We cannot say when the first place of imprisonment was established in England. It is unlikely to have been created for that specific purpose and more likely to have been an improvised expedient: a piece of rope tied to a pillar; manacles forged by a blacksmith and fastened to a floor; stocks erected on the village green or in the churchyard; or the cellar of a substantial house; whatever and wherever needs must. Headmen, landowners and bishops would have been the gaolers.

As royal power grew, and royal control over the administration of justice with it, local expedients would become more regularised. When the early Anglo-Saxon kings promulgated law codes and established courts in shire and hundred to try criminal offences, the necessity arose for means and places to detain and restrain the small number of those awaiting judgment who could find no sureties or were too dangerous to be let loose, or perhaps the rather larger number of those who were in danger of the lynch-mob. In the early tenth-century law codes of Edward the Elder and Aethelstan and early eleventh-century ones of Canute, detention pending trial was specifically reserved for strangers or for those who had neither friends willing to stand surety nor property that could be held as security. Prison was thus the preserve of those who had no ties to the locality and every incentive to evade justice by going elsewhere, and of those who could evade justice without leaving recompense. The poor, the alien, and the unpopular were ‘held for judgment’ – pending trial by ordeal.