In 1703 Daniel Defoe was imprisoned in Newgate both before and after his conviction at the Old Bailey for seditious libel, the publication of The Shortest Way with Dissenters, an outrageous satire on High Church Tories. Dissenting pamphleteers were prone to punishment. A few months earlier another such, one William Fuller, had been sentenced to three days in the pillory, fined 1,000 marks, and forced to endure a whipping followed by hard labour in Bridewell until he finally paid his dues. It was not the first time Defoe had been in gaol, but this experience was both the most traumatic and most fecund.

In 1692 he had been committed to the Fleet, having run up the colossal debt of £17,000. It was not a good place to be confined, if the account given of it by Moses Pitt, a bookseller imprisoned there three years before Defoe, is to be believed. His Cry of the Oppressed from Prison, published in 1691, recounted the ‘unparalleled sufferings of multitudes of poor imprisoned debtors in most of the gaols of England under the tyranny of the gaolers and other oppressors’, and in particular ‘the barbarities of Richard Manlove Esq, the present warden of the Fleet’. Fortunately, while the claims of his numerous creditors piled up, Defoe was transferred to the King's Bench prison in Southwark whence he managed to get to ‘the Mint’ which offered a safe if insalubrious haven for debtors because of its status as a ‘Liberty’. Along with the notorious ‘Alsatia’ which lay in Whitefriars between Fleet Street and the Thames, it was the last of the infamous little ‘bastard sanctuaries’ that had ringed the City, offering a safe haven from the law. They were the sites of monasteries which, after the Dissolution, retained their ancient rights. The others had been progressively closed down in the seventeenth century, and ‘Alsatia’ would be in 1697.