Clink Street: A Bishop's Palace and London's Most Notorious Prison
Why is it significant?
Stand in the shadowy canyon of Clink Street, between tall Victorian warehouses, and look up at the ruined gable wall with its great round window, a rose of stone tracery hanging in mid-air.
Key Facts
| Place | Clink Street: A Bishop's Palace and London's Most Notorious Prison |
|---|---|
| Address | Clink Street, London SE1 9DG, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.50690, -0.09140 |
| Part of Walk | Shakespeare's Southwark: Bankside, the Globe and Tate Modern in London |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the shadowy canyon of Clink Street, between tall Victorian warehouses, and look up at the ruined gable wall with its great round window, a rose of stone tracery hanging in mid-air. It is almost all that survives of Winchester Palace, the London home of the Bishops of Winchester for some five hundred years and one of the grandest houses in medieval London.
Those bishops were the landlords of Bankside's pleasures. Their liberty, known as the Clink, licensed the riverside brothels, the stews, and the women who worked in them were nicknamed Winchester Geese. Shakespeare uses the insult in Henry VI Part One, where one nobleman hurls it at the Bishop of Winchester himself. The bishops collected the rents, wrote the regulations, and kept a prison of their own, right here, for anyone who broke them.
The Clink prison held debtors, drunks, brawling apprentices and, as the religious tides turned under the Tudors, Protestant and Catholic prisoners of conscience by turns. It was burned by the Gordon Rioters in 1780 and never rebuilt. Its name has probably outlived it in the language: to be in the clink still means to be locked up, although word historians argue over whether the prison gave us the phrase or the clink of chains gave the prison its name.
The palace was also a place of feasts and politics. In 1424 the young King James I of Scotland, a prisoner of the English for eighteen years, married Joan Beaufort, niece of the powerful Bishop of Winchester, in the priory church next door, and by tradition the wedding feast was held here. James was a poet too: The Kingis Quair, usually credited to him, tells of a captive who falls in love with a lady glimpsed in a garden below his prison window.
A little further on, Clink Street opens onto a small dock where a full-size replica of the Golden Hinde floats, the ship in which Francis Drake sailed around the world between 1577 and 1580. It looks impossibly small for the job. Walk past it, and the tower of a great Gothic church rises right in front of you.