The Fleet: Its Rivers, Prison, and Marriages

The River Fleet was once London's greatest tributary, a rushing stream that powered mills, supplied countless baths and wells, and bore merchant vessels to the city's heart. By the late 19th century, it had been entombed beneath centuries of development, reduced to a dark and fetid sewer that even the most intrepid explorers dreaded to enter. John Ashton resurrects this lost waterway with the passionate curiosity of a Victorian antiquarian, tracing its journey from the Hampstead hills through the teeming streets of Clerkenwell and Holborn, past vanished monasteries, Execute the prisoners of the notorious Fleet Prison, and into the Thames. But the river is merely the spine of this strange, wandering book. Ashton also chronicles the Fleet Prison itself, that grim monument to debtors and debtors' wives who chose captivity over separation, and most fascinatingly, the clandestine 'Fleet marriages' that made this corner of London infamous for decades. Without banns, without clergy, without much in the way of legal standing, couples wed in taverns adjoining the prison walls, a practice so licentious that Parliament repeatedly attempted, and repeatedly failed, to stamp it out. For readers who wonder what London was before it was London, this is a haunted, intimate tour of a neighborhood that vanished utterly.