The Mint

The Mint was a district in Southwark, London, west of Borough High Street named for the mint King Henry VIII set up there at Suffolk Place in about 1543. The mint ceased to operate in the reign of Mary I and Suffolk Place was demolished in 1557. ["Mint Street" in Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert (eds) (1983) "The London Encyclopaedia": 521] In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the area was known for offering protection against prosecution for debtors due to its legal status as a "liberty", or a jurisdictional interzone.

In 1550, the Borough of Southwark purchased its titles of independence from the crown and the lands of the Duke of Suffolk, but these patents excluded Suffolk Place, the "Liberty of the Mint", the Clink Liberty and Paris Garden. This set up a judicial and political anomaly in those areas no longer part of London, but also not officially within other jurisdictions. Prior to Henry VIII, each of the areas was ruled by ecclesiastical courts and manorial powers, but after the break from Rome it was effectively without law. "The Mint" and "The Clink" were two areas in Southwark, therefore, where no laws could be enforced. Alsatia, an area of Whitefriars, had enjoyed a similar distinction under patent of James I, but it had its privileges revoked in 1697.

Each of these anomalous districts attracted its own form of law breaker, and The Mint's primary population was debtors. Those who were in danger of being thrown into debtor's prison could, if they were lucky, run to The Mint to hide. Once in The Mint, such debtors risked immediate arrest if they were found outside of it. Debt collectors (known as "duns") would stand along the main roads out of The Mint and wait for any suspected debtor. Sometimes the duns were bill collectors in the modern sense, and sometimes they were thugs who would beat and seize the debtor. Within The Mint, life was hard. Since persons there could not leave (except on Sunday, when no debts could be collected), they could not get jobs to raise money enough to pay off their debts. Those who would attempt to leave The Mint on Sunday to gather money from friends or lenders were often called "Sunday gentlemen", as they would attempt to appear prosperous to hoodwink lenders.

The Mint was hardly a debtor's holiday. Because the people there were poor, such housing and food as could be found inside the Mint was at a sub-ghetto level. Those who went to the Mint would frequently die of malnutrition or murder before raising enough money to escape their debts. Furthermore, the Mint's geography was a factor in its poor living standard, as it was below the river's level and therefore was a breeding ground for sewage- and water-borne maladies. Daniel Defoe describes life in The Mint for his heroine Moll Flanders in the novel of the same name.

In 1723, the Mint lost its protected status as a result of The Mint in Southwark Act 1722, although it remained a slum into the 19th century. By that time, its reputation as a haunt for the poorest of the poor had ensured that neither it nor The Clink had a standard of living on par with the rest of London. Although elsewhere in nineteenth century London new roads were deliberately laid through slum areas to eliminate them, Southwark Bridge Road, constructed in 1819 to link up with Southwark Bridge, swerved round the western side of the Mint. In the later nineteenth century its reputation as one of London's worst rookeries was sustained when conditions there were exposed by the Rev. Andrew Mearns in "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London" (1883) and by George R. Sims in "How the Poor Live" (1883). The scandal created by Mearns' and Sims' revelations prompted a royal commission 1884-5. However, the destruction of the old Mint was already underway. From 1881 to 1886, associated with the construction of the new Marshalsea Road, the area was cleared of most of its old slums, though even in 1899 some remnants of the old rookery were still to be discovered between Red Cross Street and Borough High Street. [Jerry White (2007) "London in the Nineteenth Century": 9-10, 58-60]

In addition to Defoe's description, the Mint is referred to by most 18th century British satirists, including Alexander Pope in his "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" and, indirectly, by John Gay in "Trivia". It also features as the refuge of the outlaw Jack Sheppard in William Harrison Ainsworth's novel of the same name (1839) and in the novel "The System of the World" by Neal Stephenson.

References

External links

* [http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH36/browner1.html An essay on Southwark]
* [http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications/raggedlondon-thesouth.htm A Victorian description of the area]