. People who had been arrested and were in transit to the mur were not kept incommunicado.
  91. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 82. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. Aside from lodging men and women in separate rooms, no effort was made to keep the sexes apart. Similarly, no effort was made to segregate prisoners awaiting trial from those who had already been condemned.
  92. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 82. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. The most striking feature of life in the inquisitorial prisons was its largely unstructured nature. The inquisitors seem to have made virtually no effort to establish a special penitential regime. Unlike prison authorities in early modern and modern Europe, they set up no system of labor. If prisoners worked, they did so of their own volition and on their own schedule. Even more surprising is the lack of any special program of religious education or indoctrination.
  93. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 83. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. However, at times the prison authorities restricted free access of visitors to prisoners. Writing at the end of the fourteenth century, Nicholas Eymerich noted that inquisitors should be suspicious of the sincerity of penitents who during the initial stages of their investigation doggedly clung to their errors. Such people were rarely genuine converts to orthodoxy. Therefore they should be imprisoned, for life if necessary, to prevent them from infecting others. For the same reason visitors should be restricted. Prisoners should not be allowed visits either by women, who are 'weak, and easily perverted,' or by simple individuals. Only Catholic men, zealous for the faith and beyond all suspicion of heresy, should have access to them. Eymerich's Languedocian predecessors may have shared his suspicions about the genuineness of their prisoners' conversion. Yet they seem to have done little to restrict visiting privileges. Spouses had the right to visit their mates. Even visitors who the jailers should have known were suspicious characters had little trouble gaining access to the murs.
  94. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 31. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. As a prisoner, however, Adhemar proved less than exemplary. On 7 March 1316 Gui took the unusual step of sentencing him to the much more severe form of imprisonment known as murum strictum, in which a prisoner was kept confined in a cell and could also be burdened with fetters and shackles.
  95. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 163. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. Of these, four were sentenced ad strictissimum carcerem, that is, to be kept bound in chains and fed on nothing but bread and water.
  96. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 154. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. In some cases, if there was only mild suspicion against a person, the equivalent of a modern probation order might be issued, requiring the suspect to turn up each day and report, though not to be incarcerated.
  97. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 61. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. In those cases where decisive proof was lacking and the suspicions entertained as to the defendant's conduct were not 'vehement,' the suspect was to be released upon providing suitable sureties until such time as new, more convincing evidence was found against him. Such individuals, however, were not given complete liberty. Every day they were to present themselves at the gate of the inquisition's house in Toulouse and remain there until supper.
  98. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 69. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. Imprisonment was almost invariably for life, and entailed the confiscation of one's property.
  99. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 32. ISBN 0195061535. But when she was sentenced to life imprisonment because her judges believed that she had recanted only out of fear of death (a common reason for sentences of life imprisonment in inquisitorial courts), Joan revoked her confession and was burned at the stake.
  100. ^ a b Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 157. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. The length of a heretic's prison sentence depended on the judgement of the inquisitor. While a few got away with just 1 year, most had a life sentence imposed on them. As nowadays, this only sometimes meant life. Inquisitors could and did free some penitents.
  101. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 84. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. This was not the way of the inquisitors, who operated something akin to a parole system. Those who cooperated with the inquisitors could look forward to a relaxation of their sentences.
  102. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 101. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. Even after someone had fallen into the hands of the inquisitors, escape from custody does not seem to have been extraordinarily difficult. In the first decade of the fourteenth century, the custodians of the mur at Toulouse had considerable difficulty in maintaining effective security. In 1309 and 1310 eight men escaped. 22 April 1310 was a particularly bad month. On the 19th Guillaume Falqueti escaped; five days later, on the 24th, there was a mass breakout, when five prisoners made off. After this escape, security was evidently improved. Nevertheless, one other person, Pierre Gilbert the elder of Ferrus, escaped-not from the mur itself but from the looser form of detention at the prison's gatehouse. Bernard Cui's register contains the story of a man who escaped from the inquisitors not once, but twice.
  103. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 155. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. The terrible conditions the consuls complained of were not, however, universally experienced in the mur of Carcassonne. While waiting for and during interrogation, things could be more comfortable, at least for those born of well-known families.
  104. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. pp. 64–65. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0.
  105. ^ Dunbabin, Jean (2002). Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 155. ISBN 978-0-333-64715-8. In 1296, the citizens of Carcassonne revolted against such conditions; in 1303 Philip IV feared a more general rising across the whole of Languedoc.
  106. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 31. ISBN 0195061535. The inquisitors' frequent use of imprisonment also increased officials' awareness of prison conditions. Early in the fourteenth century, Pope Clement sent a commission of inspectors into the inquisitorial prisons of southern France; finding these prisons to be in great disrepair, the inspectors issued strict and apparently successful orders for improvement.
