The Clink: How London’s oldest prison gave jails everywhere their nickname
Prison. The slammer. The hoosegow. The lockup. The coop. His Majesty’s Pleasure. The Pen. Pokey. There are countless nicknames for prison, and fair enough, there should be. It’s the thing waiting for pretty much all of us if we step out of line and take the law into our own hands.
There isn’t a lot that everyone can relate to, but the fear of doing hard time (there’s another one) is pretty much universal. That universality means that we can talk about it to basically anyone without needing to be all that specific, which is why there are so many nicknames for prison. Pretty much every culture has added a new one to the list, but there’s a pretty good chance the very first nickname for prison was one that you’re probably wondering why I haven’t said yet.
After all, ‘the clink’ is one that is pretty universal. It turns out there’s a very good reason for that, as the term might not just be one of the most famous nicknames for prisons in general, but also a nickname for one very specific jailhouse. One of the earliest examples of a prison in the world, in fact. One found right in the heart of London, which was opened in 1144 as part of a palace built for the Bishop of Winchester, Henry of Blois, brother to King Stephen and grandson of William the Conqueror.
It was actually two jails built for Henry, one for men and one for women. At first, they were more or less his dungeons to use as he wished. However, in the absence of a functioning police system (that was still centuries off, mind), his personal guards started keeping the peace in that area of London, holding people who broke ‘The Liberty of the Bishop of Winchester’ in those cells, whether or not they’d done anything to Henry himself personally.
The liberty in this case means something a little different to what we’d normally assume the term liberty means.
Why did this prison get the nickname ‘The Clink’?
At the time, the term ‘Liberty’ with regards to a part of London was synonymous with what we call the jurisdiction today. Given that Henry was literally the King’s brother, what he said was codified into ‘The Liberty of the Bishop of Winchester’ initially. As time went on, however, this jail began to get a nickname for itself. One that is so old that we didn’t really know the specifics of how we got it, but we can make an educated guess.
The jail started being referred to as ‘The Clink’ fairly early in its existence. This is probably due to the onomatopoeia of the clinking, clanking iron manacles that prisoners were forced into on entry, or perhaps the strike of metal on metal from when the prison doors were bolted shut by the guards. One way or another, The Clink stuck. So much so that, given time, it would influence not only the name of the prison, but the name of the entire area surrounding it.
The area that Henry owned was passed down to whoever took over as the Bishop of Winchester. This meant that it remained under his jurisdiction (or ‘liberty’), unlike the rest of the surrounding area, which was run by the High Sheriff of Surrey, which meant that a particular jurisdiction needed a separate name from the other parts of London surrounding it, and by 1530, ‘The Clink’ had become so infamous that people could refer to that part of London as “the Liberty of the Clink”, and everyone knew what they were talking about.
Thus, that became pretty much the official name for that part of London from an administrative standpoint for the next 300 years until it was abolished in 1889. One hell of an influential nickname, and one that deserves the cultural status it has to this day.