St Sepulchre-without-Newgate as the "bells of Old Bailey". In 1605, London merchant tailor Mr. John Dowe paid the parish ₤50 to buy a handbell on the condition that it would be rung to mark the execution of a prisoner at the nearby gallows at Newgate. This handbell, known as the Execution Bell, now resides in a glass case to the south of the nave. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, the clerk of St Sepulchre's was responsible for ringing a handbell outside the condemned man's cell in Newgate Prison the night before his execution and announcing the news by repeating the following
Newgate Prison whose incomes partially depended on extorting their wards, charged the prisoners for food, bedding, and to be released from their shackles. To earn additional money, guards blackmailed and tortured prisoners. Among the most notorious Keepers in the Middle Ages were the 14th-century gaolers Edmund Lorimer, who was infamous for charging inmates four times the legal limit for the removal of irons, and Hugh De Croydon, who was eventually convicted of blackmailing prisoners in his care. Indeed, the list of things that prison guards were not allowed to do serve as a better indication of the conditions in Newgate than the