Queen Mary and Westfield College London University PhD Thesis ...

may well have been confined by in large to the holiday periods. The selling of these wares was
officially prohibited at the Moorfields building 321. In 1708 Brown spoke of 'Bottled Ale and
Cheesecakes' being consumed by visitors, but this was 'after [my italicsl they are Coupled and
gone out', as indeed was the case with Carey's apprentice and his sweetheart five years later328.
Historians' views concerning the rifeness of hawking, feasting and imbibing amongst visitors at
Bethlem are, on reflection, somewhat exaggerated329.
Pickpockets and other thieves certainly preyed on both visitors and patients, and would
have been much less conspicuous and less difficult to detect on entry than hucksters. It would
be a mistake, however, to presume that either hucksters or thieves were countenanced as visitors
by the Governors, or allowed to conduct their trade unimpeded°.
Governors, StafF And Visiting: Rules And Reality
Thus far, I have spoken predominantly about the motives and attitudes of spectators them-
selves to visiting Bethlem, and very little about the responses of governors and staff to visitors,
or about the regulations governing the practice. Historians have said a great deal about the
scandal of public visiting, but virtually nothing about the way in which the hospital adminis-
tration attempted to deal with it, or about the rationales behind hospital policy. No thorough
going attempt has been made to marry the literature of 'Visits to Bedlam' with the documentary
evidence available from the Governors' Minutes. Anyone familiar with the modern historiog-
raphy of Bethiem could be forgiven for assuming that its governors did nothing to control the
access and conduct of visitors until 1770.
Just how unlimited, indiscriminate and unsupervised, then, was public visiting at Bethlem
? During the first half of the seventeenth century, the access of visitors does seem to have been
totally unregulated. In the absence of any definite restrictions established by the Governors
(or recorded in their minutes) it is difficult to contest the evidence of early Stuart literature
that visitors were largely left to their own devices. Here, indeed, Bethlem is looked upon as
327
328 Brown, Am*umen., 24; Carey, Poems, 128.
329 Altick's amalgamation of all these elements together, detailing the 'nuts, fruit, and cheesecakes being
hawked, beer brought in from nearby taverns, and pickpockets hard at work', to substantiate his comparison o(
Bethiem with Bartholomew's Fair, may no'.o'fuch 'the rule' at Bethiem a he maintains; Stows, 45. See
jnfr..
330 see infra.
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