Sponging-house

Sponging-house

A sponging-house was a one-time place of temporary confinement for debtors in the United Kingdom.

If someone were to get into debt, their creditor would lay a complaint with the sheriff, the sheriff sent his bailiffs, and the debtor would be taken to the local sponging-house. This was not a debtor's prison, as such, but a private house, often the bailiff's own home. The debtor would be held there temporarily in the hope that they could make some arrangement with the creditors. Anthony Trollope set out the system in his novel "The Three Clerks" of 1857:

:"He was taken to the sponging-house, and it was there imparted to him that he had better send for two things - first of all for money, which was by far the more desirable of the two; and secondly, for bail, which even if forthcoming was represented as being at best but a dubious advantage."

If debtors could not sort matters out quickly, they were then brought up in court and transferred to a debtor's prison. How people were ever expected to pay off debts while incarcerated is hard to imagine, but still the system stood.

Sponging-houses had a terrible reputation, which was made clear in a description by Montagu Williams, a London lawyer who surely knew them well, in his "Down East and Up West" of 1894:

:"Ah, my dear fellow, you´ve never seen a sponging-house! Ye gods - what a place! I had an apartment they were pleased to call a bedroom to myself certainly, but if I wanted to breathe the air I had to do so in a cage in the back garden - iron bars all round, and about the size of one of the beast receptacles at the Zoo. For this luxury I had to pay two guineas a day. A bottle of sherry cost a guinea, a bottle of Bass half-a-crown, and food was upon the same sort of economical tariff."

The idea of the sponging-house was based on that of the sponge that gave it its name, which readily gives up its contents on being squeezed. The sponging house was the place where a debtor had any available cash squeezed out of him, partly to the creditor's benefit, but also to that to the bailiff who ran it. [ [http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-spo2.htm World Wide Words: Sponging-house ] ]

Notorious sponging-house residents

*Theodore Edward Hook - English author

*George Morland - English painter

References


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Look at other dictionaries:

  • Sponging house — Sponging Spon ging ( j[i^]ng), a. & n. from {Sponge}, v. [1913 Webster] {Sponging house} (Eng. Law), a bailiff s or other house in which debtors are put before being taken to jail, or until they compromise with their creditors. At these houses… …   The Collaborative International Dictionary of English

  • sponging house — noun Etymology: sponging (gerund of sponge) (II) + house; from the extortionate charges made there for food and lodging : a house usually maintained by a bailiff for keeping debtors for a day to afford opportunity to come to terms with their… …   Useful english dictionary

  • sponging-house — sponˈging house or spunˈging house noun (obsolete) A bailiff s lodging house for debtors in his custody before their committal to prison • • • Main Entry: ↑sponge …   Useful english dictionary

  • sponging-house — A house where persons arrested for debt were kept for a day in order that their friends might have opportunity to keep them from going to prison by paying their debts …   Ballentine's law dictionary

  • sponging-house — noun A place of temporary confinement for debtors, kept by a bailiff, where debtors were sponged of all money they had on themselves, before being transferred to debtors prison …   Wiktionary

  • sponging house — jail for debtors, debtors prison …   English contemporary dictionary

  • Sponging — Spon ging ( j[i^]ng), a. & n. from {Sponge}, v. [1913 Webster] {Sponging house} (Eng. Law), a bailiff s or other house in which debtors are put before being taken to jail, or until they compromise with their creditors. At these houses… …   The Collaborative International Dictionary of English

  • spunging-house — noun sponging house …   Wiktionary

  • Bleak House — For other uses, see Bleak House (disambiguation). Bleak House   …   Wikipedia

  • Marshalsea — The prison occupied two locations, the first c. 1329–1811, and the second 1811–1842. The image above is of the first Marshalsea in the 18th century …   Wikipedia

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