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Sometimes one of my characters takes another one of my characters captive. It happens. Then I’m faced with the proverbial problem of what to do with a captive in the 4th century Roman Empire.
To the dungeon! Yeah, um, notsofast. Dungeons weren’t a thing yet.
To the stocks! Umm… the stocks weren’t a thing either.
Quick and brutal justice in the form of execution! Wait, that’s my character, you can’t just kill him!
And this doesn’t even touch on how to store your prisoners if you’re on campaign.
Oh, bother.
Like I mentioned above, dungeons weren’t a thing yet. Built-in prisons in castles didn’t really start showing up until the 12th century. Castles themselves, as fortress-homes, didn’t come into play until the the 9th-10th centuries. The word “castle” is connected to the ancient Roman “castellum,” which was basically a walled town. At this point in history, we’re still dealing with castellums, rather than actual castles. *
So what did they do? Let’s take it back to the Romans.
The Romans didn’t really do prisons—not in the way we understand them, anyway.
They had a lot of different, creative kinds of punishments, but throwing people in prisons for long periods of time wasn’t a habit with them. Unless you were sentenced to die creatively or were in debt. Then they might do it. (Because there’s no better way to pay back your debt than by being locked up and unable to do anything productive at all.)
The early A.D. Romans just didn’t really have a lot of time for prisons.
They kind of saw it as unproductive. If you did something bad, they preferred to just kill you then and there, entertain themselves with your death, or sell you into slavery. At least then they could get some work out of you. You might get shipped off to the mines, or to an actual ship where you’d be a galley slave. Or maybe they’d make you gladiator.
The Romans did have this underground chamber that they dropped people into sometimes and just left them there for awhile.
The only way in or out was through a kind of manhole in the ceiling. Some of these prisons were connected to drains so your waste could be carried away, but most probably weren’t. Going to visit someone in an underground prison took a lot of dedication. And that meant the guards would look at you all suspicious-like before they lowered you down into the hole, because maybe you were in cahoots with the prisoner. And they might just decide not to bring you back up through the hole again.
Kind of puts the early Christian call to “visit those in prison” in a whole new light, huh?
St. Paul was in one of those cells for about two years.
That underground hole prison was a thing in the first few centuries A.D.
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In the next few centuries, prisons have evolved a little.
There seems to be evidence of more extensive chambers above the underground accessed-by-a-hole prison. It’s quite possible that these were built up later, as the emperors in the 4th and 5th centuries started to say, “Okay, new plan. We’re not tossing everyone to the freaking lions anymore.”
Or maybe those above-ground prisons were there all along.
So what was the new plan, the one that didn’t involve so many lions? Let’s look at the Theodosian Code, which was put together by Theodosius II in about 438 A.D. It was a collection of all the best laws laid out by Christian emperors since 312.
One of them, suggested by Constantine in 320, went something like this:
“He shall not be put in manacles that cleave to the bones, but in looser chains, so that there may be no torture and yet the custody may remain secure. When incarcerated he must not suffer the darkness of an inner prison, but he must be kept in good health by the enjoyment of light, and when night doubles the necessity for his guard, he shall be taken back to the vestibules of the prison and into healthful places. When day returns, at early sunrise, he shall be forthwith let out into the common light of day so that he may not perish from the torments of the prison.”
Aw, that’s sweet, right?
Constantine’s concerns here tell us about some of the stuff there was to be concerned about in the first place. Prison conditions could be bad. Torture was an issue.
Another part of the Theodosian Code orders judges to check the prisons out every Sunday just to make sure nobody was being starved or having their fingernails ripped out illegally, and that the guards weren’t taking bribes. The warden (registrar) had to answer for anything that went wrong.
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The basic picture I’m getting is of prisons in the Roman Empire picking up speed after Christianity really came into prominence in the 3rd and 4th centuries.
Christianity started officially telling people what to do and making its own laws in the 4th century. Before that, their rules had pretty much extended only to their own community, in the way a club might punish its members.
Early Christian laws adopted a lot of material from existing Roman laws. “Crimes” became “sins.” And vice versa.
“Church courts rejected any penitential punishment that resulted in death, mutilation, or the shedding of blood or any form of discipline that might lead the offender to despair, thus preventing the penance that would lead to salvation and restoration to the Christian community.” (Not sure if that applies to heretics, too.) (Quote from “Prisons Before the Prison.”*)
Under Christian control the situation was still bad, otherwise the emperors wouldn’t have had to keep saying, “STOP TORTURING PEOPLE!”
But, you know, some Late Empire emperors didn’t really mind the whole torture thing. So the rules weren’t always enforced too strictly.
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Barbarian prisons
So far I’ve been talking about the Late Empire in more centralized locations, like Rome itself, and Antioch and Arles.
We still need to discuss the other half of the population in the Late Empire—the Germanic peoples.
The Franks, Goths and other “barbarians” had their own way of doing things. And as the Empire became less organized, with central authority breaking down, the enforcement of the law and the way prisons worked became a very localized thing. Each region had its own way of doing things. There was the official Roman leadership in the area, but there was also the Germanic king/lord/chief/whatever the top “barbarian” boss decided to call himself.
But what about the Theodosian Code? Well, the Theodosian Code only applied to “subjects of Germanic Kings who were Romans,”* and while there was an official Christian handbook of what should be done with bad people, it was really hard to enforce in the far reaches of the Empire, and most people didn’t own a copy anyway.
The Goths had their own set of rules. So did the Saxons and Angles. So did the Franks.
In the 6thcentury-ish, the Franks were kind of like the early Romans. They didn’t really see the point of prisons.
They preferred:
- Mutilation
- Execution
- Enslavement
- Imposing hefty fines
They also liked to lock people up until their families paid hefty ransoms.
But they didn’t really have physical prisons. If they needed one, they used whatever was available. Monasteries weren’t uncommon. Gregory of Tours, who wrote The History of the Franks, has a few stories that include people locked in monasteries, nunneries or rooms in their houses. Here are a few examples, not all of them from St. Greg.
- In 576, the Frank Childeric locked his rebel son Merovech in a monastery cell.
- And in 570, the Lombards found a guy chained up in a sealed stone tower. They thought he might’ve been imprisoned because he was a murderer, but it turned out he was there of his own volition. He was a Christian anchorite–Saint Hospitius. Anchorites did things like that. Even though this guy wasn’t a prisoner, the Franks thought he might be. This tells us about some of their imprisonment practices.
- The Visigoths settled Spain, and they were pretty good about making laws. A lot of their practices seem to be influenced by Rome, which is only to be expected. But the Goths also had prisons, and used confinement more often than other Germanic peoples.
- The Ostrogoths, who settled Italy in the 5th century, also used prisons and confinement.
So, except for the occasional mention of a prison in an old written German law, there’s not a lot of evidence supporting the existence of Germanic prisons—as in buildings solely dedicated to incarceration.
In conclusion, where my 4th century character locks my other character up depends largely on where they are, what their nationality is, and what prisonly structures would have been nearby.
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* This quote, along with everything else in this post (unless otherwise noted), is from “Prisons Before the Prison” by Edward R. Peters. You have no idea what I went through to find this source. I looked all over for this book before realizing it was not a book, but an essay contained in a book, and then I had to start my search over for The Oxford History of the Prison: The Practice of Punishment in Western Society. I had to work through the rigmarole at the Cincinnati Public Library to make sure the book was located at my nearest branch, and drive all the way there and find parking and get a new library card. I hope you appreciate what I do for you. **
** That’s why this post is so late. ***
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Love,
L.