A prison turned museum in Southwark

The bishop built a palace and jailed his own tenants

The Clink is a former prison on Clink Street, now a museum that recreates its cells and punishments. It stood inside the grounds of Winchester Palace, the London home the Bishop of Winchester built here between 1144 and 1149. The bishop ran this patch of Southwark as his own territory, called the Liberty of the Clink. He collected the rents and he kept the court. If a tenant failed to pay, the bishop could lock them up himself.

Two separate prisons stood inside the palace walls, one for men and one for women. That split made the Clink unusual. Historians credit it as the oldest prison for women in England, and possibly the oldest for men too. The cells held petty debtors and local troublemakers at first. Guards were paid almost nothing, so they charged prisoners for everything. A bed, a candle, lighter irons, even permission to go outside and beg: all of it cost money. Those with nothing sold their clothes through the bars to buy food.

By the 1500s, the prison had changed its purpose. It was used to hold people for their religion instead of their debts. Under Queen Mary I, Protestants were starved and chained here. One of them, the Bible translator John Rogers, was later executed. Under later monarchs, Catholic priests took their place in the cells. Father George Blackwell, an archpriest who refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the king, died here in 1613.

Mobs burned the prison three times before it fell

Twice before, mobs had already torn the Clink apart. Rioters during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 broke in, killed gaolers, and freed the prisoners. Jack Cade's rebels did the same in 1450, burning the building down before it was rebuilt larger. By the 1700s, the prison was fading. Only two inmates were recorded in 1732, and by 1745 it stood almost empty.

The Clink's end came in 1780. Lord George Gordon led a mob protesting rights granted to Catholics. Lord George Gordon's rioters broke into the Clink, freed every prisoner, and burned it to the ground, and none of them were ever recaptured. The Clink was never rebuilt. Its name lived on anyway, as slang for any jail cell, long after the building itself was gone.

A debtor stayed locked up here for 42 years

Henry Broncker, nicknamed "The Ratman," was locked up for debt and stayed roughly 42 years, finally released around 1712. Nobody can say for certain where the word came from. The official story points to the sound of metal doors being bolted shut, or the rattle of chains on a prisoner's wrists. The term "Liberty of the Clink" itself first turns up in writing in 1530, a label used to tell this bishop's patch of Southwark apart from its neighbors. Even the founding date is argued over: the museum favors 1144, while other accounts put the first purpose-built cells here as early as 1107.

A surviving wall now sits inside a reconstructed museum

The building standing on Clink Street today is not the one that burned in 1780. The museum occupies a basement on the original ground, built later over the ruins of Winchester Palace. A stretch of 17th- and 18th-century prison wall survives inside it, one of the only physical fragments left from the site's working life. The museum fills in the rest with reconstructed cells, torture devices and recovered artifacts, built to show what confinement here actually felt like.

Southwark's old status as a lawless pocket outside city jurisdiction shaped more than the prison. The same freedom let this stretch of the river host bear-baiting pits, brothels and public playhouses, including Shakespeare's Globe nearby. Clink Street itself returned to the screen in 1948, when David Lean filmed a chase scene for his adaptation of Oliver Twist along the street outside.

Winchester Palace stands close by in ruin, its rose window still visible above the street, the clearest remaining sign of the bishop's household this prison once served.