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 However this may be, there can be little doubt that Thompson was mistaken in supposing that the Castle dungeon was erected under the grant of Edward the First, for it was in use long before 1309, when Edward the First's prison was finished. One man is recorded to have escaped from the "prisona castri Leycestriae" in 1298, and another in 1300. In 1305 the assistant of the keeper of the prison of Lord Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, of the Castle of Leicester, going to visit some prisoners that were in the said prison of his lord, "raised the iron door of the prison, that he might see the prisoners safely, and accidentally tripped against the iron door, so that he fell to the bottom of the said prison, and broke his neck." Further escapes from the Castle dungeon occurred in 1309 and 1318. It was clearly therefore not the prison ordered by King Edward, which indeed, as we shall see, was a county gaol.

The prisoners taken to the Castle dungeon were the Earl's men who were not Leicester men. The Earl had power to seize and hang and confiscate the goods of all thieves caught within his territory. Thus, in 1298, Gilbert Makeleys, of Houghton, "taken on the Earl's liberty in the town of Houghton," was put into the Castle prison. After the new county gaol had been built in 1309, such persons continued to be incarcerated in the Castle gaol. Thus, in the year 1323, a man taken at Stretton-in-the-Street, in Warwickshire, with a stolen bullock, was taken "to the prison of the Castle of Leicester."

Until the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the counties of Warwick and Leicester were in the charge of one Sheriff, and Leicestershire prisoners at one time were sent, as a rule, to the gaol at Warwick, but tried in the shirecourt which was held at Leicester. Thus prisoners are recorded to have been sent to Warwick gaol from Leicester in 1297 and 1300. The inconvenience of this arrangement was felt and remedied long before a separate Sheriff was appointed for Leicestershire in 1566. Indeed, it was this object which Edward the First had in view when he ordered a prison to be built at Leicester. It was finished eight years later, 42