  107. ^ Given, James B. (1997). Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 65. ISBN 978-0-8014-8759-0. When in 1306 one of the cardinals charged by Pope Clement V to investigate the complaints of the people of Albi inspected the mur at Carcassonne, he discovered that many prisoners whose trials had not yet been completed were being kept shackled and housed in 'narrow and very dark prisons.' Some had apparently endured these conditions for five years and more. Evidently shocked by what he found, the cardinal ordered that the prisoners should be held under less harsh conditions.
  108. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 31. ISBN 0195061535. From the fourteenth century on, inquisitorial prisons were probably the best-maintained prisons in Europe.
  109. ^ Skotnicki, Andrew (2008). Criminal Justice and the Catholic Church. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 91. ISBN 9780742552029. Some sentences were feared far more than imprisonment in a monastery or religious convent. One was relegation to the papal galleys or, far worse, those of the king. Some convicts were so terrified of this latter sentence that we have evidence of them accusing themselves of heresy or even, in one case, sodomy with boys and animals in order to be sent to the prisons of the Inquisition.
  110. ^ Peters, Edward M. (1995). "Prison before the Prison: The Ancient and Medieval Worlds". In Morris, Norval; Rothman, David J. (eds.). Oxford History of the Prison. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 29. ISBN 0195061535. Monastic prisons and their severities survived into early modern times, and the great Benedictine monk and scholar Jean Mabillon criticized them in a short tract written around 1690, 'Reflections on the Prisons of the Monastic Orders.'
  111. ^ Sellin, Thorsten (1724). "Dom Jean Mabillon--A Prison Reformer of the Seventeenth Century". Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. 17 (4): 595–597.
  112. ^ Étienne Dupont (1913), La Bastille des Mers – Les Prisons du Mont-Saint-Michel – Les Exilés de l'ordre Du Roi au Mont-Saint-Michel – 1685–1789, Perrin
  113. ^ Patrice de Plunkett (2011), Les romans du Mont-Saint-Michel, Éditions du Rocher, p. 318, ISBN 978-2268071473
  114. ^ Coates, Timothy J. (2014). Convict Labor in the Portuguese Empire 1740-1932, volume 13. Brill. p. 17. ISBN 978-90-04-25429-9.
  115. ^ Jean, Martine (October 2016). ""A storehouse of prisoners": Rio de Janeiro's Correction House (Casa de Correção) and the birth of the penitentiary in Brazil, 1830–1906". Atlantic Studies. 14 (2): 4. doi:10.1080/14788810.2016.1240915. S2CID 151669495. Retrieved 11 June 2023. Built in 1732 for the detention of disobedient priests, the Aljube became a civil prison in 1808 when the Portuguese crown relocated to Brazil.
  116. ^ Farrant, P. W. S. (July 1995). "Some Observations on the History of and the Role and Duties of the Manx Vicar General, Chancellor & Official Principal". Ecclesiastical Law Journal. 3 (17): 410–419. doi:10.1017/S0956618X00000417. S2CID 145773210. The most feared punishment meted out by the Manx Ecclesiastical Courts up to about the beginning of the last century was imprisonment in the ecclesiastical prison under the medieval cathedral of St. German's in Peel Island (now in ruins since the seventeenth century) near the Town of Peel. Craine tells us that: 'imprisonment in the ecclesiastical prison was a most unpleasant ordeal and that in 1812 William Faragher refused on some point of principle to pay his accustomed tithes and was committed to St. German's until he found sureties for his compliance.'
  117. ^ "Franco's concordat (1953) : Text". Concordat Watch. Retrieved 11 June 2023. When clergy or those in Religious Orders are detained or arrested they will be treated with the consideration due to their state and position. Prison sentences will be served in a Church or religious house which, in the judgement of the local Ordinary and the relevant State authority, offers suitable guarantees. Sentences will not be served in facilities where there are lay people unless the relevant Church authorities have demoted the person concerned to the lay state. They will be allowed bail and any other benefits established in law.
  118. ^ Junquera, Natalia (28 November 2013). "The great priest escape". Ediciones EL PAÍS. Retrieved 11 June 2023. The concordat signed in 1953 between Spain and the Vatican established that priests could not go to jail. Instead, sanctions had to be served inside 'an ecclesiastical or religious home [...] or at least in a different location from secular prisoners.'
  119. ^ "IMPRISONED PRIESTS ARE MOVED BY SPAIN". The New York Times. 19 November 1973. Retrieved 11 June 2023. The priests' protest against the 'ecclesiastical prison' set off a widespread campaign, particularly strong in the Basque country, in which bishops joined priests in urging the Government to shut the prison and move the seven to a monastery as provided for by the concordat between Spain and the Vatican.
  120. ^ "Agreements Between the Spanish State and the Holy See [Selections]". ReligLaw. International Center for Law and Religion Studies. Retrieved 11 June 2023. 1. Article XVI of the current Concordat is hereby abolished.
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